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Ellesse Patterson, University of Sheffield

On 18^th 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.

1. 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, 18^th June 2026, 00.40. ↩︎
2. 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). ↩︎
3. 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 8^th July 2026]. For Spooner’s comments on this, see: 14.05-22. ↩︎
4. 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. ↩︎
5. Crimson Peak, 00.01.05-20. ↩︎
6. Spooner, Women in White, 21.16-21.35, 25.50-26.05. See also: Ibid., 02.10-03.15. ↩︎
7. John Keats, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 14^th March 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, 2 vols, ed. by Maurice Buxton Foreman (Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 245. Internet Archive.
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8. 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.
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9. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford University Press, 1998; repr. 2008), pp. 364-66. ↩︎
10. Spooner, 01.30-45. ↩︎

Dipyaman Bhowmick, Jadavpur University, India

A primary characteristic of Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) and The Italian (1796) is the presence of female protagonists who get embroiled in violent power struggles against masculine forces in patriarchal spaces in a bid to control their physical and psychological autonomy. Both Julia and Ellena, the novels’ respective protagonists, become subject to scheming parental figures attempting to marry them off to less-than-favourable men while ignoring their daughters’ preferred suitors. In Julia’s case, it was her father, the Marquis, who had arranged her marriage to the devious Duke de Luovo to climb the ladder of social prestige. In The Italian, Ellena’s patriarchal foil was her paramour Vivaldi’s mother, the Marchesa, who orders Ellena’s assassination so as to preserve his social standing by preventing a marriage with an orphan of a lower social pedestal. This post will analyse how Radcliffe (1764-1823), a woman writing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, imbues her novels with a proto-feminist ethos by envisioning distinct female Gothic spaces in natural worlds far removed from the male Gothic universe of forced marriages, dark castles, and tyrannical figures of authority.

             In her pre-eminent 1976 study, Literary Women, Ellen Moers credits Radcliffe as the progenitor of the genre of female Gothic writing by creating a world where the oppressed women, like Julia and Ellena, exhibit “heroinism” (Moers 113) to escape the confines of the male. Gothic world and taking refuge in female Gothic spaces. These proto-feminist locations are often located in the boundaries of the male Gothic world, providing them with the requisite freedom and agency to lead healthy and fulfilling lives. This is something exhibited in A Sicilian Romance and The Italian as well. In both of these novels, it is the natural world – often populated by women – which becomes a safe haven for those persecuted in the male Gothic spaces. For example, in A Sicilian Romance, it is the kind Madame de Menon who provides the motherless Mazzini sisters, growing up with an exacting father as their only biological parent, with tender love and care. Similarly, in The Italian, Ellena’s protectors take the form of her Signora Bianchi, whose early death left Ellena defenceless against the devious schemes of the Marchesa and Schedoni, and Sister Olivia at the San Stefano convent, later revealed to be her mother, who aids in her escapade from the Convent’s tyrannical Lady Abbess by clothing her in a dark veil. 

             In A Sicilian Romance, Julia is blessed with an affinity for the natural world. She was “uncommonly susceptible of the charms of harmony” (Radcliffe 4), and often “leaned forwards [to witness] “a fine effect of moonlight” (Radcliffe 9). Similarly, she often found comfort in the natural sounds of oars on lapping water whose “divine melody” generated “a sigh of ecstasy from her bosom” and succeeded in “calming the tumult of her mind” (Radcliffe 58) affected by the social cares of an impending forced marriage. Ellena, too, possesses a deep affection for the environment. It was during her imprisonment in the convent of San Stefano, overlooking the Alpine mountains, that she discovered her sense of “relief” (Radcliffe 75) while looking at the sublime natural world and confesses,

“If I am condemned to misery, surely I could endure it with more fortitude in scenes like these than amidst the tamer landscapes of nature! Here, the objects seem to impart somewhat of their force, their own sublimity to the soul.” (Radcliffe 75)

             Nature, therefore, to quote Katherine McGee’s Responsibility and Responsiveness in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley (2014), plays a “liminal” role in the novels for women like Ellena and Julia who are receptive to the charms of the natural world, quite unlike the patriarchal characters stuck in the social mores of the male Gothic, like the Dukes and Schedonis hell-bent on forcing the Julias and Ellenas into undesirable, socially-sanctioned marriages instead of allowing them their heart’s desire to marry kinder, far less patriarchal figures like Hippolitus and Vivaldi.

