Mistress of Udolpho
The Life of Ann Radcliffe
Mistress of Udolpho is the first full-scale
biography of the famous
Gothic novelist, Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), author of The
Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794), the world's first "best-seller." Rictor
Norton has
unearthed new information about Radcliffe, has run to ground leads
other scholars have missed, and has given us a contextual picture of
Radcliffe's life that is unlikely to be superseded. The author
clarifies Radcliffe's emergence from a Dissenting Unitarian, rather
than a conventional Anglican, background. This discovery redraws the
literary historical map to include Radcliffe within the circle of other
women writers nurtured in radical Dissenting backgrounds (such as
Wollstonecraft, Hays, Inchbald and Barbauld). Full of fascinating
detective work, Norton's scholarly biography fully documents
Radcliffe's childhood and family background, investigates the rumours
of her madness and her extraordinary reclusiveness, and evaluates the
reasons for her probable mental breakdown. But it also constitutes a
"cultural history" of a writing woman, fully demonstrating her place
within radical culture, within literary tradition and aesthetic
discourse, and examining her crucial role in the rise of the
professional woman writer. Her novels are analysed mainly in the
context of her biography and in the context of her sources, and some
new dates for her posthumous work are established.
| Ann Radcliffe was, in her day, the obscurest woman of letters in
England. Her contemporaries despaired of learning anything about
her, while Christina Rossetti abandoned her planned biography for
lack of materials. Through patient and resourceful scholarship
Rictor Norton has thrown light on Radcliffe's life and background
for the first time. Full of new material and amazing discoveries,
Norton's book will transform our understanding of Radcliffe — an
absolute must for anyone with an interest in the subject.
Robert Miles, President, International Gothic Association |
Rictor Norton earned his Ph.D. in 1973 from Florida State University, where he first began studying the Gothic literary tradition. He has written articles on the Gothic novel and on writers such as William Beckford, and has published five books on English literature and history, including Gothic Readings (Leicester University Press, 2000). He has contributed biographies of several Georgian and Victorian figures to the New Dictionary of National Biography.
PUBLICATION DATE: January 1999.
PRICE: £17.99 Paperback ISBN
0 7185 0202 7
£45.00 Hardback ISBN 0 7185 0201 9.
EXTENT: 320pages, 8 plates of illustrations.
PUBLISHER: Leicester University Press. Order from the publisher Continuum International.
Also Blackwell's Online Bookshop.
New York Times Book Review April 25, 1999, by Diane Jacobs Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), creator of the female Gothic romance, was among the most esteemed and highest-paid novelists of her time. Unlike Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen, she wrote for pleasure rather than money, and she was praised by a wide range of important late-18th-century figures, from Mary Wollstonecraft to the Marquis de Sade. At the height of the Age of Reason, she made a case for the redeeming power of art and the imagination. Her works greatly affected all the male Romantic poets, so why has their reputation waxed while hers has waned? This is one of many issues explored by Rictor Norton in his ingeniously researched biography. Radcliffe is a biographer's nightmare. She had few friends, wrote few letters, and the only diaries she kept were narrowly focused travel journals. After producing five immensely popular novels, at the age of 32 she suddenly stopped writing Gothics. With its quotations from remote archives bolstered by sensitive analysis of Radcliffe's books, ''Mistress of Udolpho'' reads at times like a scholarly detective novel. The heroine remains an enigma, but her world comes vividly to life. Diane Jacobs
It is the origin and extent of the mysteries surrounding Ann Radcliffe which form the substance of Norton's resourceful and entertaining account. ... But in Norton's hands the circumstantial life can be made to yield a great deal. This is the case with the densely mapped Unitarian family background from which the young Ann Ward is seen to emerge ... If Norton is right, then the evidence he brings forward transforms our reading of her works in several significant ways. It gives Radcliffe a recognizable because shared identity within the broad intellectual and democratic environment that produced Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Anna Barbauld ... One of Norton's most suggestive proposals is the substitution of the republican Joseph Priestley for the conservative Edmund Burke as the originator of Radcliffe's ideas of the sublime, together with the possibility that her notorious dual commitment to reason and enthusiasm is rooted in the crucial debate between rational and evangelical dissent. ... this is a fascinating account, full of curious details that witness to the quite remarkable investigative labour which underpins it.
Review of English Studies review (extract)
by Kathryn Sutherland in The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 51, No. 202 (2000), pp. 308-10.
Eighteenth-Century Studies review (extract) "a highly readable and thoroughly researched biography of Radcliffe. ... Rictor Norton ... is exceptionally thorough and insightful in uncovering new and fascinating information on Ann Radcliffe. ... Norton has approached Radcliffe's biography in the spirit of a detective uncovering information through scholarship that is as absorbing and perceptive as it is resourceful. ... Norton is both fascinating and provoking in his tendency for speculation. Frequently, Norton's scholarship is impressive and meticulous, his conclusions logical and couched in the language of probability. ... Rictor Norton has produced not only our best biography of Radcliffe to date, but also a scintillating compilation of Gothic materials."
by Deborah D. Rogers in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Fall 2000), pp. 147-50.
The first biographical memoir of Mrs Radcliffe was written three years
after her death by a man who never met her, using material supplied
solely by her husband and his own intuition. It is clear that no one
knew her intimately — or at all. Mrs Radcliffe was shy to the
point of neurosis, and seems to have had no friends or acquaintances.
Her travel journals contain very few personal details. There are no
diaries and virtually no reminiscences by any of her contemporaries.
She set herself up as an enigma in the manner of Greta Garbo. What we
know of her life resembles one of those manuscripts discovered in a
gothic novel: passages faded and almost indecipherable, pages torn in
half, whole chapters missing, spurious passages interpolated by other
hands, all hinting at a secret mystery at the centre.
