We know the bare facts of Ann Radcliffe’s life, but not much more, at least partly because she seems to have been a very private person, living her life within the small circle of her family until she married William Radcliffe at 23, and thereafter within the even smaller circle of an apparently happy, though childless, marriage. She certainly kept a journal, at least when she was travelling on vacations with her husband, because some pages from her travel journals were transcribed in Thomas Noon Talfourd’s biographical preface to her posthumous novel, Gaston de Blondeville (1826). The journals themselves, the manuscripts of her novels, and any letters that she may have kept, written or received, seem to be irretrievably lost.1
Ann Ward was born in 1764, the only child of Ann Oates and William Ward, a haberdasher with a shop in the Holborn district of London. In 1772 her parents moved to Bath, where her father kept another shop selling inexpensive pottery, but Ann probably stayed in London, spending most of her time at the Chelsea and Turnham Green homes of her wealthy uncle, Thomas Bentley, who was the partner of the pottery and porcelain maker Josiah Wedgwood, and the proprietor of the London showroom for the more luxurious lines of Wedgwood porcelain. Her obituary states that it was there that she met the literary ladies of London, the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu and Hester Thrale Piozzi. Talfourd’s memoir asserts that she was “educated in the principles of the Church of England,” but if her uncle Bentley and her other maternal relatives, like Dr. John Jebb, were the ones who formed her spiritual sense, she may as her most recent biographer Rictor Norton suggests have been brought up a Unitarian rather than an Anglican, and have imbibed the political liberalism that was connected with that rationalist creed.
Bentley died in 1780, and we do not know whether Ann stayed in London with other wealthy relatives or went to live with her shop‐keeping parents in Bath. There is a legend that she attended a school in Bath run by Sophia Lee, who was soon to write one of the most striking historical romances, The Recess (1783–85); but Norton reminds us that when the school opened in 1781, Ann would have been 17, an age at which women of the day ended rather than began their education.
In 1787, at St. Michael’s Church in Bath where her parents lived, she married William Radcliffe of London, a graduate of Oriel College, Oxford. According to Talfourd, Radcliffe had “kept several terms at one of the Inns of Court” as preparation for a career as a barrister, but had given this up for journalism. He worked as a parliamentary reporter and then from 1791 to 1793 as editor‐in‐chief of a weekly newspaper, the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser; and he supplemented his income from journalism by publishing translations of books from Latin and French. How Ann Ward and William Radcliffe met is unclear; in his contribution to her obituary, Radcliffe says only that he knew her “from about her twentieth year.” They set up their household in London, but William’s work life was not banker’s hours, as he needed to attend the evening debates in Parliament on which he would report. Talfourd states that “on these occasions, Mrs. Radcliffe usually beguiled the else weary hours by her pen, and often astonished her husband, on his return, not only by the quality, but the extent of the matter she had produced, since he left her. The evening was always her favourite season for composition, when her spirits were in their happiest tone, and she was most secure from interruption.”
Encouraged by her husband, Ann Radcliffe anonymously published her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, in 1789; it was a tale of passion and revenge set in the medieval period in the Scottish Highlands, a novel in one volume that was scarcely noticed. But she followed it up with A Sicilian Romance (1791), which received more reviews, and more favorable ones. Her first major success was The Romance of the Forest (1792), which went through four editions in three years and established Radcliffe as a major voice among novelists. She put her name to the second edition, and its success created demand for new editions of her first two novels. Her development as a novelist is difficult to describe, because all her works share the same ingredients: castles or abbeys with dungeons or secret rooms, brave heroes, brooding and gloomy or arrogant male and female villains, heroines in danger, helpful or hapless servants. But she builds more complex structures with these materials as she learns her craft. In The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne Radcliffe seems to be thinking one scene at a time, forgetting about her characters whenever they are offstage. In The Romance of the Forest, however, she has learned to build lengthy sequences that simultaneously develop her heroine’s perceptions, her growing sense of herself, her changing relationships to the powerful figures who seem to have her in their grasp, and to the mysteries that she feels destined to unravel and with which she feels her own fate entangled.
When Radcliffe published The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the world was waiting for it, and from the reviews in contemporary periodicals, they were not disappointed. In Udolpho she continued to immerse the reader in the developing psychology of the heroine, while presenting a spectacular mise‐en‐scène of chateaux and castles in Gascony and the Apennines, along with the mountains and valleys that linked them – places that Radcliffe knew only by report, since she had yet to travel beyond England. Radcliffe received £500 for the copyright to Udolpho, an almost unheard‐of sum. Her next publication had a change of pace. In 1794 she and her husband traveled to Holland and through Germany, aiming to return via Switzerland and France; but a Swiss border guard refused them passage, and they had to return the way they had come, going in what remained of the summer to the Lake District. Radcliffe turned her notebooks kept on the tour into a travel book, which was published in 1795 to great acclaim.
The final novel published in Radcliffe’s lifetime was The Italian, which came out in December 1796, for whose copyright she received £800. The Italian is shorter than Udolpho and more unified: where Romance of the Forest adds a new set of complications in the last volume, and where Udolpho moves its heroine from one haunted castle in Italy to another in France, The Italian focuses sharply on the monk Schedoni, his machinations in the present and his guilty past, ending with scenes of mysterious intensity within the prisons of the Inquisition. The reviews again were favorable, though not universally so. Radcliffe’s novels involved apparently supernatural occurrences, ghostly doings that were eventually disclosed with commonplace explanations that many readers found disappointing, and by her fifth novel many readers were already anticipating her usual tricks.
Another factor was the literary scene: the success of Radcliffe’s novels inspired many others to imitate her, using either her own methods or others. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) brought supernatural events into his chronicle of the damnation of Ambrosio without rationalistically explaining them away: one of Lewis’s characters is a fallen angel in the form of a human temptress, the Wandering Jew shows up in a subplot, and Satan himself appears at the denouement. Rape and murder are described rather than merely threatened, and horror rather than terror seems to be the keynote here. Some reviewers condemned Lewis’s more erotic and more violent version of the Gothic, preferring the chaste suspense of Radcliffe, but as the periodical reviewers complained, the literary scene was becoming crowded with novels set in castles and monasteries. But the appetite of readers for romance continued: Gothic novels continued to proliferate into the first and second decades of the nineteenth century.
For reasons that no one has satisfactorily explained, however, Radcliffe’s own voice fell silent. She was only 33 years old, and apparently in good health then: she regularly took summer tours with her husband, sometimes twice in one year, usually to seaside destinations, but on one occasion to Kenilworth, Warwick, Oxford, and Woodstock; her last recorded tour was in 1811. Rictor Norton suggests that it was the blanket condemnations of the Gothic novel as a “terrorist” form of literature, the imaginative equivalent to the events taking place in revolutionary France, that persuaded Radcliffe to channel her creative impulse into travel journals and poetry – less controversial genres of writing. A more prosaic possibility is that in 1796 William Radcliffe took over the ownership and management of a new periodical, the English Chronicle, perhaps more profitable, and with more onerous duties, than his work on the Gazetteer, and that the death of her parents – her father in 1798 and her mother in 1800 – left property to her in trust that made it unnecessary for her to write. She could have become a public figure, but that was – from her shy and retiring temperament – the very last thing that she wanted for herself.
Around 1802, after the tour to the ruins of Kenilworth and Warwick castles, she began work on a sixth novel, Gaston de Blondeville, set in England during the reign of Henry III, and for the first time with a real ghost in it. According to Norton, this novel was written in partnership with her husband and some version of the manuscript was in a publisher’s hands in 1803, but was withdrawn by the author. It was revised at some time between 1812 and 1815 with the addition of a frame for the medieval tale (a discussion of the supernatural in fiction between two travelers, Willoughton and Simpson), but no further moves toward publication were made at that time. She published a volume of her poems in 1816, but its contents had been published previously as lyrics supposedly written by the heroines of her first four novels. From close reading of what remains of her journals, Norton conjectures that Radcliffe suffered a nervous breakdown around her fortieth year from which she recovered, and that her general health seems to have deteriorated in her late 40s. For the last twelve years of her life she suffered from “spasmodic asthma,” and in the winter of 1822–23, she came down with a severe bronchial infection leading to pneumonia which, combined with the asthma, was fatal; she died on February 7, 1823. Gaston de Blondeville, together with Talfourd’s memoir of Radcliffe’s life, was published in two volumes in 1826. By then the vogue of the Gothic had become a distant memory.
Ann Radcliffe was the single most popular writer of the Gothic romance but she did not invent it. Prose narrative romance originated in antiquity, long before the novel itself, long before English even became a language, as we discussed in Chapter 1. The French romances of the seventeenth century were successfully published in English translation, and considerably shorter English versions of romance were written during the Restoration and early eighteenth century. Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87) and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719) were very popular; the latter was one of the best sellers of 1719, sharing that title with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. But historians of the English novel are generally agreed that the romance was in eclipse during the half century that separated Haywood and Radcliffe, when Richardson, Fielding, and their successors were developing what they felt to be a new form of writing, more realistic and immediate, and capable of an enormous range of emotional affect from broad comedy to the heights of tragedy.
Just as the novel of represented action begins with Pamela, whose particular plot and characters shaped the novel going forward, the Gothic is shaped by an early forbear, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764). Walpole (1717–97) was the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole who entered Parliament near the end of his father’s lengthy career as Prime Minister and continued to sit for various boroughs till 1767. His real interests, though, were art and aesthetics. He was devoted to the architecture of the Middle Ages and renovated his country house, Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, into something resembling a Gothic castle, basing its design on historic examples, and adding decorative features, stained glass, suits of plate armor, crenellated battlements, as he could afford them. The story Walpole told was that after awakening in Strawberry Hill from a nightmare about “a gigantic hand in armour,” he began writing without any particular plan in mind. What he produced in two months and published at Christmas 1764 was a 35,000‐word novella centering on Manfred, prince of Otranto, grandson to a usurper, whose melodramatic attempts to permanently establish his family line are foiled by a series of supernatural manifestations. At the beginning, a gigantic helmet crushes his son and heir to death; at the end, the spectral body of the last true prince destroys Manfred’s castle. Walpole’s first edition purports to be a translation by William Marshal of a sixteenth‐century Italian manuscript based on events of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, but in the second edition of 1765, newly subtitled “A Gothic Story,” Walpole confessed to the authorship and defended at length in a preface his idea of grafting the conventions of the “ancient romance” onto the modern novel, in order to show how realistically depicted characters might behave in a storyworld that includes supernatural interventions like Shakespeare’s ghosts.
We normally look at The Castle of Otranto as the originating text for the Gothic genre, but it could be equally assessed as one of many forgeries of the 1760s that evoke the medieval period, including James Macpherson’s Ossian poems at the beginning of the decade, and Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems at its end. And in turn, this fashion in forgery of medieval texts is a sign of something more significant: a blossoming of interest at the end of the Augustan period in history – neither medieval history alone, nor English history alone. Both David Hume and Tobias Smollett wrote lucrative histories of England, and both William Robertson’s History of Scotland and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire became best sellers. One of the features of eighteenth‐century modernity was the sense that, not only would the world of the future be the product of decisions in the present, but that the present moment was the product of the past, and that enlightened individuals could only understand their place in the world by understanding how that present had come about. So The Castle of Otranto has a place in the development of the historical novel (discussed in Chapter 10 on Scott) as well as the Gothic.
That said, Horace Walpole’s antiquarianism was aesthetic rather than scientific, and his interest in the Middle Ages was a mile wide and an inch deep. His standards of accuracy were not high for his own time, and he even boasted of his ignorance: “I know nothing of barrows and Danish entrenchments, and Saxon barbarisms and Phoenician characters – in short, I know nothing of those ages that knew nothing.”2 There was even a strain of Augustan contempt for the rude manners of earlier times, when those manners could not be elided by the imagination. After inspecting John Pinkerton's histories of medieval Scotland Walpole sneered that he himself had “seldom wasted time on the origins of nations; unless for an opportunity of smiling at the gravity of the author; for absurdity and knavery compose almost all the anecdotes we have of them.”3 Like the literary historian Thomas Warton, Walpole delighted in the Gothic taste, but unlike Warton, who insisted on keeping his medieval and modern cultural artifacts strictly separated, Walpole thought little of combining them. It was not surprising that in Otranto Walpole produced a farrago of Enlightenment motivation with medieval detail, fabricating peculiar rituals and customs out of his baroque imagination, just as he had begun his restoration of Strawberry Hill by grafting battlements made of papier‐mâché onto a Palladian framework.
The Castle of Otranto was popular from the outset, going through four editions during the 1760s and many further editions two decades later, when the Gothic Novel had become an important genre. The Castle of Otranto establishes many of the conventions of the Gothic: such as its favorite locales in castles, dungeons, monastic cells, and grottos; or its character types, including the demonic antagonist Manfred, driven like Shakespeare’s Macbeth alternately by overweening arrogance and by remorse; the plain vanilla protagonist Theodore, the peasant boy who turns out to be the actual heir to Otranto, and who is almost uncharacterized except by bravery and loyalty; and the almost entirely passive virginal heroines, Isabella and Matilda. And there are specters and spirits haunting Otranto, ones that would be absorbed into the Gothic genre. But Walpole’s use of the supernatural is often unintentionally droll. For Manfred’s son and heir to die suddenly generates Manfred’s quest for a new heir, but it is grotesque for him to be crushed to death by a gigantic helmet falling out of the sky; it is all very well for the marble statue of Alfonso the Good (the last rightful Prince of Otranto) to deliver a supernatural warning to Manfred, but it is outlandish for that warning to take the form of a nosebleed.
Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron explicitly presented itself as an attempt to rewrite The Castle of Otranto in a way that would mitigate the defects of its supernatural machinery and its lack of an appropriate moral. Like Otranto, it centers on the artfully prepared revelation that a noble and brave peasant, Edmund Twyford, is actually the secret son and heir to a murdered nobleman, Lord Lovel.4 The world Reeve creates is one in which knights have toothaches and sup upon “new‐laid eggs and rashers of bacon.” The supernatural is allowed to be present but its effects are intentionally muted. Characters have dreams that reveal the secrets of the past or predict the future, but that is what dreams traditionally do. Edmund undergoes an ordeal of staying in a reputedly haunted wing of the Castle of Lovel, in the course of which he hears mysterious groans that test his courage; on the second night, the groans lead him to a locked room on a lower floor, where he discovers the bloody armor of the murdered Lord Lovel along with a portrait that convinces him of his true parentage. On the third night, Edmund initiates events that lead ultimately to the murderer’s confession, his resignation of the title and property, and the establishment of Edmund as Lord Lovel in his father’s place. The most vivid and explicit supernatural manifestation involves two rascals, Wenlock and Markham, who are punished for tale‐bearing by having to spend a night in the haunted wing:
Walpole read The Old English Baron but was unimpressed by Reeve’s attempts to improve on his own creation. He wrote to William Mason: “Have you seen The Old Baron, a Gothic story, professedly written in imitation of Otranto, but reduced to probability? It is so probable, that any trial for murder at the Old Bailey would make a more interesting story.”5
And in the next sentence of this letter, Walpole praises “Sir Bertrand: A Fragment,” a brilliant 1773 text by the physician John Aikin,6 which was frequently reprinted in periodicals throughout the late eighteenth century. Unlike the matter‐of‐fact world of The Old English Baron, “Sir Bertrand” has the surreal logic of a nightmare: a knight, wandering in darkness, comes upon a ruined castle, upon whose gate he knocks. No one replies, but a bell tolls ominously in the turret above. He enters, and a disembodied bluish flame draws him inward and up flights of stairs to a gallery. The light vanishes leaving him in total darkness. Suddenly, a cold hand grasps his own and pulls him onward, and he strikes at it with his sword and severs it. He then climbs further stairways toward the top of the castle:
The prefatory essay by Aikin discusses texts of “mere natural horror,” accounts of tortures, executions, and the like, including a sequence in Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) in which the protagonist finds himself locked into a room with a freshly slaughtered corpse. Curiosity keeps one reading, he says, but such scenes produce pain and disgust rather than pleasure. And he contrasts this sort of text with what he calls “well‐wrought scenes of artificial terror which are formed by a sublime and vigorous imagination.” Here, he says, “a strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of ‘forms unseen, and mightier far than we,’ our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy cooperating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.” This evocation of the sublime is clearly what the first writers of Gothic tales were aiming at, and their failures, either by overshooting the mark or by creating too prosaic a world, would be instructive to Ann Radcliffe.
It would be futile to attempt a detailed summary of the plot of Udolpho – there are dozens of characters and hundreds of events – but the protagonist is a heroine rather than a hero, and its shape is that of a voyage out and a return, with a bit of growing up in between. The novel begins with Emily St. Aubert living happily with her mother and father in their chateau of La Vallee in Gascony, and it ends with her return to the same chateau as a wife rather than a daughter. In the “launch” phase, she meets and falls in love with her future husband, Valancourt, but before that courtship can lead anywhere, the bases for Emily’s initial domestic happiness are destroyed: first her mother dies, then the news arrives that the family’s investments have been lost, so they are financially ruined, and soon thereafter her father dies. Emily’s new guardian, her aunt Madame Cheron, seems to favor Valancourt’s suit and allows them to become engaged, but meanwhile her aunt has married the Gothic villain of the novel, Signor Montoni, who has his own plans for Emily.