             The natural world plays an integral role in A Sicilian Romance even more significantly than in The Italian. When Julia escapes the confines of the Mazzini Castle – where she had to live under the iron grip of her father – she flees to a pastoral abode deep in the heart of nature under the loving care of her governess, Madame de Menon. In The Tale of Terror (1920), Edith Birkhead observes that Radcliffe relies on “natural terror… rather than on supernatural suggestions” (Birkhead 52). This observation aptly manifests in both the Romance and in The Italian where the sublime in nature wards off the brigands, led by the Duke, chasing the unhappy Juliaa and similarly provides Ellena with a refuge in the mountainous climes where the San Stefano Convent was located. Thus, within this framework, nature does not remain a mere passive agent, but acquires what Vandana Shiva calls the adi shakti of “Prakriti” – “a powerful and effective primordial source of power” (Shiva 38) in Staying Alive (1988). This awesome power of the sublime Prakriti (nature) could only be comprehended by the feminine characters of Radcliffe’s texts, primarily due to their ability to be more at home in the natural, ecofeminist space than their masculine foils.

              To conclude, A Sicilian Romance and The Italian formulate two distinct social worlds that the characters inhabit. A masculine world about which Cannon Schmitt wrote in Alien Nation (1997), containing “betrayals, confused identities, nebulous malevolence and opaque motivations” (Schmitt 57) of forced marriages, intrigue and murder. The necessity for marrying to attain a ‘higher’ social status supersedes love between individuals, traits commonly found in the pages of canonical Gothic texts like The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole’s and in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Alongside the many male Gothic traits enunciated by Schmitt, characters inhabiting Radcliffe’s masculinist world exhibit a stark absence of harmonious contact with the natural world, in stark contrast to her female protagonists, which emerges as a theme around which both of these novels pivot.            

             This masculine world can thus be called, echoing Claudia Johnson’s Equivocal Beings (1996) one “riven with crisis” (Johnson 2). Taking cues from the existing tropes of the genre, Radcliffe provides what Johnson calls an “imaginative response” (Johnson 2) by subverting the genre from within by pitting the masculine world against a feminine world where love reigns, and nature plays an active and nurturing role. The female Gothic world wins out in the end of Radcliffe’s texts as the intrigues of the Marquis and company are rebuffed in the conclusions to both the novels, where the Julia and Ellena can be found conjoined in marital bliss with their lovers, vanquishing the oppressive male Gothic forces that had subjected them in the past, thereby creating a victory of the female Gothic sentiments in the erstwhile pages of the male Gothic.

Works Cited

Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror: A Study of Gothic Romance. London Constable & Company Ltd., 1921.

Johnson, Claudia. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

McGee, Katherine Marie. Responsibility and Responsiveness in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. 2014. University of South Florida, PhD dissertation. Digital Commons, digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/5376.

Radcliffe, Ann. A Sicilian Romance. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. Penguin Books, 2004.

Schmitt, Cannon. Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India. Kali For Women, 1988.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women, Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1976. 