Christina Rossetti was offered the opportunity of writing a biography
in the "Eminent Women Series" in 1882, and decided upon Mrs Radcliffe
as one who "takes my fancy more than many." But after a cursory survey
of the known material, some discussion with a few literary friends, and
a letter to The Athenaeum that elicited no
response, she abandoned the project because she felt that the lack of
material made a biography impossible. All subsequent critics seem to
have been scared off by Christina Rossetti's failure, though Rossetti
herself was not a scholar and did not have the health necessary for the
drudgery of research. Virtually no scholarly effort has been made to
identify, for example, "the Tour through England" in which Mrs
Radcliffe is said to have been confined in a madhouse in Derbyshire, or
"an Ode to Terror published by a clergyman in 1810" saying that she
died in "the horrors," referred to in Talfourd's
Memoir of 1826. These sources, and many
other
facts and rumours, will be uncovered for the first time in my study.
Literary circles found it intolerable that the most famous novelist of
the time should live a completely sequestered life. The result of their
unassuaged curiosity is best summed up by Jeaffreson in 1858: "Leading
a life of domestic seclusion, ... Mrs Radcliffe was utterly unknown to
the thousands of English who, in London and in the country, were
burning to learn something about her. At last,
society, tired of being kept in such an
ignominious state of ignorance, determined no longer to acknowledge
herself unacquainted with the person, history, and circumstances of Mrs
Radcliffe, but to borrow from imagination the facts which the lady was
so impertinent as to keep to herself."
The public image of the mysterious Mrs Radcliffe as a mad genius, and
the sensational nature of her novels are in sharp contrast to the
ordinary preoccupations of her middle-class domestic life. She loved
dogs and music, enjoyed excursions to Dover and Worthing, was fond of
the sound of Greek though she could not understand the language, and
felt it more important to be valued as a gentlewoman than a genius.
Contemporaries remarked upon her scrupulous sense of propriety, which
is borne out by her journals and her novels and the few people who met
her, but it is clear that she also felt constrained by the pressures
placed upon women to preserve an unblemished reputation of bland
passivity. She eventually lost this battle to unite "desire and
decorum," and withdrew from the world as journalists attacked her as a
veritable sorceress.
Through her father she was related to the Cheseldens of Leicestershire,
her paternal grandmother being the sister of William Cheselden, surgeon
to King George II and noted for his skill in operating for "the stone."
Through her mother she was related to the Jebbs of Derbyshire, who
dominated the political, religious and medical life of Chesterfield for
almost a century, notably the rapacious Sir Richard Jebb, physician to
the fashionable in London, who was fond of reciting ribald verses to
Mrs Thrale (Piozzi); and John Jebb the controversy-loving Unitarian and
his strong-minded and equally controversial wife. The Dissenting and
Unitarian commitments of many of her relatives may have contributed to
her anti-Catholicism and to her fairly weak commitments to the Church
of England (the deity of her novels is essentially the deity of the
Unitarians). Collateral relations included Dr Samuel Hallifax, Bishop
of Gloucester for a short while before becoming Bishop of St Asaph, and
Dr Robert Halifax, physician to the Prince of Wales. Ann Ward and her
mother cherished their distinguished pedigree, and traced their roots
to the burgomasters John and Cornelius De Witt whose sons came over
from Holland to drain the Lincolshire fens for Charles I. Ann Oates
must have been distressed by her new circumstances when she married
William Ward, a haberdasher who lived and worked in the same location
on Holborn street for twenty-one years.
Many of Radcliffe's relatives had literary talent and were very
individualistic and radical in their views, and she inherited their
talent and their daring. But in daily behaviour she was very formal and
straight-laced, and condescending towards the lower classes not only in
her novels but also in real life, as when she makes fun of the
housekeeper at Knole for not admitting that her mistress was a
commoner. Radcliffe's family background of Rational Dissent, notably
the intellectual élite of the Unitarians, is thoroughly
documented, and its influence upon her writing is explored.
The themes of childhood disappointment and sense of rejection by her
parents in her first three novels must reflect her own childhood. The
major traits of her character can be found in her childhood: neurotic
shyness, docility, and primness, due perhaps to being surrounded
always
by much older people (her mother was 38 years old when Ann was born)
and the ancien regime of the Augustans. On
the other hand, she must have sought escape and refuge in reading
romances and poetry, as do all of the heroines in her novels; her
literary taste was formed at a very early age, for she seldom alludes
to anything written later than 1775 in her novels. The private life of
her imagination, as expressed in her novels, ran directly counter to
this classical Augustan childhood, but her personal behaviour matched
it throughout her life, and people who met Mr and Mrs Radcliffe
regarded them as figures from a bygone era.
But it is equally important to note that discussions about the Sublime
are part of intellectual Unitarian culture, particularly in works by
Joseph Priestley, close friend of Radcliffe's uncle Bentley, whose
works may have influenced her. Her background in Rational Dissent
accounts for her signature hallmark, "the explained supernatural." The
most important aesthetic influences upon her work are examined. The
clearest literary influences upon The Castles of Athlin and
Dunbayne and her next novel A Sicilian
Romance (1790) are Shakespeare's
Hamlet, The
Tempest,
Macbeth, Richard
III, Collins' Ode to Fear,
Milton's Comus and Paradise
Lost, Walpole's The Castle of
Otranto, Smollett's Ferdinand Count
Fathom, Aikin's Sir
Bertrand,
Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron, Sophia
Lee's The Recess and Charlotte Smith's
Emmeline, The Orphan of the Castle, all of
which contributed to the formation of the distinctive gothic genre.
