2 - Ann Radcliffe

Summary

Radcliffe's heroines are women of imagination. By their taste for scenery and aptitude for fancy they transform the plots of sentimental fiction into otherworldly romance: they are effectively the co-authors of their own stories. Their risky adventures give them every opportunity to display their ‘genius’, and they are amply rewarded in the end. In this manner, Radcliffe repeatedly allegorizes her own triumphant career as a writer. She was the ‘Queen of the tremendous’, ‘the Shakspeare of Romance Writers’. One review, possibly by Mary Wollstonecraft, said of her, ‘the spell, by which we are led, again and again, round the same magic circle, is the spell of genius’. As Michel Foucault has observed, she has the rare distinction of figuring as the ‘founder of a discursive practice’. It was a phenomenon frequently noted at the time. A multitude of Gothic novels by lesser writers were categorized by the critics as belonging to the ‘Radcliffe school’. ‘Radcliffe’ connoted an immediately recognizable style of lyrical prose writing, playfully invoked by Keats in a letter to a friend: ‘I am going among Scenery whence I intend to tip you the Damosel Radcliffe – I'll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and solitude you’. ‘Radcliffe’ became the name for a particular narrativized relation to the world. One would, like Washington Irving on a tour of Europe, see a castle through the window of the coach, and instantly a web of Radcliffean romance would be woven around it in the mind of the viewer.

It is strange, given her celebrity and influence, that Radcliffe is the only author discussed in this book of whom, apparently, no portrait exists. But she shunned personal disclosure. It is usual to preface a biographical account of her by stating that little is known. Notoriously, in the 1880s, the poet Christina Rossetti abandoned an attempt to write her life through lack of material. But today, thanks to the painstaking efforts of Deborah Rogers and Ricter Norton, much more has come to light about her early life and family circumstances, her husband the newspaper proprietor William Radcliffe, and the period after she abandoned her publishing career in 1797.