Elizabeth Bobbitt and Dale Townshend

This year marks 200 years since the posthumous publication of Ann Radcliffe’s St Alban’s Abbey; A Metrical Tale, a lengthy poem by the so called ‘Great Enchantress’ of early Gothic fiction that is set during the first year of the Wars of the Roses (May 1455). In celebration of the poem’s publication in 1826, the AHRC-funded Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now project recently sponsored a study day hosted by the Adult Learning Centre at St Albans Cathedral. The day included a guided tour of the cathedral, during which participants read aloud excerpts from Radcliffe’s extraordinary poem, comparing her descriptions of the then dilapidated abbey with the space as it is experienced by tourists today while trying imaginatively to reconstruct what it looked like when she visited it in the early years of the nineteenth century. Following the tour, Rosie Garland (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature) led a creative writing workshop, in which attendees composed their own poetry in response to both Radcliffe’s narrative and St Albans Cathedral itself.

Printed alongside Radcliffe’s last novel entitled Gaston de Blondeville, two other narrative poems, and a collection of twenty-six shorter lyric poems, St Alban’s Abbey is little known today. To admirers of Radcliffe’s distinctive Gothic fictions of the 1790s, it represents a monumental shift in the writer’s creative practice. Where her Gothic romances are set on the Continent in France and Italy, for instance, St Alban’s Abbey is set in Radcliffe’s native England. While her 1790s novels take place on the cusp of the European Enlightenment, St Alban’s Abbey is a poem firmly rooted in the Catholic ritual and civil conflict of Britain’s medieval past. And unlike her earlier works, in which apparently supernatural occurrences are ultimately explained by rational and earthly means, St Alban’s Abbey is shot through with instances of ghostly hauntings. In St Alban’s Abbey, then, Radcliffe enacts a sharp turn away from the prose that earned her an exalted place among the bestselling authors of her day in favour of antiquarian metrical romance, a form popularised in the early years of the nineteenth century by Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810).

 Our study group set off to follow in Radcliffe’s footsteps to the site she explored time and again, we are told by T.N. Talfourd, with ‘unwearied zeal.’ As we progressed through our tour, expertly led by our knowledgeable volunteer tour guide, Laurie Gibson, we marvelled at the painstaking architectural and decorative details of the medieval abbey-church that Radcliffe evokes in her poem. In the south transept, for instance, we saw the upper gallery where Baron Fitzharding, a Lancastrian knight in the narrative, looks down on the wounded of the First Battle of St Albans in search of news of his father’s bloody fate. In the north presbytery aisle, meanwhile, we examined the brass of Thomas Rutland, a sixteenth century sub-prior of the abbey, that hangs on a stone wall. Much admired by Radcliffe, Rutland’s brass is included in her antiquarian end notes to St Alban’s Abbey. The remains of the arched doorways that once led to the abbey’s medieval cloister are still visible in the cathedral yard today, and it was here we stood to listen to the bells toll in celebration of a summer wedding. As we stood together at the Abbey Gate, we mused on whether Radcliffe herself stopped to listen to the bells peal as she wandered through the remains of the abbey-church, the site in the early nineteenth century given over to ruination and neglect following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 and the ravages of Oliver Cromwell’s army during the Civil War.

Our study day allowed us not only to follow in Radcliffe’s footsteps, but also, like Radcliffe herself, to revel in the imaginative power of place. As a Romantic tourist, Radcliffe deliberately sought out historical sites that particularly awakened her own creative sensibilities. During the creative writing workshop, we adopted Radcliffe’s creative practice, using St Albans Cathedral as a prompt or catalyst for our own creative and scholarly expressions. Thank you to all who came along. You made the day unforgettable! 

Below is a sample of the creative work that resulted from our creative writing workshop, a short poem that imaginatively explores the fate of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest son of Henry IV and Margaret de Bohun. As uncle to Henry VI, Gloucester served as protector of England during Henry VI’s minority. Under Henry VI’s early rule, Gloucester remained heir presumptive until Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s wife, gave birth to their only son, Edward, in 1453. Eventually convicted of treason, the duke died under suspicious circumstances at Bury St Edmunds in 1477. His grave was discovered at St Albans in 1703, his body embalmed in a mix of alcohol and aromatic spices. The site became a popular tourist attraction in the eighteenth century, and visitors to the cathedral can still see the site of his grave today.

Duke Humphrey of St Alban’s

Only the best for you, Duke Humphrey.

Our local brew and altar wine

Could never slake your dogged zeal

To be pickled in more than common brine.

Cognac –a speech—rapt attention—

Every eye and every tongue

Buzzing hot in speculation

On all your worst exploits, far flung

And local –sins long past, forever young.

Professor Michael Gamer (University of Pennsylvania)

Between the 24th-27th May, members of the Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now team travelled from all corners of the world for a two day international Radcliffe Symposium at the University of Bologna. Hosted by Professor Serena Baiesi and Professor Diego Saglia, the Symposim was a lively, intimate event in which postgraduates, ECRs, and seasoned professors met to discuss Radcliffe in the Aula Prodi, a stunning building featuring a sixteenth-century fresco. Two days of relaxed and productive discussions were punctuated by plenty of excellent food, a trip to the Anatomical Theatre of the Archiginnasio (a remarkable sixteenth-century University building), and the book launch of Professor Michael Gamer’s wonderful edition of Radcliffe’s The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents. The Radcliffe Symposium was a joyful and welcoming meeting of minds and a fantastic opportunity for delegates to present new research and writing on Radcliffe.

Natalia Bartocha

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792),¹ Mary Wollstonecraft asserts that when women are inadequately educated ‘their senses [are] inflamed, and their understandings neglected, consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling.’² Throughout my reading of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794),³ published only two years after Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, I was struck by the way in which Wollstonecraft’s ideas informed Radcliffe’s novel and the characterisation of her protagonist, Emily St Aubert.

Radcliffe’s heroine, Emily, is raised to resist the dangers of unchecked sensibility. From the novel’s opening chapters, Emily’s father, Monsieur St Aubert, states that he ‘endeavoured to strengthen her mind; to enure her to habits of self-command; to teach her to reject the first impulse of her feelings.’⁴ I believe that St Aubert’s cautioning and education of Emily against sensibility becomes a foundation through which Emily’s character can be understood; a notable example of this can be found in Emily’s oftentimes conflicting relationship with Valancourt. From St Aubert’s own focalisation Valancourt and Emily ‘appeared like two lovers.’⁵ Upon her father’s death Emily states that ‘It was the remembrance of Valancourt, of his taste, his genius, and of the countenance which glowed with both, that, perhaps, alone determined her return to the world.’⁶ Through her remembrance of Valancourt she is able to overcome the grief for her deceased father and she continually refers to Valancourt in terms of tenderness throughout the course of the novel. She states that she ‘had passed in his society the happiest hours she had known since the death of her father.’⁷ Emily’s recovery from the loss of her father is attributed  to Valancourt’s companionship. 

However, as well as being a vital source of comfort and consolation, Valancourt also serves as a foil to Emily, emphasising her rational disciplining, instilled by her father. Emily rarely frames her affection in terms that could reflect emotional sensibility. In Wollstonecraft’s terms, she is not a heroine who is ‘blown about by every momentary gust of feeling.’⁸ Ann Radcliffe appears to be reversing the conventional gendered association of sensibility. Rather than Emily embodying excessive emotionality, it is Valancourt who performs this role. When Emily rejects his proposal, Valancourt responds with emotional intensity: ‘He could only exclaim, ‘Emily! Emily!’ and weep over the hand he pressed to his lips.’⁹ While Valancourt ‘weeps’¹⁰ Emily merely asserts that ‘we have no time to waste in exclamation, or assertion’;¹¹ she refuses to indulge in an emotional display and instead redirects the conversation towards a rational approach. She responds calmly to Valancourt’s emotional, so much so that she refers to his actions as ‘wast[ing] time in exclamation.’¹² Rather than participating in his emotional outburst, she asserts a rational boundary grounded in her father’s teachings. Emily’s reflection of her father’s lessons mirrors Wollstonecraft’s assertion that if men ‘let woman share the rights…she will emulate the virtues of man.’¹³ Emily’s emulation of St Aubert’s teachings positions her as the adaptor of a masculine role.

She further embodies St Aubert’s moral caution when she explains: ‘I have alas! No longer a parent — a parent, whose presence might sanction your visits. It is unnecessary for me to point out the impropriety of my receiving them.’¹⁴ Without the authority of a parent to sanction their meetings, she insists on maintaining propriety and reasserts the indecency of Valancourt’s private visit. Even when Valancourt continues his emotional appeals, Emily again attempts to regulate the situation, asking him to ‘try to moderate these transports…for my sake, try.’¹⁵ Throughout the scene, Emily consistently resists indulging in sensibility and takes on the stereotypically masculine role of reasserting rationality. Radcliffe reverses emotional gender roles with Valancourt expressing uncontrolled feeling, while Emily maintains composure and rational restraint. Even when Emily does seem to express a sense of emotional uncertainty, for example when she states that she had ‘exerted herself in endeavours to attain fortitude and composure, to bear her through the approaching scene,’¹⁶ her emotional challenge ultimately ends with a decisive assertion that she ‘will not prolong these moments… by a conversation, which can answer no good purpose. Valancourt, farewell!’¹⁷ She decisively rejects her male counterpart while reasserting that she will not  ‘become the prey of [her] senses,’¹⁸ despite the emotions she may feel towards Valancourt his impropriety prevents her from succumbing to his wishes. Consequently, I believe that Ann Radcliffe, throughout the characterisation of Emily St Aubert, creates a female protagonist who embodies the arguments of Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary work. 

Natalia Bartocha is an MA English Literature student at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests lie in Gothic literature with a particular focus on the intersections of class and gender. She is especially interested in the works of Gothic female authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Joanna Baillie, exploring how their writing interrogates social expectations and gives voice to transgressive female experiences.  

1. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Penguin Books, 2004) ↩︎
2. Ibid., p. 66.
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3.  Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
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4.  Ibid., p. 5.
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5.  Ibid., p. 49.
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6.  Ibid., p. 89.
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7.  Ibid., p. 139.
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8.  Wollstonecraft, p. 66.
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9. Radcliffe, p. 158.
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10. Ibid., p. 158.
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11. Ibid., p. 158.
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12. Ibid., p. 158.
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13.  Wollstonecraft, p. 133.
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14.  Radcliffe, p. 107.
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15.  Ibid., 159.
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16.  Ibid., 511.
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17.  Ibid., 515.
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18.  Wollstonecraft, p. 66.
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Rosie Whitcombe

When I first started researching Ann Radcliffe, it was my job to go through hundreds and hundreds of listings in online databases to find any and all mentions of Radcliffe in the press. While at moments painstaking, this work was a real pleasure because the majority of what I found was fascinating, and that’s because Radcliffe was a fascinating writer. In addition to the many reviews of her work, Radcliffe appears frequently in reviews of the works of other writers, often used as a benchmark by which to measure their skill. She is referenced in non-fiction travel accounts where her name is used as a byword for a particular form of landscape description. She features in short stories, is the subject of poetry, and appears in a spate of articles, published between 1818-1821, that accuse Lord Byron of plagiarism. She is the subject of multiple obituaries, some of which appeared well before her death in 1823. Her poems are published readily, as are reviews of the theatrical adaptations of her novels. I found plenty of articles that reference her work in relation to the insidiousness of the modern novel, and many others in which she is repeatedly praised for her original genius and ability to terrify her readers. I read numerous articles that attested to the surge in popularity of what one reviewer termed ‘hobgobliana’, better known today as Gothic literature.¹ And, beyond Nathan Drake’s 1798 assertion that Radcliffe was the ‘Shakespeare of Romance Writers’, I found other articles that compared her, favourably, to the bard.²

One of the main things that struck me as I carried out this research was the potency of Radcliffe’s reputation. A peerless trailblazer of the Gothic Romance, when it came to terrifying set pieces, nobody did it better. In 1823, a writer for The Quarterly Review challenged any reader, certain of their imperviousness to frightening fiction, to read