Both novels (published anonymously) were well reviewed, and
established
Mrs Radcliffe's fame as an elegant and original writer.
The reviewers accorded the novel an extraordinarily high critical
acclaim, possibly leading to some professional jealousy between Mrs
Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith, and the former was established as the
creator and finest practitioner of a distinctively new school of
fiction. It was enthusiastically read by the public, who were requiring
stronger stuff in their novels as the French Revolution was making
domestic life more terrifying. During the Terror of 1794, Mrs Piozzi
and her circle were reading The Mysteries of
Udolpho, and in her diary she noted that "the people are
gaping for Wonders of every kind, and expect Marvels in the Natural
World to keep Pace with the strange Events observed in the
Civil & Political World." One of the stranger
manifestations of this millennialism was the belief that ancient
prophecies were now being fulfilled. Even Mrs Piozzi, an educated
middle class woman, began a serious study of the prophecies in
Revelations and Isaiah, and believed that the French government of
early 1794 could be identified with "the third part of the sun" that
would be smitten when the fourth angel sounded in St John's Apocalypse.
For some people Mrs Radcliffe was more than just an exemplar of the
spirit of the times: she was herself a prophet. Joanna Southcott, the
well-known religious mystic, was among several readers who believed
that The Romance of the Forest was divinely
inspired, and the Spirit of God actually dictated to her a divine
analysis of the novel in 1803. The unpublished autograph manuscript is
in the library of the University of Texas. The Spirit told Joanna that
Mrs Radcliffe became the channel for God's prophecies, and went on to
analyze the novel as an allegory of Joanna's followers being
persecuted, and as a "history" of God's plans for the future. The
villain, Phillipe de Montalt, is identified as Satan, while Adeline is
identified with Joanna; her slanderers are the criminal henchmen hired
by Montalt; the mystery over Adeline's father parallel Joanna's
confusion over whether she should conform to society or trust in "the
Voice" which speaks to her.
For this novel Mrs Radcliffe received £500 (the contract was
discovered
in 1966), an unprecedented amount for a novel. An important
consequence
of the high royalty was its cultural impact: serious money dignified
what might otherwise have been dismissed as yet another silly novel.
Literature, the patrimony of men, already under threat by working
women
novelists such as Charlotte Smith, was struck another humiliating blow:
never before had such an amount been paid to a woman, and the male
literary establishment was astonished. It was almost wildly received by
the general public, and was praised in hyperbolic terms by major
critics. Modern critics too often compare her to other novelists, but
her contemporaries more accurately compared her to dramatic poets,
particularly Ariosto, Milton and Shakespeare. The Mysteries
of Udolpho is examined as one of the great works of
European literature, replete with cultural signifiers. For example, the
epigraphs function as imprimaturs which allow the learned and the wise
to read her books with the satisfaction that they are taking their
pleasure from a worthwhile source. The fact that she wrote her own
poems proved her high morals and distanced her from charges of being
merely frivolous or sensationalist. The poetry — from a formal
point of view, without being read or reflected upon — was
essential for her success with the critical establishment and the
literary world, and also accounted for her success among ladies as well
as their self-respecting maids. The poetry rendered Mrs Radcliffe's
novels genteel, and it is very illuminating to review how civilized
ladies and gentlemen responded to the kind of romances read by their
valets and ladies maids. It is due to Mrs Radcliffe that the gothic
novel became literary as well as popular. At the same time there is an
important secondary theme about the importance of property, female
inheritance and independence.
Not only does the book demonstrate that she had enough spirit to travel
to such places at a time of political upheaval, but it also contains
interesting examples of her wider political and social views
(demonstrating sympathy with the common people, and harsh anti-
Catholicism). The book was published at a time that Unitarians were
being imprisoned for treason and fomenting rebellion (1794), yet she
clearly aligns her opinions with those of the Radical Dissenters and
praises, for example, the Glorious Revolution.
Her main purpose was to describe the picturesque landscape; she was
highly influenced by the theorists of the Picturesque such as Gilpin,
and she even made direct borrowings from works such as Hester Lynch
Piozzi's Observations and Reflections made in the Course
of
a Journey through France, Italy and Germany (1789). Her
own book had a powerful influence upon later picturesque travellers and
topographical writers (such as Ebenezer Rhodes' Peak
Scenery and Joseph Farington's massive project
Britannia Depicta). Many critics feel that
Mrs Radcliffe's most important contribution to the development of the
English novel was the introduction of extensive scenic description
(landscape has the force of a psychological character in her works),
and she deliberately created word-paintings to match the canvasses of
Salvator Rosa, Claude and Poussin.
An examination of the autobiographical elements in her imaginative
writings prompts me to follow two lines of analysis that I acknowledge
are frankly speculative: first, that she was perhaps sent to stay with
her uncle Bentley as a way of protecting her from sexual abuse by her
father; and second — but not necessarily related — that she
suppressed lesbian emotions, possibly related to love-hate relations
with her mother. In the repeated patterns of family life in all her
novels we are justified in seeing a reflection of the author's own
childhood. The Castles of Athlin and
Dunbayne, for example, contains curiously pessimistic
allusions to apathetic and condemnatory parents; the characterization
of the mother-figures suggests that her own mother was a manic-
depressive and ineffectual, and there are suggestions that her father
was avaricious and mean-spirited. Within this first novel there are two
separate households, each occupied by a widow with a son and daughter,
both households united under the oppression of a brother-in-law and an
uncle. The parallels suggest that a personality has been split and
duplicated, and the problem of childhood abuse is being dealt with by
means of projection. A peculiar characteristic of Ann Radcliffe's
novels is that most of the protagonists are on the verge of madness.