The lengthy “development” section of the novel begins as Montoni puts an end to Emily’s engagement and carries his wife and ward to Udolpho, his castle in the Apennines. In effect, Radcliffe has put Emily into a version of the “Pamela” situation where she is unprotected and threatened by terrifying dangers of various sorts. It is one of the features of Radcliffe’s plotting that these hazards are vague, in the sense that while they are going on Emily does not know which of them are actually serious threats to her and which ones are not. And since the reader is tightly tied to Emily’s consciousness, neither does the reader. Count Morano loves Emily, and Montoni encourages him: is she threatened with a forced marriage to Morano, or with being kidnapped by him? Once at Udolpho, Emily is separated from her aunt, who lies ill in one of the castle’s turrets. Exploring the castle at night Emily finds weapons and bloody clothing: are they evidence that her aunt has been murdered?
While Udolpho is under siege, Montoni sends Emily away into Tuscany “protected” by intimidating servants who seem to be cut‐throats: has she been taken away from the castle only to be murdered? After her aunt dies, of natural causes hastened by Montoni’s mistreatment, her property has been left to Emily, or at least not firmly transferred to Montoni. Montoni wants Emily to sign it over to him, and threatens to allow two sinister servants to do whatever they want with her unless she does so. Beyond this family intrigue there also seem to be supernatural doings going on in Udolpho, including an apparition behind a black veil that Emily catches sight of, only for her to faint away from terror that robs her of her senses.
During this section, which takes up most of the second and third volumes, the global atmosphere of menace and peril is more important than anything that actually happens, because in fact nothing does happen. Violence is threatened but never performed, and neither the beloved Valancourt nor the loathed Morano attempts the sort of sexual aggression Richardson presented as the chief threat to his heroines. Time itself seems to stand still throughout the novel: the descriptions of castles and forests are elaborate but the seasons are entirely unmarked. Nor has Emily really learned anything to speak of: she emerges from Udolpho essentially the same as when she arrived.
Emily is typical of Gothic heroines in being a passive creature, but we need to be clear that this passivity does not take the form of immobility but of indecisiveness, and her choices, once reached, tend less to be decisions than abdications of the right to decide. In the first volume of Udolpho, Emily is entirely under the tutelage of her wise and kind father. Upon his death, her guardianship passes to Madame Montoni, who is vulgar and selfish. Emily recognizes this, yet feels as constrained by duty to obey her aunt as to obey her dying father's request to burn his private papers. Perhaps her one significant point of decision comes at the end of volume 1, when she declines to elope with her lover, Valancourt, despite her aunt's decision to carry her away from him into Italy and despite her suspicions of Montoni. With eminent propriety, Emily decides that elopement would be precipitate and imprudent, while on the other side, her aunt is in loco parentis, and Montoni, however suspicious, has not yet been proved a villain.
Her decision, in short, is to accede, however reluctantly, to the course of action that has been provided her by her elders; in effect it is no decision at all. This is the pattern Emily continues to follow: When her chateau at La Vallee is rented out, she thinks of protesting, mentions “some prejudices … which still linger in my heart”, but again accedes. To further Montoni's plans for Emily, she is removed to Venice, then to Udolpho. There indeed she, like Pamela, resists all attempts made against her person, her virtue, and her fortune. This resistance is overlaid, however, upon a sense of her own powerlessness that is almost total, and an equally exaggerated sense of the omnipotence of her captor, Montoni. After Emily escapes from Udolpho (discussed in greater length in the section ‘The Content of the Form: Politics and the Gothic Novel’), her voyage back to France lands her at a second haunted castle, Chateau‐le‐Blanc, with a second heroine, Lady Blanche, and the vague threats and uncertainties continue, though in degree they are much attenuated.
Most of the final fourth volume is in effect the “arrival” section, where the character of Valancourt is cleared of accusations that had been made about him, where various mysteries that have been presented earlier in the novel are cleared up, and where properties greater than those that the St. Auberts lost are restored to Emily, so that the now wealthy heroine can marry Valancourt, return to her childhood home of La Vallee, and live happily ever after.
The power of Radcliffe’s narrative lies primarily in its texture, its local effects, rather than its structure. Just as Emily is imprisoned in the castle of Udolpho, the reader is imprisoned in the consciousness of Emily, who is neither stupid nor timid, but is clearly unequal to the nocturnal quests she takes on. Here slightly abridged, from volume 2, chapter 10, is one of the many sequences in Udolpho in which Emily explores the castle and confronts her terror. It begins with a “launch” of its own, as Emily leaves her chamber toward midnight, seeking her aunt, whom she fears has been the victim of foul play.
