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Ann Radcliffe’s fiction taps into the historical consciousness opened up by Sophia Lee to depict, in a different way, the problems of historical recovery. Radcliffe’s scenes of reading emphasize what is left out of written records, cuing her readers to see how just as the technology of writing cannot fully archive the complexity of lived experience, neither can the past be revived by sympathetic reading. In an era intensely aware of the historicity of writing, of the ways in which language was subject to decay and only some texts were retrieved from dereliction and neglect, Radcliffe anticipates the fading of her novelistic effects and her disappearance from a canon reserved largely for male poets. Her novels allow us to better read the situation of popular women novelists, for despite her unsurpassed success, even Radcliffe found herself outside the protections given to more canonical authors.

This chapter examines the properties that define Gothic fiction and demonstrates the importance of various geographical and institutional locations for this genre in England during the late 18th century and mid-Victorian period. It highlights the importance of anachronism in Gothic fiction and describes the historical and rhetorical attitudes which underpin this mode. It analyses early Gothic fiction including Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance and The Italian.

This chapter charts the genesis, development, and eventual modification of Ann Radcliffe’s architectural imagination over the most active years of her career. Having provided a reading of the politics of Radcliffe’s fictional castles, and situating her representations within the tradition of eighteenth-century landscape painting, the argument explores the transition from imaginary Gothic architectural forms—those proverbial ‘castles in the sky’—to the ‘real-life’ Gothic castles described in contemporary antiquarian topographies. Broadening the focus out beyond the particular case of Radcliffe, the chapter explores a more general sense of cultural transition in the period, one that resulted in a marked turning away from fake ruins, follies, and fictional ‘castles in the air’ and a movement into the more ‘authentic’, grounded, and antiquarian impulses of the ‘topographical Gothic’.

It is conclusive that Ann Radcliffe’s writing is a despondent version of Joseph Priestley’s contemporary experiments on, and in, the “different kinds of air. ” Priestley’s relationship with and romance of atmosphere could be said to be somewhere between the romantic organicism of the future and the corpuscular and mechanistic paradigms of the past. Fixed air, or carbon dioxide—the gas that made Priestley’s name—would be the perfect example of this romance, resulting in Priestley seeing what other kinds of “factitious air” might make up “common air.” As it so happened, fixed air appears in Radcliffe’s writing as well, in the popular travelogue of her 1794 tour. This chapter looks at how science and literature seemingly converge into new grounds, and how this encouraged experimentation in gothic fiction.

Re-evaluating the implications of the French Revolution for Gothic fiction, this chapter examines representations of the past in a novel that is often neglected in Gothic studies: Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. Written in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, but set in seventeenth-century Roman Catholic France, it discusses the ways in which the novel bears traces of the present and examines the significance of the decaying abbey and fragmented manuscript that feature in the novel. Citing the enormity of the events taking place in France and the challenge they presented to established Enlightenment historical theories and methods, it is argued that The Romance of the Forest responds to such shifting notions of history by revealing a heightened sense of historical consciousness that is engendered by the French Revolution. Influenced by The Recess and utilising the Female Gothic’s focus on the heroine, this chapter shows how Radcliffe’s novel engages with the politics of the past and, more specifically, with the contested ‘Gothic’ views of history presented in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

This chapter takes Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) as a representative example of the ‘waking dreams’ constructed by gothic fictions. In so doing, it reconceptualizes some of the key features of gothic fiction: its unprecedented mixing of conventions designed to represent the actual world with those normally deployed to evoke the marvellous; its ability to evoke in readers a powerful sense of the reality of its unreal worlds; and the consequent power of these virtual-realities to rouse the emotions of those who enter them. The argument begins with an account of John Locke's use of the camera obscura and magic lantern to illustrate the distinction between sensation and imagination, reason and passion, the real and the virtual; and it draws on the sensational psychology of David Hume, in which the mind itself is ‘a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance’.