Nearly every character loses consciousness at the height of an intense
emotion, possibly indicative of severe repression. It is clear that Ann
Radcliffe failed to establish any bonds of friendship throughout her
life, perhaps concluding, like Adeline in Romance of the
Forest, that "no person is to be trusted" —
particularly her parents.
Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho tears
aside
the veil and penetrates the recess of the mother figure who is
simultaneously the Shadow, the Other. Emily is male-willed, fascinated
by powerful or passionate women such as Lady Laurentini/Sister Agnes,
and the Marchioness de Villeroi, and courted by young women such as
the
peasant girl Maddelina, "whose gentle countenance and manners soothed
her more than any circumstance she had known for many months," and
eighteen-year-old Lady Blanche, who "became impatient for her new
friend" when Emily spends some time in the convent: "She had now no
person, to whom she could express her admiration and communicate her
pleasures, no eye, that sparkled to her smile, or countenance, that
reflected her happiness." The veil is suffused with sexuality, but it
is a narcissistic and quasi-lesbian sexuality. In a fleeting early
episode in the novel, Emily is attracted to a Venetian girl, Signora
Herminia, who sings and plays on her lute, "with her veil half thrown
back," whose picture Emily draws and gives to her "as a pledge of her
friendship." Emily is similarly attracted to the Lady Abbess, whose
veil is "thrown half back," suggesting some half-hidden mystery.
A lesbian theme first appears in The Romance of the Forest, when
Adeline wakes from a fever to discover her protector Clara La Luc: "the
bed curtain on one side was gently undrawn by a beautiful girl. ...
Adeline gazed in silent admiration upon the most interesting female
countenance she had ever seen." In The
Italian the relationship between Ellena and Sister Olivia
adumbrates the problematical relationship between Ann Radcliffe and her
own mother. The first meeting between Ellena and Olivia is a highly
charged depiction of erotic love at first sight, connected with the
image of throwing back the veil; later, Olivia gives Ellena an
unambiguous love-token, "a knot of fragrant flowers"; when Ellena
finally escapes the convent, by disguising herself in Olivia's veil,
their separation is the parting of lovers, explicitly recognized as
such by Vivaldi, her supposed fiancé: "'Ah Ellena!' said Vivaldi,
as he gently disengaged her from the nun, 'do I then hold only the
second place in your heart?'" It is a mistake to dismiss this as
"merely" a sentimental friendship convention typical of the "romantic
friendship" literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. The possibility that Ann Radcliffe suppressed lesbian
emotions goes some way towards explaining some of the mysteries of her
novels; for example, Jane Spencer points out that her three major
novels all "end with defeat for the authoritarian male and the
heroine's marriage to a feminized hero"; and analysis of Radcliffe's
posthumous poetry shows that she clearly identified herself as the male
figure of Prospero the magician.
Whatever the cause of her total withdrawal from the world, the study of
the reaction to Mrs Radcliffe's novels is interesting in itself, as a
study of public taste, and as a study of critical reception, closely
aligned to the attack upon the "unsexed females" such as
Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Robinson, Smith, Yearseley, and Mrs Mary Ann
Radcliffe, author of The Female Advocate; or, An Attempt To
Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation, which
was attributed to our Mrs Radcliffe. She was systematically attacked by
a conspiracy of critics from the Anglican Establishment. But by the
1820s Mrs Radcliffe was being praised for the very qualities for which
she had been criticized in the 1790s, for the Revolution of politics
had been matched by a revolution of reading, and her works do in fact
prefigure the Romantics and their love of liberty, the natural man,
passion, and the darker side of individualism. It was Mrs Radcliffe who
established the female novelist's claim to an equal rank with men in
the literary world; it was she as much as Mary Wollstonecraft who was
responsible for establishing the rights of literary women, and the
rights of heroines to move through their fictional domains with as much
liberty as heros.
On the other hand, a growing melancholy colours her writing. Her
journals are notable for her frequent reflections upon the ghost in
Shakespeare's Hamlet and the nature of
sublimity and awful solitude. The journals reveal virtually no human
contact with any fellow travellers or the locals; on the contrary, they
include very sad references to the deaths of both of her parents during
this period, and contain ample proof of withdrawal, advancing
melancholia, and severe depression. Her aunt died in 1797, her father
died in 1798, and her mother died in 1799. Her mother made an
extraordinary will leaving her estate to her daughter solely as if she
were unmarried, and prohibiting her husband William from
"intermeddling" in her affairs, and her sentiments on female
inheritance clearly parallel those of Madame Montoni in The
Mysteries of Udolpho.
Shortly after his wife's death, William Radcliffe married their
housekeeper. Talfourd in private correspondence noted that William
Radcliffe was over-scrupulous about his more illustrious wife's
reputation, and burst into tears whenever her name was mentioned,
probably due to some unexplained guilt. When one realizes the constant
presence of William Radcliffe as censor of Talfourd's memoir, it
becomes relatively easy to read the true story between the lines, for
Talfourd very skilfully implied more than he said. I have discovered
that William Radcliffe inexplicably moved to Versailles, where he died
in 1830, leaving a substantial estate to his new wife.
Copyright © 1998 Rictor Norton. Updated 4 November 2000.
Chapter 1 The Mighty Enchantress
Chapter 2 Dissent versus Decorum
Throughout the eighteenth century, one's pedigree was more important
than one's talent, and the French Revolution had little impact upon
this method of estimating one's character. Any writers who wished to
establish their merit, had first of all to establish their respectable
family connections. Mrs Radcliffe's most respectable connections were
mostly collateral and mostly maternal — her paternal grandmother
was a sister of a celebrated surgeon, her maternal grandmother's sister
married a celebrated physician, and her maternal grandmother's father
was a celebrated merchant and member of the minor gentry — but
she
and her husband made the most of what was available. The future
novelist was born on 9 July 1764, the only child of Ann Oates and
William Ward, haberdasher. William Radcliffe in his contribution to his
wife's obituary was careful to note that her parents, "though in trade,
were nearly the only persons of their two families not living in
handsome, or at least easy independence."
Chapter 3 Taste versus Trade
In 1771-2 Ann Ward stayed with her uncle Thomas Bentley in Turnham
Green while her parents prepared for their removal to Bath, where her
father was to manage the Wedgwood showroom, a position obtained for
him
by Bentley, who was Wedgwood's partner and a man of refined taste. At
Bentley's her consciousness of her superior relatives would have been
strengthened, and there she is said to have met Mrs Piozzi, Mrs Ord,
Mrs Montague, Athenian Stuart, and the Wedgwoods. Bentley's home in
Turnham Green (demolished in 1880) is undoubtedly the model for the
Marquis de Montalt's villa in The Romance of the
Forest. But Ann's creative life seems to be virtually a
reaction against this early Neoclassical background. This visit to her
uncle may have been experienced as a traumatic experience, which finds
its expression in themes of abduction and avuncular incest in her
novels. Surely it is more than a coincidence that Adeline in
The Romance of the Forest is cruelly
rejected
by her father and sent to a convent at the age of seven, the same age
at which Ann Ward was sent to stay with Bentley.
Chapter 4 Miss Nancy
William Ward's Wedgwood showroom in Bath was an outlet for poorer
quality ware, and the evidence indates that he was a second-rate
tradesman. Ann Ward Radcliffe's life in Bath has been almost totally
suppressed, as if she were ashamed of it, and especially ashamed of her
father. Her parents are portrayed in her novels as a middle-aged
ineffective woman and a rapacious but failed tradesman. I suggest that
she probably never returned from Bentley's home to live with her
parents, and therefore never lived in Bath. It is often assumed that
Ann Ward attended the school of Harriet and Sophia Lee at Bath, but I
produce evidence and argument to show that this would have been
impossible and has to be abandoned as wishful thinking. Her books
suggest that she was self-educated through a circulating library;
contemporary reviewers noted with embarrassment her gaffes regarding
history and manners while they admired her natural good breeding.
Chapter 5 A Literary Establishment
In 1787 Ann Ward married William Radcliffe, a graduate of Oriel College
who gave up the study of law in favour of literature. I suggest that
William Radcliffe came from a Unitarian Dissenting family, and he met
Ann through her Dissenting uncle Jebb. William earned some money by
mediocre translations, and became editor of The
Gazetteer, a radical newspaper, and then proprietor of
the English Chronicle. The
Gazetteer under Radcliffe's editorship was closely linked
to the Revolution Society and radical Unitarians. Mrs Radcliffe began
her first literary efforts through boredom as much as anything else,
while her husband attended the Parliamentary debates and remained out
late most evenings. Writing and reading were the only intellectual
pursuits open to many women, and one of the reasons for the popularity
of the novel. The daily routine could be very boring for the middle
class woman, whose abilities were by no means stretched by the two or
three servants under her command, and whose round of pleasures was
circumscribed by earned rather than inherited wealth. For women with
an
imaginative stamp, the writing of novels and poetry would follow on
quite naturally from the reading of them. Mrs Radcliffe was just such
a woman, and fortunately she was encouraged by a husband sympathetic
to
literary pursuits. He is said to have read her manuscripts with a
delicious shudder when he came home after work. A look at her first two
novels, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne
and A Sicilian Romance, and the influences
upon them. The early years of her marriage were culturally active, with
time spent going to operas — notably operas by Handel and
Paesiello whose influence can be shown upon her novels — and
picture exhibitions, but Mrs Radcliffe was never able to mix easily in
society.
Chapter 6 The Aesthetics of Terror
In Radcliffe's first novel her critical vocabulary and aesthetic
techniques are already well in place. The union of the sublime with the
beautiful is the goal towards which she strives, by means of careful
obscurity. The vocabulary of the Gothick is fixed: "the ruins of an
abbey, whose broken arches and lonely towers arose in gloomy grandeur
through the obscurity of evening." The images are fixed: decayed ivy-
clad cloisters, violent storms, vivid flashes of lightning, ruffians,
assassins, shipwrecked survivors, mysterious figures, candles and
torches blown out by gusts of wind, the sounds of breathing close
beside one in the pitch darkness, horrible caverns, castles whose
"lofty towers still frowned in proud sublimity," with abandoned
apartments, intricate passages, dark galleries, winding flights of
stairs, gloomy vaults, trap doors, secret panels, and a subterranean
labyrinth in which one-fifth of the action of the novel takes place.
The images come from the Graveyard School of poetry, the aesthetic
comes from the contemporary debate about the picturesque and the
sublime, and the sensibility of her characters comes from the Novels of
Sentiment.
Chapter 7 Portrait of the Artist
Many readers regard The Romance of the
Forest
(1791), her third novel, as her most wholly satisfying work, because
the balance between characterization, description, sentiment and
mystery is just right, her use of "the explained supernatural" is fully
convincing and natural, and the plot is intriguing without being unduly
complicated, and it is in this novel that Mrs Radcliffe's skill in
constructing an intricate and suspenseful plot can be most fully
recognized and analyzed. Here also we have a single heroine for the
first time, and it is in this novel that we come to appreciate most
fully that the real heroine of her novels is in a sense the
reader, particularly the young female reader seeking
independence. Adeline is a self-portrait of Mrs Radcliffe declaring her
personal worth independent of men, with which pre-feminist readers
would identify: "The observations and general behaviour of Adeline
already bespoke a good understanding and an amiable heart, but she had
yet more — she had genius." This novel is essentially a portrait
of the artist as a gothic heroine, and it is of central importance in
understanding Ann Radcliffe's theory of creativity, and how she went
beyond the eighteenth-century critique of the beautiful/ the
picturesque/ the sublime and developed a theory of the Romantic
Imagination rather than simply Augustan Fancy; the forest itself
symbolizes the "wild illusions of creative mind" that break down and
then re-shape the structures of society and civilization (just as the
tree-stump catches the wheel and overturns the carriage, forcing the La
Motte family to take up habitation in the abbey tower). Although Ann
Radcliffe is essentially a "transitional" and "pre-Romantic" figure,
there are nevertheless numerous instances in which she prefigures the
central concerns of the Romantic poets.
Chapter 8 Unrivalled Genius
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is Mrs
Radcliffe's most compelling novel, which has prompted a rich range of
modern criticism, and I shall review the most fruitful approaches. I
would disagree with Elizabeth Napier who in The Failure of
Gothic (1987) argues that disjunction and imbalance are
inherent to the gothic genre, but Napier does at least recognize that
Mrs Radcliffe comes closer to achieving a successful unity than any of
her colleagues. Wylie Sypher (1945) sees in the novel a skilful
attenuation of tension rather than resolution of her contradictory
bourgeois and bohemian impulses, and several critics see it as a case
of internalized hysteria. Many of these approaches are illuminating,
but depend too heavily upon psychological and social analysis. I
believe that in The Mysteries of Udolpho
Mrs
Radcliffe succeeded in creating an aesthetic
out of her personal conflict between order and disorder, harmony and
passion, the Augustan and Romantic impulses, and that this
fundamentally imaginative achievement is
the
hallmark of her genius and the secret of her appeal to some seven
generations of readers.
Chapter 9 Picturesque Tours
In 1794 Mr and Mrs Radcliffe travelled through Holland and the western
frontier of Germany, returning along the Rhine, possibly using the
royalty from The Mysteries of Udolpho to
cover expenses. They intended to proceed into Switzerland and France,
but were turned back at the border due to a confusion over passports.
So instead, they finished off with a trip through the Lake District.
This was the only time Mrs Radcliffe ever left England, though many
people believed she visited Italy because her descriptions of that
country were so vivid, and it was even said that her husband worked at
one of the British embassies in Italy (wholly untrue). There is a
marvellous anecdote about Mrs Radcliffe being arrested as a spy in
France and thrown into a Gothic dungeon, again wholly untrue. Her notes
on these travels, with political comments contributed by her husband,
were published in 1795 as A Journey Made in the Summer
of
1794 (though many early critics incorrectly believed the
journey was made before she wrote The Mysteries of
Udolpho), which was given an excellent critical
reception.
Chapter 10 The Mighty Magician
Mrs Radcliffe's publisher gave her a grand dinner to mark the success
of Udolpho, but this was followed soon after
by her mysterious flight from the public eye, as if she were a
Pythoness retreating into her cave. In 1796 The
Italian was published, which contains her most successful
examples of characterization, particularly Schedoni brooding over his
secret guilt, upon whom the Byronic Hero would be modelled, and it is
possibly her best novel in terms of structure and unity. At this time
the very highly respected critic Thomas Mathias compared her to the
Pythoness of Apollo both because of the terror which she inspired and
because he saw her as a fitting medium of the god of poetry. This set
the establishment's seal of approval upon her, and it became possible
for the most respectable persons to read and discuss her novels in
public. In Mrs Radcliffe's day, poetry was literature and novels were
trash; by interspersing her fictions with poetry, she elevated the
novel into a higher literary form. But then, at the height of her fame,
Mrs Radcliffe decided to cease publishing. Mrs Barbauld felt that in
The Italian Mrs Radcliffe had taken her
peculiar art as far as it could go, that after portraying the horrors
of the Inquisition the next step could only have been a portrayal of
Hell, which she shrank back from. The novel is essentially an analysis
of identity, self-realization, and thwarted development of a full
personality — the buried self.
Chapter 11 Behind the Veil
Because Gothic novels confront issues of horror and sexual violence, it
is common to interpret them using the tools of Freudian (and more
recently Lacanian) psychoanalysis, reducing literary style to
strategies for dealing with tabooed material (such as repetition
compulsion, splitting, projection, and so on). Daniel Cottom suggests
that Radcliffe's idealization of a neurasthenic sensibility is itself
evidence of a severe internal conflict, and David Punter has argued
that The Italian, for example, "fits in" with Melanie Klein's analysis
of narcissism and the child's fantasies about the father inside the
mother. The novels sometimes contain hints of a autobiographical
allegory. For example, The Italian opens in the year 1764, the year of
Ann Radcliffe's birth; in The Mysteries of Udolpho, we can deduce that
Emily was born in 1564 and meets her future husband Valancourt in 1584
when she is twenty, just as the author was born in 1764 and met William
Radcliffe in 1784 when she was twenty; the heroines' names Emilia and
Emily may have been suggested by her grandmother Amelia Jebb and by
her
ancestor Amelia De Witt. Even without the more extreme insistence upon
the romantic identification of the author with his or her works, Ann
Radcliffe's novels betray a heady mix of morbidity, guilt, repression,
and a stifling sense of frustration and confinement. A melancholia that
goes beyond the requirements of fashion is everywhere in evidence. The
preternatural secrecy which Ann Radcliffe cultivated, the controlled
hysteria of her novels, and the melancholy depression of her journals,
inevitably prompt questions about her inner life.
