Ellesse Patterson, University of Sheffield
On 18th June 2026, the AHRC-funded Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now project hosted a free public lecture delivered byLancaster University’s Professor Catherine Spooner. Accompanied by a film screening of Guillermo del Toro’s Gothic masterpiece Crimson Peak (2015), Professor Spooner’s thought-provoking analysis of Women in White and the New Gothic Cinema: Reinventing the Gothic Heroine highlighted the enduring significance of this powerful symbol, tracing its origins in the genre from Radcliffe’s pivotal 1790s romances to the advent of what Spooner terms ‘New Gothic Cinema.’1 As Spooner observes, women in white consistently occupy prominent positions within this emerging sub-genre, appearing within the aforementioned Crimson Peak, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (2023), Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024), del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025), Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (2026), and beyond.2 Although the powerful motif of the woman in white naturally predates the publication of Radcliffe’s work, Spooner’s lecture illuminated the ways that Radcliffe’s imperilled heroines have shaped and inspired the depictions of the white-gowned Gothic women that haunt contemporary cinema.
While I was already familiar with both Radcliffe’s literature and del Toro’s Crimson Peak before this event, Professor Spooner’s lecture made the symbiotic relationship between the early and modern Gothic unmistakable, emphasising the importance of placing these two works in conversation with one another. In a 2024 interview with The Vulture, del Toro openly acknowledged the influence of foundational Gothic authors upon his 2015 film, mentioning by name Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and the works of Ann Radcliffe.3 Though the ghostly echoes of Walpole and Lewis’s own work can certainly be felt throughout del Toro’s film, it was Radcliffe’s influence upon Crimson Peak that I found to be most profound. In many ways, del Toro’s bloody Gothic romance – with its exquisite scenery, deadly marriage plots, and virtuous heroine – recreates some of the core characteristics of Radcliffe’s oeuvre for the modern age.
Accordingly, this indicates that the sense of ‘Radcliffe as matrix’, a term coined by Robert Miles, continues to ring true within the Gothic genre, though – as the Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now project seeks to rectify – the author herself has largely fallen out of the public eye.4 Viewed in the wake of Professor Spooner’s insightful lecture, Radcliffe’s influence on del Toro’s work becomes readily apparent from the opening shot of Crimson Peak where our heroine, Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), appears amidst the mists of a macabre yet sublime snowy landscape, clad in a grand white nightgown, her face and once pristine sleeves stained with blood.5 In her lecture, Spooner highlights the significance of the Gothic heroine’s white dress as a visual marker of the heroine’s purity in the illustrations and etchings surrounding Radcliffe’s work, a purity that is typically placed at risk as the Radcliffean heroine is besieged by rakish suitors, ambitious male relatives, and bandits alike.6 By beginning Crimson Peak with the image of Edith’s marred white dress and bloodied visage, del Toro simultaneously evokes and reinvents the Gothic heroine’s treacherous journey, popularised by Radcliffe’s work, for a fresh audience. The striking contrast of red blood against Edith’s bridal white gown makes visual the threat of domestic and/or sexual violence faced by many of Radcliffe’s heroines.
Following this powerful opening scene, del Toro’s film travels back in time to explore how Edith’s deadly romance with the mysterious Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) placed her into such dire straits. After the wealthy newlywed Edith moves to the Sharpes’ decrepit ancestral home with her husband and his unnerving sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), the solitary landscape of Allerdale Hall becomes instrumental in evoking a decidedly Radcliffean atmosphere of terror and dread. In itself, Radcliffe’s writing was so notorious for its astonishingly detailed and powerful imagery that it became viewed as almost parodic, as we see in an 1818 letter written by John Keats to John Hamilton Reynolds
I am going into scenery whence I intend to tip you a Damosel Radcliffe – I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and solitude you.7
Positioned as the prototypical Gothic residence, Allerdale Hall mirrors (and perhaps even exceeds) the mysterious grandeur of the titular residence of Radcliffe’s The Mysterious of Udolpho (1794). Snow weeps through the decaying roof, wind howls through the halls in the dead of night, and blood red ore gushes up from the floorboards, staining the snow outside crimson whilst inside Edith slowly begins to uncover the trail of dead brides and stolen fortunes left in the aristocratic yet impoverished Sharpe siblings’ wake.8 Edith’s journey mirrors the trials experienced by Radcliffe’s most famous heroine, Emily St. Aubert, as she discovers the dark secrets of Udolpho and its master, the villainous Signor Montoni, who marries and imprisons her aunt in order to obtain her fortune.9 In the climactic confrontation that appears at both the opening and close of Crimson Peak, Edith’s magnificent white gown is revealed to be stained by both the symbolic blood seeping from the foundations of Allerdale Hall and the literal blood from the numerous wounds Edith accrues within its walls, unifying Radcliffe’s fascination with sublime landscapes and deadly marriage plots in a single powerful image that testifies, as Spooner’s work suggests, to the enduring power of Radcliffe’s legacy.10
Ellesse Patterson is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield. Her PhD thesis analyses depictions of monstrous reproduction across the long nineteenth-century British Gothic, exploring the circumstances that lead to the creation of new life being positioned as a harbinger of death and decay. This work was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH). Her research has been previously published in Gothic Studies and Journal of Dracula Studies.
- Crimson Peak, dir. by Guillermo del Toro (Universal Pictures, 2015). See also: Professor Catherine Spooner, Women in White and the New Gothic Cinema: Reinventing the Gothic Heroine, lecture, Showroom Cinema, Sheffield, 18th June 2026, 00.40. ↩︎
- Ibid. 00.45-50. See also: Poor Things, dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos (Searchlight Picture, 2023); Nosferatu, dir. by Robert Eggers (Universal Pictures, 2024); Frankenstein, dir. by Guillermo del Toro (Netflix, 2025); Wuthering Heights, dir. by Emerald Fennell (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2026). ↩︎
- Matt Zoller Seitz, ‘Guillermo Del Toro on the Misunderstood Beauty of Crimson Peak’, Vulture, 2024 <https://www.vulture.com/article/guillermo-del-toro-on-the-misunderstood-crimson-peak.html> [Accessed 8th July 2026]. For Spooner’s comments on this, see: 14.05-22. ↩︎
- Robert Miles, ‘“Mother Radcliff”: Ann Radcliffe and the Female Gothic’, in The Female Gothic: New Directions, ed. by Andrew Smith and Diane Wallace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 42-59 (p. 45). ProQuest Ebook Central. ↩︎
- Crimson Peak, 00.01.05-20. ↩︎
- Spooner, Women in White, 21.16-21.35, 25.50-26.05. See also: Ibid., 02.10-03.15. ↩︎
- John Keats, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 14th March 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, 2 vols, ed. by Maurice Buxton Foreman (Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 245. Internet Archive.
↩︎ - Crimson Peak, 01.30.47, 00.48.46, 00.41.37-42, 01.36.21. For Spooner’s analysis of the repetition of ‘red marking white’ in Crimson Peak, see: Spooner, 38.00-39-14.
↩︎ - Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford University Press, 1998; repr. 2008), pp. 364-66. ↩︎
- Spooner, 01.30-45. ↩︎