This chapter examines the role of classical literature in the life and writings of Ann Radcliffe. A strong case can be made for Radcliffe’s awareness of, and interest in, classical literature, even if it is impossible to claim decisively that she could read Latin. First, it examines allusions to Greek and Roman antiquity in The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). These allusions are used to articulate an ethical sensibility for these novels’ heroines: they are susceptible to the grandeur and sublimity of the classical world, and yet direct their attention and sympathy not to heroes or leaders but to the innocent victims of grand ambition. The second part of the chapter examines Radcliffe’s work of travel literature. In this work, the Roman historian Tacitus is quoted in Latin three times, in each case to describe the traces of war and suffering in the places that Radcliffe and her husband visit. Finally, the chapter turns to Radcliffe’s final novel published in her lifetime, The Italian (1797), in which the eroticism of Herculaneum wall paintings, and the shadowy walls of a Roman fort are sources of terror for the novel’s heroine and hero.

Ann Radcliffe’s popular romances of the 1790s marked the widespread literary practice of gothic fiction—the key signature of which is atmosphere. Atmosphere in the gothic sense, however, can pertain to two things. Frist is Deidre Lynch’s illuminating view that the shroud which surrounds the gothic page signals a separation with the Enlightenment’s presumptions of transparency. Second is the fact that gothic fiction is concerned with weather to a much greater extent than any other novelistic subgenre. This focus on and rise in atmosphere in gothic fiction is noted by Radcliffe as a method to produce more chills, to tingle the spine. Joseph Priestley, the leading “aerial philosopher,” is another figure not to be forgotten in this respect, one with whom Radcliffe identified. This chapter is an investigation of Radcliffe’s and Priestley’s sense of atmosphere, and how Radcliffe’s work was possibly influenced by that of Priestley.

Radcliffe’s Anglican orthodoxy is established in Chapter 4, along with her attempt through her fiction to offer a theology of mediation and participation. She works with Shaftesbury’s Platonic moral realism in contrast to Mrs Barbauld’s associationist view of taste and develops a mode of mystical ascent through the interplay of vertical and horizontal experiences. The sublime allows ascent through an awareness of one’s created nature, which is linked to Shaftesbury’s taxonomy of forms. It is an inherently social and virtuous experience, as in James Thomson’s Seasons, and centred on melancholy—an awareness of fallenness, which again allows for a mediation through this distantiation. Twilight’s veiling inbetweenness restores a sense of the lost Eden, while music and liturgy offer humanity’s articulate praise as an example of a Shaftesburian ‘form that forms’. Radcliffe’s explained supernatural is revisioned as a false idolatrous sublime that mistakes an effect for a cause and refuses the mystical ascent.

This chapter considers the quotation compulsion of the romantic-period gothic novel, interpreting it as a manifestation of the ambivalent canon-love of a fictional mode that knew itself to be sub-canonical. Adorned with chapter epigraphs citing Shakespeare, Milton, and others, and modelling through their heroines lessons in literary appreciation, the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and her many imitators resembled the canon-forming, nation-building historical anthologies with which they were contemporary. They should be considered an equally important institution of literary transmission, likewise serving to provide the reader access to the heritage that was hers as a member of the reading nation. But while portraying reading as an experience of haunting and assimilating encounters with poetry in particular to encounters with apparitions, gothic novels also brought to view the dark side to reverence for the literature of the dead and to the arrangement that made writing’s pastness crucial to its canonicity.

This chapter argues that attention to Ann Radcliffe’s use of Scots poetry in the epigraphs of TheMysteries of Udolpho (1794) transforms the female gothic into an historical instead of a psychological analytic. In the tension between Udolpho’s representations of female sensibility and its paratext—what Gerard Genette calls the “border” or “threshold” of the text—this chapter finds an uneven and non-linear feminist historiography capable of producing unconventional accounts of women’s experiences of British imperial and commercial growth. Specifically, Radcliffe uses James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748) and James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1771) as signposts for her heroine’s journey, grafting Emily St. Aubert’s “progress” onto debates about history, the relationship between manners and economic structures, and the place of women in historical narrative.

Chapter One explores how the historical novel emerged in the 1760s as a form which at once employed and interrogated the dominant political narrative of ‘ancient liberties’. The notion of ancient constitutionalism allowed proposals for reform or for limits on monarchical power to be seen as attempts to ensure stability or, at most, (as with the theory of the Norman Yoke) to return to political origin. Yet for Horace Walpole ancient constitutionalism seems at times a troubled jest; Clara Reeve senses that the motif desperately needs reinforcement; and even after the more radical uses of the theory of the Norman Yoke by the Constitutional Society in the 1780s and 90s, Ann Radcliffe considers it a frozen political fable. Haunted by the spectre of the divine right of kings, in the historical novel the narrative of tradition ultimately proves an insufficient underpinning for the constitution.