Chapter 12 Horrid Mysteries
Ann Radcliffe's immense popularity gave rise to an extensive debate,
found in contemporary diaries as well as literary journals, as to
whether or not gothic novels, including hers, tend to deprave and
corrupt their readers. The influence of German sources upon the later
gothic tradition, especially Lewis's The
Monk, which in turn influenced The
Italian, were felt to be unpatriotic, blasphemous and
unhealthy. Her works were attacked as promoting republican and
egalitarian sympathies; even the wild mountain scenery of her
landscapes, which was in a sense her signature, was suspected —
was not Liberty "the mountain Goddess"? Attacks upon "The Terrorist
School of Writing" appeared in the journals, relating Gothic Romances,
including hers, to the Terror raging in France. The imitations of her
work, by writers such as Mary Meeke and Isabella Kelly and numerous
anonymous writers, were more blatantly revolutionary than her own, and
probably made her ashamed of begetting such ill-bred progeny. The
view
held by Sir Walter Scott and other contemporaries is that she was
shocked into silence. Her husband was so scandalized by the public
discussion of his wife's works and her implied lack of morals, that he
persuaded her to stop writing for publication.
Chapter 13 The Gothic Tourist
Mr and Mrs Radcliffe took two holidays each year, and Mrs Radcliffe
kept a travel journal for each of these. Her excursions in search of
the Picturesque and the Sublime in Kent and the South Downs are
amusing
and interesting examples of the new middle-class fashion for visiting
country-houses and taking holidays by the seaside, which also
illuminate her character and her creative and emotional sensitivities.
From 1797 through 1801 she visited Rochester castle, Feversham,
Canterbury Cathedral, Dover (where she climbed Shakespeare's Cliff),
Folkestone, Portsmouth, the Isle of Wight (perhaps her favourite
resort), Winchester, Arundel Castle, and Worthing (where they enjoyed
watching the frolics of the day-trippers from Brighton). I suggest that
Carisbrook Castle on the Isle of Wight is the model for the Castle of
Udolpho. She was always keen to see the latest "modern castles" as well
as genuine castles and ancient churches. It was characteristic of Mrs
Radcliffe that she always climbed to the very top of a precipice or
turret in order to gain the sublimest view possible; like her heroines,
if there was anything more to see, she was game to see it. She loved
hiking, climbing hills, and listening to the mighty sound of the waves
lapping the shore; walking around Windsor Castle and Windsor Forest in
the moonlight; and the exhilaration of sailing in boats. The journals
are very interesting for showing her extremely fine visual receptivity
to colours and the beauty of landscapes. Although she had a painterly
eye, her critical judgment and vocabulary when dealing with paintings
seen in country house collections are limited entirely to an evaluation
of realism and the representation of emotions in portraits. She records
the occasional humorous incident, such as walking with her favourite
dog Chance at Beachy Head, being given bad service at a hotel and
anticipating with some humorous malice the service that other diners
will similarly receive, exulting with childish glee when a cliff
returns her echo.
Chapter 14 Olden Times
It seems clear that after that after the furore caused by
The Italian, and possibly the fear of
confronting her own demon, Mrs Radcliffe had determined to abandon the
Terrorist School and to redirect her enthusiasms into a more acceptable
channel. During 1802-1807 she visited Kenilworth, Warwick Castle,
Blenheim, and Knole, for which she made detailed historical notes and
comments on their collections of paintings. Her antiquarian enthusiasms
can be traced through all of her work, but are especially well
illustrated by Gaston de Blondeville, which
was written as a result of a trip to Kenilworth in 1802. Her journals
suggest that the urge to write was irrepressible, and I would suggest
that her husband directed this urge toward this more acceptable
historical outlet. But her imagination was constricted by this effort
to achieve accuracy and realism, and the novel is a failure. Her
husband claimed this novel was written for her personal amusement, but
it can be established that she withdrew it from publication at the last
moment, for reasons not altogether clear. She took it out of the bottom
drawer on at least two occasions to reconsider its merits, and was very
nearly persuaded by a friend finally to allow it to be published, but
something went wrong at the publisher's office, and it never appeared
in her lifetime. Its more archaeological approach to the gothic
prefigures the transition from Georgian Gothic to Victorian Gothic,
from gothic romances to the more "nationalist" and vernacular school of
romance exploited by Sir Walter Scott, upon whom she was a powerful
influence. On the other hand, it is notable for its use of the genuine
supernatural, which ironically proves to be less terrifying than the
mysterious sounds of her earlier novels. Another result of these
antiquarian travels was the long poem St Alban's
Abbey, also published posthumously; it is difficult to
date, but it shows a falling-off of her imagination, if not a breakdown
of her mental powers. I assemble evidence to indicate that the main
text of Gaston was a joint effort between
her
and her husband in 1802; and that the important Introduction to the
novel (which contains her theory about use of the supernatural in
fiction) was written separately, entirely by Radcliffe, and was
significantly revised between 1812-1815.
Chapter 15 Construction of the Legend
Although Mrs Radcliffe made more Gothic Tours to Penshurst, Portsmouth
and the Isle of Wight in 1811, and Malvern in 1812, she had withdrawn
from society to such an extent that there were widespread rumours of
her death — which she declined to contradict. It was conjectured
that her wild imagination had preyed upon itself, that her effort to
create visions of horror had finally driven her into a lunatic asylum.
