Ann Radcliffe  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Ann Radcliffe (July 9, 1764 - February 7, 1823) was an English author, a pioneer of the gothic novel, best-known for The Mysteries of Udolpho. Sade mentioned her work in his literary essay Reflections on the Novel.

In popular culture

Influence on later writers

• Paul Féval, père used her as his protagonist in the novel Vampire City.
• Jane Austen
• William Makepeace Thackeray
• Sir Walter Scott
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• John Keats
• Lord Byron
• Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855-7)
• Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860)
• The Brontës
  • Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847)
• Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938)
• Witold Gombrowicz's Possessed, or The Secret of Myslotch: A Gothic Novel (1939)
• Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Oval Portrait drew from Udolpho and mentions Radcliffe by name (somewhat disparagingly) in the introduction.

Publications include

• The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1 volume), 1789, gothic novel. ISBN 0-19-282357-4
• A Sicilian Romance (2 vols.) 1790, gothic novel. ISBN 0-19-283666-8
• The Romance of the Forest (3 vols.) 1791, gothic novel. ISBN 0-19-283713-3
• The Mysteries of Udolpho (4 vols.) 1794. ISBN 0-19-282523-2
• The Italian (3 vols.) 1797. ISBN 0-14-043754-1
• Gaston de Blondeville (4 vols.) 1826, reprinted in 2006 by Valancourt Books ISBN 0-9777841-0-X