Ann Radcliffe

English · 1764 to 1823

Born Ann Ward on July 9, 1764, in Holborn, London, to a haberdasher father and a mother connected to a minor branch of medical and literary gentry, she grew up in comfortable circumstances and married William Radcliffe, a journalist and Oxford graduate, at twenty-three. He often worked late at the newspaper he edited, and she filled the quiet evenings by writing. Her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), appeared anonymously and made little impression. A Sicilian Romance (1790) and The Romance of the Forest (1791) followed, the latter establishing her name. Then came The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the book that made her the most highly paid novelist of her age; her publishers gave her five hundred pounds for it, an enormous sum for a woman writer, and again six hundred for The Italian (1797). She perfected what she called the explained supernatural, raising terror through suggestion and atmosphere before resolving every apparent ghost as a natural cause. Her landscapes, painted from engravings and travel books rather than firsthand sight, conjured an Italy and a Pyrenees she had never visited. She was intensely private, declined to appear in literary society, and stopped publishing at thirty-three. Rumours circulated that she had gone mad from her own horrors, or died, while she lived quietly with her husband, traveling and keeping journals. A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 recorded a real Rhine tour. She died on February 7, 1823, in London, of respiratory illness, at the age of fifty-eight. Gaston de Blondeville, written years earlier, appeared posthumously in 1826.