Madness and an early death were the two great ideas that seized upon
the public imagination. Many of the rumours about her death,
particularly the numerous reports that appeared in France, can be
traced to a newspaper notice of the death of her mother-in-
law Mrs Deborah Radcliffe in 1809. Around 1809-1811
several publications declared that Mrs Radcliffe had either died insane
or that she was currently locked up in a madhouse, which I have traced
to a rumour prevalent in her native Derbyshire, possibly fostered by
the Duke of Rutland in order to promote tourism at Haddon Hall, which
many readers believed was the model for the Castle of Udolpho. The
existence of some of these rumours has always been known, but I
identify the actual publications in which they occurred for the first
time, and also trace other rumours not previously known about. Mrs
Radcliffe did not repudiate any of these scandalous reports —
probably because they were too close to the truth, as her journals
demonstrate an advancing melancholia. This chapter is essentially a
study of how "the legend" of Mrs Radcliffe was created by the literary
world. It has always been denied that Radcliffe visited Derbyshire
before she wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho,
but I establish that at the age of thirteen she stayed with her uncle
Bentley's wife's parents in Derby, only a few miles away from Haddon
Hall, and I reopen the possibility that Haddon Hall is indeed the model
for the Chateau-le-blanc in the novel.
Chapter 16 Retirement at Windsor
I examine factual evidence that does indeed suggest that Ann Radcliffe
suffered clinical depression during late 1811 and suffered a nervous
breakdown in 1812. I speculate that it was her reading of the Letters
of Anna Seward published in 1812, wherein she accused Radcliffe of
falsely claiming to have written the Plays on the
Passions actually written by Joanna Bailey, that
triggered the breakdown, and I establish the source of this rumour. It
is a measure of Mrs Radcliffe's ill health at the time that she reacted
towards this gossip with such acute sensitivity, and similar
suggestions of slander preyed upon her mind for the rest of her life.
Talfourd in his memoir of her acknowledged "the morbid delicacy of
feeling which is acquired and nourished by living in great retirement."
For two and a half years she retired to Windsor to recover, and did not
return to London to live with her husband until 1815. While walking in
the Windsor Great Park she met several of the Princesses and struck up
a friendship with Mary Berry (lesbian lover of the sculptor Anne
Seymour Damer). And during her stay there, a ghost appeared on the
Terrace of Windsor Castle. The poems in two of her novels were
collected and published in 1815, bearing all the hallmarks of being
intended as a posthumous publication. This was probably authorized by
her husband, who may have believed Ann Radcliffe was on her deathbed;
in the event, she made a miraculous recovery in late 1815 and returned
to London, where they moved into a new home.
Chapter 17 The Final Years
The last twelve years of Mrs Radcliffe's life were marred by declining
physical health, in particular increasingly severe asthma, and by
deteriorating mental health. She now made only day trips as she could
not take the strain of long excursions, though in 1823 she went to
Ramsgate, probably in search of healthy air, where she caught a chest
infection which caused her death. Towards the end of her life, gasping
for breath was her daily nightmare, though contemporary works said she
deliberately induced horrifying visions by eating raw carrots before
going to bed. During this period asthma was almost a fashionable
disease, and the subject of articles in the Gentleman's
Magazine; several contemporary treatises describe the
treatment she probably would have endured. William Radcliffe's main
concern was to defend his wife from charges of Raving Madness, which
is
the image of her in the popular imagination. He admitted that she went
into delirium just before she died, and a contemporary journal defended
its claim that she died in a state of mental alienation. There exists
a journal in Ann Radcliffe's own hand, recording the details of her
illness during the last few months; a study of the doctor's
prescriptions suggests that she had a long-term bronchial infection
rather than asthma, and also that medical treatment of her may have put
undue stress upon her heart, though clearly she died of pneumonia.
Chapter 18 Mother Radcliffe
The Romantic poets were deeply indebted to Ann Radcliffe for some of
their most powerful imagery (Byron and Shelley plagiarized her
outright), and poets such as Scott, Wordsworth and especially Coleridge
still mined the superstitious vein, but the mainstream of The English
Novel, the novel of realism and fashionable manners, had reasserted
itself, and the Horrid Novels of spectres and mysteries had fallen from
their position of dominance in the market. Gothic novels declined in
popularity, from the first rush of more than a dozen titles per year
for 1794-7 to a high point of around two dozen per year for 1798-1810, to
little more than half a dozen for 1811-20, to only 3 or 4 for 1821-30. The
torrent became a trickle (though this should not mislead us into thinking
that Mrs Radcliffe stopped writing at the right time: she could have
ridden the crest of the wave for a good ten years longer had she chosen
not to stop publishing after 1797). There was always something
deliberately archaic about the gothic school of romance, and it is not
surprising that its own traditions lasted little more than a single
generation. As early as 1818 a contributor to
Blackwood's felt that the supernatural
branch of fiction had taken its place upon the shelf of literary history.
The gothic genre had fallen into disrepute due to the unskilfulness of
most of its practitioners and the overworked machinery of their haunted
castles and presentiments. The most severe judgement always comes from
the generation immediately following the death of an artist, and so it
was with Mrs Radcliffe. By the 1850s it had become the fashion to speak
of her works with contempt and to point to them "as the best possible
representatives of stupidity." This unjust scorn is ironically due to
the very fact that her success made her remembered while her
contemporaries lay forgotten in oblivion. But she nevertheless
influenced works by Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth,
James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown, William Thackeray,
Charles Dickens, Charles Maturin, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley,
Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Henry James, Edgar
Allen Poe, Swinburne, and many French writers including Stendahl.
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