ann radcliffe

This article is about the 19th-century author. For the 17th century benefactor of Harvard, see Ann (Radcliffe) Mowlson.

Ann Radcliffe (July 9, 1764 - February 7, 1823) was an English author, a pioneer of the gothic novel. She was born Ann Ward in Holborn, London, England. She married William Radcliffe, an editor for the English Chronicle, at Bath in 1788. To amuse herself, she began to write fiction, an avocation her husband encouraged. She published The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789. This set the tone for the majority of her work, which tended to involve innocent, but heroic young women who find themselves in gloomy, mysterious castles ruled by even more mysterious barons with dark pasts. Her works were extremely popular among the upper class and the growing middle class especially among young women. Her works included The Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1796). The success of The Romance of the Forest established Radcliffe as the leading exponent of the historical Gothic romance. Her later novels met with even greater attention, and produced many imitators, and famously, Jane Austen's burlesque of The Mysteries of Udolpho in Northanger Abbey, as well as influencing the works of Sir Walter Scott and Mary Wollstonecraft. She died on February 7, 1823 from respiratory problems probably caused by pneumonia. Radcliffe's influence on later writers:

Jane Austen
William Makepeace Thackeray
Sir Walter Scott
Wordsworth
Coleridge
Shelley
Keats
Byron
Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855-7)
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860)
The Bronts

Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre (1847)

Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938)
Witold Gombrowicz's Possessed, or The Secret of Myslotch: A Gothic Novel (1939)
Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Oval Portrait" drew from Udolpho and mentions Radcliffe by name (somewhat disparagingly) in the introduction.

Radcliffe, Ann Radcliffe, Ann Radcliffe, Ann

<< Previous

Word Browser

Next >>

beaver county, oklahoma
atoka county, oklahoma
alfalfa county, oklahoma
adair county, oklahoma
interstate 91
interstate 93
myoglobin
wyandot county, ohio
wood county, ohio
williams county, ohio
wayne county, ohio

washington county, ohio
warren county, ohio
vinton county, ohio
eric cartman
ornithine
syncom
oud
rubrics
ah puch
citrulline
van wert county, ohio

union county, ohio
tuscarawas county, ohio
trumbull county, ohio
web cam
circular dichroism
northrop frye
art clokey
adlai e. stevenson
utterance
charles w. fairbanks
maybelline

bunker
magnetic circular dichroism
james s. sherman
len sassaman
charles g. dawes
charles curtis
tsar bomba
bariaur
john nance garner
francisco de orellana
henry a. wallace