Ann Radcliffe
1764–1823
Biography
Ann Radcliffe, born Ann Ward, lived from 1764 to 1823. She was born in London into a middle-class family and was raised partly in Bath and partly on the estate of an uncle. She wed the journalist William Radcliffe in 1787, and the pair moved to London. In the decade that followed she published five novels, which brought her great fame and made her one of the best-paid novelists of the century. She then withdrew from public life for the last twenty-six years of her life, travelling often with her husband. She also wrote poems and an account of a continental journey.
Her most famous book, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), follows Emily St Aubert, a young woman who is carried off by a ruthless man to a castle in the Apennines. Radcliffe built her novels on suspense, exotic and historical settings and apparently supernatural events, and she usually explained those events in natural terms at the close. Her books were the most sought after of her time, and in her own lifetime the term Radcliffe school was used for Gothic fiction in general.
The Mysteries of Udolpho is the book on this site, and it is the one most readers now connect with her. Its imprisoned heroine, its long descriptions of mountains and ruined castles, and its dark secrets set a pattern that later Gothic writers followed and sometimes mocked. Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is a famous send-up of readers who love such novels, and Mary Shelley is among the writers Radcliffe helped to shape.
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Books
The Mysteries of Udolpho
by Ann Ward Radcliffe
The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance is a Gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe, which appeared in four volumes on 8 May 1794 from G. G. and J. Robinson of London. Her fourth and most popular novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho tells of Emily St. Aubert, who suffers misadventures that…
Summary from Wikipedia: The Mysteries of Udolpho (CC BY-SA 4.0)