As she picks her way through the maze that is Udolpho she hears a voice and goes to investigate. What immediately follows is comic anticlimax: the voice belongs to her own maid Annette, who has been locked into a chamber and is fretting about being locked in (Emily has no key to free her), and also about having had “nothing to eat since dinner.” Then the quest for her aunt continues:
But of course the discoveries, the weapons and the blood, have nothing to do with Emily’s aunt, who is alive if not exactly well in the eastern turret; they are from a battle between rival gangs of banditti that has been going on around the castle for some time. Coral Ann Howells has finely analyzed a similar passage from volume 3, chapter 6 of Udolpho, showing how the objective narrator, technically always present, disappears from view so that the reader is forced to accept, at face value, Emily’s imaginings and suppositions about the murderous intentions of the servants whom Montoni has sent away with her when Udolpho is besieged. And Radcliffe's style contributes to the effect: “While the passage is cast in the form of reasoned argument, with one sentence depending on and balancing the other, it has really only the appearance of judiciousness; what we have in effect is the dramatisation of a process very close to obsession, going round and round the same point and finding no escape or release from the central anxiety.”7
Because of Radcliffe’s essential rationalism – whether the product of a Unitarian upbringing or not – the discoveries Emily makes always prove disappointing or bathetic, as the blood and armor do here. And the mysteries whose revelations are delayed the longest (the contents of the papers that St. Aubert makes Emily swear to burn unread, the vision of horror that lies behind the “black veil”) are perhaps the most bathetic, partly because Radcliffe’s narrator, usually eager to let us in on the slightest perturbations of the heroine’s senses or speculations, here shuts us out. We don’t get to see even vaguely what lies behind the black veil until the penultimate chapter of the final volume, and we never learn what dreadful words Emily inadvertently reads in her father’s papers. Her fears suggest an anxiety about her own origins, about the devotion she has always understood between her beloved mother and father. But the papers refer to her father’s sister, displaced and murdered by her rival Laurentini, and when she learns the story from Laurentini herself, instead of confirming her anxiety about her heritage, it leads only to the acquisition of a further legacy.
The writing career of Ann Radcliffe, from 1789 to 1796, corresponds eerily with the French Revolution, although, as we have already seen, the Gothic novel begins much earlier and continues on into the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. The Marquis de Sade had noted a connection at the time: the Gothic novel, he said, “became the necessary result of the revolutionary shocks which all Europe experienced,” his point being that an audience that had almost universally experienced considerable suffering and anxiety demanded texts that would go far beyond the milk and water plots featured in the usual sentimental tales that had previously been popular. Now authors had to “call in Hell itself to assist in creating texts that would be interesting.”8 Sade is explaining why the terrors of Ann Radcliffe and the horrors of Matthew Lewis would appeal to readers of his day, but he isn’t suggesting that Radcliffe or Lewis were in any sense writing about the Revolution. Ronald Paulson, in our own day, goes quite a bit further: the Gothic is actually a reflection of the French Revolution. “By the time The Mysteries of Udolpho appeared (1794), the castle, prison, tyrant and sensitive young girl could no longer be presented naively; they had all been familiarized and sophisticated by the events in France …. We are talking about a particular development in the 1790s, a specific plot that was either at hand for writers to use in the light of the French Revolution, or was in some sense projected by the Revolution and borrowed by writers who may or may not have wished to express anything about the troubles in France.”9
The point, made somewhat more clearly by Marilyn Butler, is that Radcliffe’s novels are revolutionary in spite of the politics of their creator: “Mrs. Radcliffe’s symbolic ‘meaning’ is the progressive one: her innocent heroine, pure, passive, acutely sensitive, is acted upon by the evil, all‐powerful tyrants who govern the world about her …. The Mysteries of Udolpho … might well have championed the individual oppressed by a corrupt society, to judge alone by their central situations and their emotive style. But Mrs. Radcliffe, although bent on exploiting her period’s discovery of abnormal nervous conditions, remains resolutely orthodox in her religion and morals and conservative in her politics. Her evil society usually belongs to a past century, and to a country of Southern Europe; her typical tyrants are aristocrats of the Spanish type, narrow cold abbesses, or monks associated with the Inquisition.”10
One feature of the Gothic novel that may clarify this oblique relationship to history is what I would call the episode of the unguarded door. We can ask: How do these novels function in the production of ideology? Specifically, how do they foreground the contradictions within current ideology? Consider the situation of Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho, trapped by the mysterious, domineering Montoni, within the walls of Udolpho, her lover Valancourt and any other help far away. The reader spends 300 pages participating anxiously in Emily's vacillations, observing her ricocheting around the castle, fearing rape and murder at every noise, always looking for a way out until finally, in chapter 9 of volume 3, she and her fellow prisoner Du Pont, together with assorted domestic servants, do little more than simply walk out into the Tuscan countryside. “Emily was so much astonished by this sudden departure,” Radcliffe tells us, “that she scarcely dared to believe herself awake.” It is exactly as though the castle had always been a dream prison.
