ANN RADCLIFFE
By Ruth Facer
Ann Radcliffe will always be remembered as the
great exponent of Gothic fiction. Though Jane Austen would parody her novels in
Northanger Abbey (1818),
Radcliffe's wild, often bleak, landscapes, dark threatening men, and gothic
mysteries lived on in the works of Keats, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Dickens,
and Bram Stoker and many others.
Contemporary readers and modern day critics have
variously dubbed Radcliffe the 'Mistress of Udolpho', 'The Great Enchantress',
and the 'Mother of the Gothic', but these are misleadingly exotic titles to
bestow upon such a private person with such a prosaic life history. According
to The Edinburgh Review (May
1823), 'She never appeared in public, nor mingled in private society, but kept
herself apart, like the sweet bird that sings its solitary notes, shrouded and
unseen'. In fact, so little was known about Radcliffe's life in the nineteenth
century that Christina Rossetti abandoned a projected biography due to a lack of
material.
We do know, however, that Ann Ward Radcliffe was
born in Holborn, London, on 9 July 1764. She was the only child of William
Ward, a haberdasher, and his wife Ann Oates. Her mother was relatively well
connected. Oates's cousin was Sir Richard Jebb, physician to George III, while
her brother-in-law, Thomas Bentley, was the partner of Josiah Wedgwood. In
1772, William Ward moved with his wife and young daughter to Bath, where he
would manage a china shop partly owned by Wedgwood. The young Ann was reasonably
well educated, read widely and had opportunities to meet literary figures of
the day, including Hester Thrale and Elizabeth Montagu. Physically, she was
said to be 'exquisitely proportioned' – quite short, complexion beautiful 'as
was her whole countenance, especially her eyes, eyebrows and mouth'. In 1787
Ann married William Radcliffe, a hardworking Oxford law graduate who became
part-editor and owner of The English
Chronicle. He often came home late and in order to occupy her time,
Radcliffe began to write, reading aloud the lines she had written during the
day on his return. She completed six novels in all. Her last, Gaston de Blondeville (1826), was
published posthumously.
The Radcliffes' marriage, though childless, appears
to have been happy. In her Preface to A
Journey made in the Summer of 1794 through Holland and the Western Frontiers of
Germany (1795) Radcliffe touchingly referred to her husband as her
'nearest relative and friend' and acknowledged that the account of the journey
had 'been written so much from their mutual observation, that there would be a
deception in permitting the book to appear, without some acknowledgement, which
may distinguish it from works entirely her own'. The couple loved travelling
together and used some of the money made from the publication of Radcliffe's
novels to finance their trips. They went to the Rhine and Lake District in 1794
and later made tours in Southern England, during which her beloved dog Chance
chased wheatears on the beach.
According to Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd's Memoir of the Author, prefixed to Gaston de Blondeville, Radcliffe kept
daily accounts and spent her days reading poetry and novels. She sang with
exquisite taste: her voice, though 'remarkably sweet, was limited in compass'.
She was a frequent visitor to the Opera and enjoyed sacred music, especially
Handel oratorios. She admired Mrs Siddons and occasionally accompanied her
husband to the theatre where she sat in the pit because it was warmer and she
was less likely to be recognised. According to the Memoir, 'the very thought of appearing in person as the author
of her romances shocked the delicacy of her mind'.
Like her novels, Radcliffe's last years are
shrouded in mystery. She was said to be depressed in 1797. By the end of her
life, rumours abounded that she had become insane as a result of her Gothic
fantasies and had been incarcerated in a Derbyshire asylum. The truth may never
be known. Radcliffe had suffered from asthma for the past twelve years and her
death on 7 February 1823 may well have been the result of a fatal attack.
Talfourd's Memoir of the Author,
undoubtedly written under the instruction of Radcliffe's husband, categorically
denies that she was insane: 'while some spoke of her as dead, and others
represented her as afflicted with mental alienation, she was thankfully
enjoying the choicest of blessings of life'. Her doctor issued a statement
after her death, maintaining that she was in perfect mental health. Ann
Radcliffe was buried in a vault in the Chapel of Ease belonging to St.
George's, Hanover Square, in Bayswater, London.
Radcliffe's novels commonly feature oppressed young
females, passionate, but flawed, young lovers, overwhelming patriarchal
villains, faithful, talkative servants, ivy-clad Gothic buildings with sinister
vaults, wild romantic scenery and mysteries to be unravelled. Her plots assert
traditional moral values such as honour and integrity while making strong
political statements on the oppression of women in patriarchal society. She was
not, however, the first practitioner of the Gothic. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), written
in the year Ann Radcliffe was born, and Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (1777) were popular early examples of the
form. Nevertheless, it was Radcliffe who was acknowledged by Sir Walter Scott
as the true 'founder of a class or school'. Her writing was influenced by the
ideas of Edmund Burke, who, in A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), proposed that terror was a source of the sublime capable of producing
'the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling'. In her essay On the Supernatural in Poetry,
Radcliffe was careful to distinguish terror from horror:
Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first
expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other
contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither
Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning,
anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all
agree that terror is a very high one.
Where horror paralyses the individual, the
experience of terror sublimely awakens the soul to its power. Radcliffe's
heroines often experience the sublime in wild, rugged landscapes which brings
them closer to the awe-inspiring presence of God.
Radcliffe's first novel, the anonymously published The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne
(1789), is in some ways an experimental work which relates the story of two
warring Scottish clans. It is here that she first articulated the theories on
the sublime and picturesque – viewing a landscape as if it were a painting –
she would develop in her later work and introduces the subject of the
imprisoned woman deprived of her property rights. Her second novel, A Sicilian Romance (1790), features a
spirited young lady of sensibility, Julia, who confronts the destiny of a
marriage imposed by her tyrannical father, the Marquis of Mazzini. Some of
Radcliffe's recurring themes are developed in this novel: the heroine's search
for a lost mother and incarceration, and woman's subjection to the impossible
choice of a forced marriage or the veil.