This chapter traces the narrative strategies around the situational logic of poetic justice in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic fiction. On the one hand, Radcliffe constructs tightly coiled “comeuppance clockworks” in which the villains of her narratives are swiftly and appropriately punished. On the other hand, she also hides many instances of delayed comeuppance in the manuscripts, interrupted stories, and effigies that fill her narratives, thereby creating a narrative “Zeigarnik effect.” Because comeuppance is either too tight or too loose in Radcliffe’s novels, it never seems to correspond to a human measure of strong reciprocity. At the same time, however, Radcliffe does not introduce any mechanism, such as divine intervention or a strong author figure, which could explain such supernatural reciprocity. Fitting Radcliffe’s strategy of the explained supernatural, the specter of the “superpunisher” (and its epistemic comforts) is raised and disavowed, creating a particularly uncanny situational logic of poetic justice.

Though famous for its visual effects, the most important feature of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic fiction is its use of mysterious music and indistinct sounds. According to late eighteenth-century vitalist physicians, the nerves vibrated in response to external impressions like the strings on a musical instrument. Alternately pampered and overstimulated by modern conveniences, the nerves lost the ‘tone’ necessary for physical and mental health. With the rise of a new ‘expressive’ aesthetics that emphasized literature’s power, like music, to stimulate affective responses rather than ideas, novels soon became implicated in this discourse. Like ‘ethereal’ instruments such as the Aeolian harp and the glass harmonica, Radcliffe’s narrative machinery was to administer therapeutic vibrations and excite imaginative reveries that reconnected the body to nature’s vital resources. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, however, Radcliffe warns that this machinery, if administered to an already debilitated body, could cause nervous pathologies and excite uncanny hallucinations.

As ‘active climber[s] of the hills’ to use Dorothy Wordsworth’s phrase, women played a significant part in the Romantic-period development of mountaineering and its literature, with Wordsworth herself and Ann Radcliffe producing two of the era’s most influential ascent narratives. This chapter examines the climbing activities and writing of the era’s female mountaineers, including Elizabeth Smith, Sarah Murray, and Ellen Weeton, in addition to Wordsworth and Radcliffe. It argues that these women were responding to a developing culture of climbing which increasingly sought to differentiate modes of ascent in terms of gender. The chapter concludes with a focused examination of Dorothy Wordsworth as both a mountaineer and a climbing writer, tracing her remarkable development over the course of three decades during which she wrote her narrative of her pioneering ascent of Scafell Pike, which was published unattributed in her brother’s Guide to the Lakes.

Consolidating the themes explored in previous chapters, Chapter 6 turns to consider the ‘antiquarian Gothic romance’, an oxymoronic strain of Gothic writing that, even as it peddled its hyperbolic, highly fanciful tales, self-consciously aspired towards the rigour and facticity of the antiquarian topographical method. Having discussed these impulses in a selection of lesser-known Gothic romancers, as well as the curious antiquarian romances of writers such as Thomas Pownall and Joseph Strutt, the chapter focuses on two literary responses to the ruins of Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire: Ann Radcliffe’s posthumously published Gaston De Blondeville (1826), and Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821). As in previous chapters, Gothic ruins are shown to call up vastly competing imaginative constructions of the Gothic past, each of which is politically inflected: the Tory ‘white Gothic’ of Scott, and the radicalism of Radcliffe.

Chapter 3 continues to make the case for a literary mode—the sentimental—while explaining what sort of things happen when the genre shifts from literary nonfiction—that is, the slave narrative, to the Gothic novel. The chapter provides the next case study where this time the environments, technically understood with the help of perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson, make people terribly uncomfortable to the point of becoming unhinged. This chapter on the environment serves as a particular kind of ecocriticism, while at the same time energetically distinguishing itself from "literary Darwinism" and related versions of literary criticism where the ancient environment of evolutionary psychology exerts undue pressure on the scene. Here instead of evolutionary psychology, the perceptual psychology of Gibson provides the basic definition of an environment. The chapter also shows how some literary criticism that falls under the heading of Cognitive Approaches—including work by Elaine Scarry, cognitive rhetoric à la George Lakoff, and David Herman who practices Umwelt research—already benefits from an environmental approach referencing Gibson.