Ann Radcliffe perfected the Gothic school of terror. "In harrowing up the soul with imaginary horrors and making the flesh creep and the nerves thrill with fond hopes and fears," Hazlitt wrote, "she is unrivalled among her fair country-women."
Radcliffe's followers admired her poetic descriptions of scenery in countries she had never visited. Her novels awakened the romantic sensibilities of the age and charged language and landscape with new meaning. Keats tweaked Radcliffian attitudes when he wrote to a friend, "I'll tip you a Damosel Radcliffe. I'll cavern you and grotto you and waterfall you and immense-rock you and…solitude you." Byron quipped in a letter, "I am going out this evening in my Cloak and Gondola—here are two nice Mrs. Radcliffe words for you."
The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, a tale of two warring Highland clans, was Radcliffe's first novel. Sir Walter Scott wrote of it, "we can now trace some germs of that taste and talent for the wild, romantic and mysterious, which the authoress afterwards employed with such effect."
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) firmly established Radcliffe as a major literary talent. She was, De Quincy put it, "the great enchantress of that generation." Then in 1800 at the peak of her powers she retired to the English countryside with her husband William. Rumor had it that she had gone mad. Suffering from ill health, she was writing poetry and taking carriage rides far from the London drawing rooms she disliked.
In 1883 a disappointed Christina Rossetti, after a visit to the British Museum, gave up plans to write about the reclusive Radcliffe. Although biographies have been published since, Radcliffe's legacy remains her novels, not her life.
|