Radcliffe (née Ward), Ann

Although during her lifetime Ann Radcliffe was a more successful novelist than Jane Austen, the two authors may be said to have been equals in the profound influence they have had on the subsequent development of the novel. As the ever-perceptive Walter Scott noted, they both founded their own distinct schools of novel-writing. Whereas Austen’s primary invention was in developing free indirect speech, Radcliffe created complexity in her characterization through a technique of layered allusion—primarily through epigraphs and quotations—and through a clever, ever-developing strategy of straddling the borderline between the marvelous and the real, a device generally and unhelpfully described as the “explained supernatural.” While contemporary commentators referred to Radcliffe as a writer who blends romance and poetry (the first “poetess of romantic fiction,” as Scott calls her [On Novelists and Fiction. Edited by I. Williams. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968, 103]), her work is best thought of as a form of psychological romance. Core elements include a “contested castle” (Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. University of Illinois Press, 1989), ancestral mystery, a persecuted heroine, an absent mother, a patriarchal ogre, an ineffectual hero, and an historical setting on the cusp between a feudal past and an emergent modernity. As William Hazlitt noted, the Gothic romance was a threadbare device until Radcliffe transformed it (Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers. London, New York and Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1907, 165–67); as such, she may be thought of as the Gothic romance’s most significant progenitor—“Mother Radcliff”—to use John Keats’s formulation (Keats 1970, 214).