Mrs. Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, alone, at one o’clock in the morning, and by a rushlight, just to convince themselves that the imagination may be worked upon by unreal terrors.³

Radcliffe’s ability to terrify her readers was widely documented in the press. Her masterful skill encouraged more than one critic to compare her to Shakespeare, with a 1819 retrospective on The Italian going so far as to declare her, in some ways, his superior:

She is the greatest sorceress in the terrific that has ever appeared: the murder scene in Macbeth “melts into thin air,” when compared to the black and lowering horrors of the attempted assassination in the Italian.⁴

Incredible praise like this helped to solidify Radcliffe’s reputation as head of the Gothic school of literature. But she was praised for more than just her ability to conjure terrifying scenes. Unlike her contemporary, Matthew Lewis, author of lurid Gothic tale, The Monk, Radcliffe was an expert in balancing terrifying twists and turns with scenes of a softer nature. As one reviewer put it,

The works of this writer lead us for ever to the tomb; but the wand which she bore was gifted only to call up the milder and unalarming spirits: we listen to her charms as we would to the incantations of a benevolent enchanter, whose “quaint apparitions” may soften and solemnize, but neither terrify nor hurt us.⁵

Radcliffe’s ability to strike fear into the hearts of her readers is undermined and dismissed somewhat in this critique. Her writing is softened and feminised, the potency of her terror diluted. But it is possible that estimations like this may have been key to her success. They demonstrate Radcliffe’s ability to thrive in the public eye as both the ‘greatest sorceress in the terrific’ and the ‘Shakespeare of Romance Writers’, her scenes

truly terrific in their conception, yet so softened down, and the mind so much relieved, by the intermixture of beautiful description, or pathetic incident, that the impression of the whole never becomes too strong, never degenerates into horror, but pleasurable emotion is ever the predominating result.⁶

Radcliffe conjured scenes of terror that rivalled Shakespeare’s, but the similarities between the writers doesn’t end there. They also seem to share a knack for writing provocatively while avoiding censure. Shakespeare famously avoided punishment by the censors; many of his contemporaries weren’t so lucky, with some even facing legal ramifications for publishing unsavoury material. Radcliffe, shrewd in her ability to temper terror and disguise anything in her novels that might be interpreted as a challenge to the status quo, avoided being castigated by the contemporary press as just another writer of tawdry ‘hobgobliana’, the fate that befell so many of her fellows. Like Shakespeare, Radcliffe expertly balanced a careful line: her extraordinary skill provided her with both success and protection from the press, allowing her to cultivate and uphold her peerless reputation as one of the greatest writers of her day. 

Dr Rosie Whitcombe is an AHRC-funded Research and Innovation Associate for the Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now project. She has published on Radcliffe and Keats, and her essay, ‘Connection, Consolation, and the Power of Distance in the Letters of John Keats’, won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Essay Prize. She is currently working on her first monograph, John Keats and the Letter. She is also one third of educational YouTube channel, Books ‘n’ Cats, where she disseminates literary research to a wide audience.

1. ‘Astonishment!!! A Romance of a Century Ago’, Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, or, Monthly Political, and Literary Censor, 16 (September 1803), 93. ↩︎
2. ‘Observations on Objects of Terror’, The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany, (March 1799), 193. ↩︎
3. ‘Art. VIII.—Private Correspondence of William Cowper, Esq.’, The Quarterly Review, 30 (October 1823) 13. ↩︎
4. ‘Estimate of the Literary Character of Mrs. Ann Ratcliffe [sic]’, Monthly Magazine, or, British Register, 47 (March 1819), 125.
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5. ‘Art. II.—Harrington and Ormond, Tales’, The British Review, and London Critical Journal, 11 (February 1818), 49. ↩︎
6. ‘Observations on Objects of Terror’, The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany, (March 1799), 193. ↩︎