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Chapter 4 - The first poetess of romantic fiction: Ann Radcliffe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

James Watt
James Watt
Affiliation:
St Catharine's College, Cambridge
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Summary

Long however as our eyes have been now turned on scenes of turbulence and anarchy, long as we have listened with horror to the storm which has swept over Europe with such ungovernable fury, it must, I should imagine, prove highly soothing to the wearied mind, to occasionally repose on such topics as literature and imagination are willing to afford

Nathan Drake, Literary Hours: Sketches Critical and Narrative (1798)

When the reader travels with a Mrs Radcliffe, he goes on in the society of a lady who has made Romance her darling study, and who now uninterruptedly executes it with confidence, and real pleasure to herself

Joseph Fox, Santa-Maria; or, The Mysterious Pregnancy. A Romance (1797)

Though there was far less impropriety in the late-eighteenth-century ‘Gothic’ romance than is commonly assumed, as I argued in the previous chapter, many ostensibly unremarkable works were still condemned because of their association either with German literature or, more often, with the perceived commodification of prose fiction in general. One particular writer was consistently singled out and absolved from any such criticism, however, ‘the mighty magician of Udolpho’, Ann Radcliffe.

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Contesting the Gothic
Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832
 , pp. 102 - 129
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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