Almost the same situation recurs twice in Melmoth the Wanderer, a late Gothic novel from 1820 by Charles Maturin, which takes some of the devices of Radcliffian suspense to their emotional endpoints, with Stanton immured as a sane man in a horrific madhouse, or of Monçada, a reluctant monk tortured in his monastery. The latter, especially, spends harrowing nights trapped in a tunnel in an attempted escape with another monk who ultimately betrays him to the Inquisition. Maturin makes the reader concentrate intensely on the way in which free men can be turned into caged animals, but ultimately both Stanton and Monçada are released: Stanton is set free without any rational explanation, while Monçada, in a moment of tumult, finds himself temporarily unguarded, and with a sense of ease that comes as a severe anticlimax, escapes his torment as though it had never been real.
The origin of this pattern, as of so many others, can be found in The Castle of Otranto – found twice here too in fact. In chapter 1, Isabella escapes from imprisonment by Manfred of Otranto through the comically described inattention of her guards. And in chapter 3, the hero Theodore, under sentence of death, escapes in almost exactly the same way, when Manfred sends everyone who can be spared in pursuit of Isabella, and Theodore's guards mistakenly assume that the order supersedes their previous duties. Matilda, Manfred's daughter, informs Theodore that she has saved him, but her feat consists primarily in supplying the information that there is no one at all left in the castle except the two of them. In an era that had produced the complex plot machinery of Tom Jones, the inattention to the means of these characters' escapes from their various imprisonments is striking. Surely, if they had wished, Walpole, Radcliffe, and Maturin could have invented machinery for delivering their respective victims of persecution. That they did not do so suggests that the prisons were unreal in the first place, prisons of the mind from which one finds oneself freed when one no longer considers oneself bound.
The Gothic novel seems to have been a production of ideology appropriate for the age of the French Revolution, an age in which the chains of feudal authority were snapped less by the violent fury of the people than by an equally sudden deflation of belief in the source of that authority. In a less violent manner, and over a longer period than in France, England was experiencing the same crisis, in which the authority of a landed aristocracy gave way to the less centralized authority of the bourgeoisie, based on commerce and manufacturing. In both cases, however, the imagined hegemony of the ruling class proved to be a myth whose source of power was simply the temporary inability to see it as myth. Ideology in one of Louis Althusser's senses – the structure that life in society gives to thought – turns into ideology in the other sense – false consciousness, palpably false and arbitrary. The dungeon door that had been imagined so solid and impassible turns out, upon inspection, to be open and unguarded; the autocratic authority of the despot turns out to conceal a genuine power vacuum. From within the prison a Prince Manfred or Signor Montoni seems to be omnipotent; from outside, he seems an incompetent and petty tyrant. And the Theodores and the Emilies, once imprisoned within the walls, eventually succeed legitimately to their estates.
Finally, there is the question of how Radcliffe’s readers read her novels. Q.D. Leavis proposed that there had been a shift from active to passive reading at the end of the eighteenth century, one that delayed the public acceptance of modernist texts. I would agree that Radcliffe, and the Gothic novel in general, sits astride a major shift in the response of the English reader to literature, a shift from reading for information, and for the sake of entry into a verisimilar world otherwise inaccessible to the reader, towards reading as an escape from the world one inhabits into an inner site of fantasy. We can see this exemplified in the contrast between two reviews of The Mysteries of Udolpho, one by the anonymous critic for the Monthly Review for 1794, and the other by Thomas Noon Talfourd in the New Monthly Review for 1820. In the former, Radcliffe is praised for her “correctness of sentiment and elegance of style,” for her “admirable ingenuity of contrivance to awaken [the reader’s] curiosity, and to bind him in the chains of suspense,” and for “a vigour of conception and a delicacy of feeling which are capable of producing the strongest sympathetic emotions, whether of pity or of terror.” Talfourd talks about Udolpho in a very different way: “When we read, the world seems shut out, and we breathe only in an enchanted region where … the sad voices of the past echo through deep vaults and lonely galleries.”