Neither of these works were to capture the public's
imagination in the way that Radcliffe's subsequent novels would. In her popular
Romance of the Forest (1791),
the author's descriptive abilities reached their full maturity. A Gothic castle
almost takes on the role of a central character: 'The lofty battlements,
thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished, and become the residence of
birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern tower, which was almost
demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, that waved slowly to the
breeze'. Descriptions of landscape were likewise enriched by a poetic intensity
lacking in her early works. Radcliffe had never seen the mountains or lush
Italian countryside she described, but was inspired by the landscape paintings
of Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa. In describing a house she had visited,
she wrote,
In a shaded corner, near the chimney, a most
exquisite Claude, an evening view, perhaps over the Campagna of Rome. The sight
of this picture imparted much of the luxurious repose and satisfaction, which
we derive from contemplating the finest scenes of nature. Here was the poet, as
well as the painter, touching the imagination, and making you see more than the
picture contained. You saw the real light of the sun, you breathed the air of
the country, you felt all the circumstances of a luxurious climate on the most
serene and beautiful landscape; and the mind thus softened, you almost fancied
you hear Italian music in the air.
Just as the Lorraine painting stimulates
Radcliffe's imagination, so the landscapes described in her novels serve to
awaken the sensibility (and terror) of her heroines. Landscape is always more
than a backdrop to her novels. It is a device through which we come to know her
characters and through which Radcliffe outlines her theories of the sublime and
picturesque.
Radcliffe's next novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), earned its author £500. It
remains the best-known of her novels today, not least because it was Udolpho
that caused Catherine Moreland's imagination to run riot as she approaches
Northanger Abbey in Jane Austen's novel:
With all the chances against her of house, hall,
place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to
be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel,
were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope
of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated
nun.
Despite the 'long damp passages' and 'awful
memorials', reason prevails in the end of Radcliffe's novel. Emily St. Aubert,
the heroine, is sorely tried as she is incarcerated in the villainous Montoni's
dark castle, in which she manages to rise to each new challenge with strength
and rationality after temporarily giving in to superstition and an excess of
feeling. A girl of spirit, she retorts to Montoni: 'You may find, perhaps,
Signor, that the strength of my mind is equal to the justice of my cause; and
that I can endure with fortitude, when it is in resistance of oppression'. In
Ann Radcliffe's particular form of Gothic, of which Udolpho is perhaps the best example, mysteries may confound for
pages, spectral figures, distant groans and ghostly music may haunt the
heroine, but eventually all is explained and reason prevails.
The
Italian (1797) was the last of Ann Radcliffe's novels to
be published in her lifetime. She was paid £800 for it and it is considered by
many to be her best work. The novel is dominated by the dark, glowering figure
of the monk Schedoni. Radcliffe's earlier works had already demonstrated that
she possessed a strong ability to portray character, often of servants and
minor players in the plot, but in this work she surpassed her previous efforts.
Schedoni, who embodies the spirit of the Inquisition and the Terror in France,
is vividly described thus:
His figure was striking, but not so from grace; it
was tall, and, though extremely thin, his limbs were large and uncouth, and as
he stalked along, wrapt in the black garments of his order, there was something
terrible in its air; something almost super-human. His cowl, too, as it threw a
shade over the livid paleness of his face, increased its severe character, and
gave an effect to his large melancholy eye, which approached to horror.
It is probable that Radcliffe wrote The Italian in an attempt to rescue
the Gothic from the ravages of hell into which it was plunged by Matthew
Lewis's scandalous horror work The
Monk (1796). It has been suggested that Radcliffe's disgust with other
Gothic writers was the principle reason for her decision to stop writing after The Italian.
Ann Radcliffe's final novel was written in 1802 but
never published in her lifetime. Gaston
de Blondeville (1826) is a thirteenth-century tale set within a modern
story. The book is drawn out and sometimes rambling, the plot lacking in
impetus. It is partly redeemed by colourful descriptions of banquets and court
ceremonial with remarkable detail. The second course at a feast included 'joly
amber potage; jiggots of venison, stopped with cloves; lamprey, with galentine,
marchpane; fritter-dolphin; leche-florentine'.
Although Radcliffe will always be remembered as one
of the most gifted, exciting and popular novelists of the late eighteenth
century, she was also a poet. A few of her minor poems are interspersed in her
novels, but she also wrote a longer piece, St. Albans Abbey (1826), which was published posthumously. It
does her no justice; it is long, rambling and tedious. The rhyme scheme is
extremely variable and verses such as
A sigh – the first she long had
known –
Burst from her breast, and fell a
tear;
But 'twas not grief she felt, nor
fear:
'Twas desolation, hopeless, drear!
bear little relation to her rich prose style.
Ann Radcliffe's novels were republished in two
major early nineteenth-century collections, The British Novelists (1810) edited by Anna Laetitia Barbauld
and The Ballantyne Novelist Library
(1821) edited by Sir Walter Scott. Today there is a revival of interest in her
work. Her five major novels are in paperback – Gaston de Blondeville is not surprisingly omitted – and three
major biographies, Ann Radcliffe: A bio-bibliography by Deborah Rogers, Rictor
Norton's Mistress of Udolpho
and Robert Miles's Ann Radcliffe: The
Great Enchantress have all been published in recent years. Her
enchantment goes on as her novels continue to give pleasure to many readers.
THIS TEXT WAS TAKEN FROM RUTH FACER, THE 2nd OF NOVEMBER OF
2008 AT:
http://www.chawton.org/library/biographies/radcliffe.html
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