She was a proto-feminist author whose phenomenally popular novels commanded unprecedented fees and influenced the work of Jane Austen, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry James, the Brontë sisters and Charles Dickens.
Yet for centuries, Ann Radcliffe has been neglected by publishers, her name missing from textbooks and anthologies, and her extraordinary contribution to literature overlooked.
Now a team of academics is attempting to assert her rightful place in the canon and introduce new readers to her “terrifying” gothic novels, Romantic poetry and travel writing, publishing the first major edition of Radcliffe’s complete works. Eight volumes of her writing are set to be released between 2025 and 2028.
An accompanying critical volume, Ann Radcliffe in Context, will be complemented by a series of podcasts, public lectures and outreach workshops by academics at the University of Sheffield, with the aim of getting her oeuvre into school curriculums.
Prof Michael Gamer, co-editor of the new Cambridge edition, said: “Radcliffe is one of the few novelists that we can say with certainty invented a new artform: the psychological novel of suspense and the supernatural – so much so that, within a few years of her first popular successes, critics had named this new kind of fiction ‘the Radcliffe school’.
“Nearly every Romantic writer of consequence is indebted to her, from Austen and Byron to Keats and Mary Shelley. No writer would so transform the novel – its style, price or prestige – until Walter Scott’s historical romances decades later.”
Radcliffe’s work was so sought-after by publishers that she doubled the fees top writers could command for their manuscripts. In 1794, at the age of 30, she negotiated £500 for her four-volume novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, nearly five times the sum Austen would accept for Pride and Prejudice almost two decades later.
Radcliffe’s masterpiece, an archetypal example of gothic literature, is a proto-feminist psychological thriller about a young woman trapped in a gloomy castle by a murderous Italian count who is trying to marry her off and steal her property. Greatly admired by literary critics and the Romantic poets, it was widely read and discussed, including by characters in Austen’s fiction.
“I have read all Mrs Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure,” Austen writes from the perspective of Henry Tilney, the hero of Northanger Abbey. “The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days – my hair standing on end the whole time.”
Angela Wright, professor of Romantic literature at the University of Sheffield and co-editor of the new edition, had a similar response the first time she read Radcliffe’s work. “She kept me awake all night,” Wright said. “She offers us a heroine-centred narrative where a young, unprotected, often orphaned heroine is thrown into really dangerous situations where somebody is trying to force her into marriage and take her property rights.”
The heroines are often imprisoned in remote, atmospheric locations where supernatural events appear to take place. “That gives us a real sense of terror,” said Wright. “It’s quite psychological, before psychology was invented. She uses the image of the decayed castle or crumbling convent to explore the precarious and outmoded issue of marriage laws in England, where coverture meant a woman’s legal identity and her property effectively disappeared when she married. So she shows young women in distress, in really exciting, action-packed narratives, with the aim of showing the precarious nature of a young female’s existence who has no protection in society.”
By empowering her heroines with the strength and resilience they need to escape and marry the men they choose, Radcliffe is “very staunchly” showing that women can successfully resist domination, Wright said.
“There is a sense of Radcliffe critiquing patriarchy and men who think they can dictate to women precisely what we should do and what we should give to them in marriage. So in many ways it is feminist literature, on a par with what Mary Wollstonecraft was arguing in A Vindication of the Rights of Women.”
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At one point, a Radcliffe villain tells his victim: “You speak like a heroine, let us see if you can suffer like one.”
Wright added: “There’s always a happy ending and a good resolution. But there’s a sense of a heroine being able to manoeuvre that resolution.”
It is not clear whether Radcliffe, who interspersed her fiction with poetry and quotations from Shakespeare, was self-taught or formally educated. “We do know that she [was] a voracious reader.”
Born Ann Ward, she grew up middle-class and was a niece of Thomas Bentley, a business partner of Josiah Wedgwood, the potter. She married the journalist William Radcliffe at the age of 23 and so was able to socialise with publishers, who later competed to print her works.
“Everyone knew her and her name was on the lips of all these famous Romantic poets,” Wright said. “But also, in Sheffield, there’s a 14-year-old apprentice called Joseph Hunter who writes in his diary about going to the library every morning to try to borrow volume two of The Italian by Radcliffe. He’s desperate to get his hands on it – and it’s always taken out.”
The popularity of Radcliffe’s books meant that her works were widely pirated and copied by lesser writers, to the extent that criticism began to flood in about the genre she had created. “Critics wrote anonymous articles complaining about their daughters reading too much gothic romance, and it filling their heads with wild ideas,” said Wright.
She believes that Radcliffe’s gender was “undoubtedly” a factor in barring her work from the canon, with 19th-century critics dismissing her books as “feminine fiction”.
She added: “There is a lot of gatekeeping in literary criticism – but evidence shows that, during the 1790s, everybody read her.”