William Hazlitt, similarly in 1818 wrote that Radcliffe “makes her readers twice children, and from the dim and shadowy veil which she draws over the objects of her fancy, forces us to believe all that is strange and next to impossible … All the fascination that links the world of passion to the world unknown is hers, and she plays with it at her pleasure; she has all the poetry of romance, all that is obscure, visionary and objectless in the imagination.” It is not just the style of writing that is different here: the reviewer of 1794 is standing outside and evaluating a pretty fiction, while the later Talfourd and Hazlitt – as John Aikin argues – are describing an inward voyage to an imagined world. Anna Aikin Barbauld makes a similar point in her preface to The British Novelists (1810), about the novel as a locus for the imaginative play of the reader: “The humble novel is always ready to enliven the gloom of solitude … to take man from himself (at many seasons the worst company he can be in) and, while the moving picture of life passes before him, to make him forget the subject of his own complaints. It is pleasant to the mind to sport in the boundless regions of possibility; to find relief from the sameness of everyday occurrences by expatiating amidst brighter skies and fairer fields; to exhibit love that is always happy, valour that is always successful; to feed the appetite for wonder by a quick succession of marvellous events.”11
This sense of the Gothic as demanding an inward projection, as carrying the reader towards states of transport and escape, appears not only in writers who approve the state but in those who do not. Novel‐reading in the late eighteenth century was gendered female, and those attacking it shifted their focus during the vogue of the Gothic. In the 1760s and 1770s it was implied that indiscriminate reading was likely to erode women’s moral principles by providing poor examples of conduct, but in the period after 1795 the anti‐fiction editorial was more likely to attack reading as sapping strength of mind, wasting precious time, and calling the reader into a world whose attractions would lead her to neglect the duties and pleasures of her sublunary existence. Moralists like John Bennett warn as early as 1789 that the passion for literature “is dangerous to a woman. It … inspires such a romantic turn of mind, as is utterly inconsistent with the solid duties and proprieties of life.” But at the height of the Gothic, “castle‐building,” the use of literature as material for fantasy, becomes the moralist’s chief complaint. For example, T.H., in the Lady’s Monthly Museum for March 1799, writes that her daughter “reads nothing in the world but novels. I am afraid she will read herself into a consumption … These time‐killing companions monopolize every hour that is not devoted to dress or sleep … I am afraid,” she concludes, “that the girl will never get a husband,” and she asks the editor for the name of a man willing to wed a beautiful and well‐off young lady with an addiction to romance.
On a more hysterical note, a letter in the Sylph for 6 October 1795 claims to have “actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread.” And one “Rimelli,” writing on “Novels and Romances” for the Monthly Mirror in 1802, insists that “Romances … serve only to estrange the minds of youth (specially of females) from their own affairs and transmit them to those of which they read: so that, while totally absorbed with … the melancholy situation of … a Matilda, they neglect both their own interests and the several duties which they owe to parent, friend or brother.”
The notion of seduction by fiction appears, naturally enough, in the fiction of the period as well. The most famous fictional victim of the Gothic novel is Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey),12 who, after reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, mistakes a laundry list for a fragmentary manuscript and takes General Tilney for a wife‐murderer, when he is in fact only a snobbish and mercenary man of the world. Other victims include Sophia Beauclerc, of Mary Charlton’s novel Rosella, or Modern Occurrences, published in 1799 by the same Minerva Press that furnished such Sophias and Catherines with their favorite reading. Still other Gothic parodies include Self‐Control (1810), by Mary Brunton and The Heroine, or the Adventures of Cherubina, by Eaton Stannard Barrett (1813).
To conclude, there were in the 1790s two very different implied readers: the first, whom the clergymen and journalists of the age personified as older and male, read primarily for factual information, for the reinforcement of ethical values, and for the pleasure of recognizing the persons and things of his world; the second was personified as younger and female, receptive rather than critical, and eager to indulge in the pleasures of imagination. So the Gothic vogue was partly self‐reinforcing, in that its popularity began to draw in new classes of readers who had not formerly been a significant part of the market for literature. One major result was to pave the way for the reception of Romanticism in poetry as well as fiction, with the result that its bards – Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott, at least – despite a bit of rough handling from reviewers, were able to stir without conspicuous resistance a public that already looked to literature for the play of fantasy, dream, and desire. But the genre of romance at which Radcliffe excelled – terror Gothic – was superseded, ironically, by the historical romances of that romantic poet, Walter Scott.