The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Radcliffe, Ann

(née Ann Ward). Born July 9, 1764, in London; died there Feb. 7, 1823. English writer.

Radcliffe was educated at home. She won broad popularity for A Sicilian Romance (1790) and The Romance of the Forest (1791) and especially for The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). In her Gothic novels Radcliffe masterfully created an atmosphere of terror and mystery, but the element of rationality is also strong in her novels. Everything mysterious is fully explained by real phenomena. The romantics adopted the strong-willed, unrestrainedly passionate “hero-villain,” definitively portrayed in Radcliffe’s works.

REFERENCES

Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, vol. 1, fasc. 2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1945.
MacIntyre, C. Ann Radcliffe in Relation to Her Times. New Haven-London, 1920.
Varma, D. P. The Gothic Flame. [London, 1957].
Birkhead, E. The Tale of Terror. New York, 1963.

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

"Ann Radcliffe could not have depicted yon mountains in a more appalling aspect."

View in context

In this manner they passed along a winding gallery of some length, with as many staircases leading out of it as are to be found in the mysterious and gloomy palaces of Ann Radcliffe's creation.

View in context

Ann Radcliffe in the last decade of the century, of which 'The Mysteries of Udolpho,' in particular, was popular for two generations.

View in context

Developing from Ann Radcliffe, Emilia Pardo Bazan, and Vernon Lee, it moved away from explanation and mechanism toward instinct and transformation, ambiguity not merely ambient but embodied.

Unhomed: TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

(1) Akanesi, known as Canny, is not unusual as a Gothic heroine in being unable to turn her gaze away from a sublime landscape, the sort of view Emily St Aubert might have paused to gaze on with awe on her travels through the narrative of Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Memory and Misdirection in Mortal Fire

It takes Elliott most of her lengthy book to make her case, charting out a large number of Gothic works while still relying on a representational few--Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley--as well as contextual documents central to middle-class thought to support her claims.

Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction; The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764-1835

The authors examine the book market of the time and the reception of Balzac's first texts, which consisted mainly of romans noirs and adventure novels inspired partly by Anglophone popular successes (Ann Radcliffe and Walter Scott's novels in particular).

Chollet, Roland and Stephane Vachon. A l'ecoute du jeune Balzac. L'echo des premieres oeuvres publiees (1822-1829)

Wallace's technique of rereading well-known Gothic authors such as du Maurier and Ann Radcliffe, discussing their assimilation and reworking of motifs from other women writers or their influences on later writers, is particularly effective in mapping an alternative history of female Gothic--one that does not always originate with 'mother Radcliffe' and peter out in the mid-twentieth century.

Diana Wallace, Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic