1764 Although Horace Walpole invented the gothic novel (see 28 January), Anne Radcliffe was by far its most successful practitioner. Born Anne Ward in Holborn, London on this day, and married at 22 to the editor of the English Chronicle, Mrs Radcliffe started to write at just the point when the new circulating libraries in London and fashionable watering places like Bath were crying out for high-class romance. So once her fiction had found its audience, it attracted the highest fees in the business. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) netted her £500, and The Italian (1797) £800 (£300,000 and £480,000 in today’s money, using book prices as the index of relative value.) At the same time £80 was the average price for a copyright.
The main elements of Radcliffe romance were exotic mountain locations that the author and most of her readers had never seen, like the Alps or the Apennines, virtuous heroines captured by scheming men – as often after their money as their bodies – castles with secret passageways and hidden rooms, supernatural apparitions or sounds of sighing and groaning, and a general air of mystery, not just in the immediate atmosphere but also in the fate and identity of the characters, some of whom go missing, while others prosper following a revelation of their true identity and the fortune attaching to it. Jane Austen would satirise the genre in Northanger Abbey (written 1798–99) while striking a blow for realism, when she showed Catherine Morland to be intrigued by the fanciful mysteries of the old country house, only to discover that the real horrors emanated from the vile snobbery of its present-day owner.
Typically the novels end by resolving the mysteries, but Mrs Radcliffe’s innovation was to include rational explanations for even the supernatural events as part of her dénouements. So in Udolpho, for example, the ghosts that Emily hears and sees are really pirates hiding in the castle, entering and leaving her apartments via a secret passageway, and a horrific figure behind a veil turns out to be a wax dummy. This was fiction in a period of scientific discovery, a sort of ‘let’s pretend’ in the supernatural, even though the age of reason had largely discredited it.
For later, more ‘serious’ authors, this device of the supernatural explained led to experiments in indeterminate narratives foregrounding the process of interpretation. Henry James exploited the gothic ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw (1898), when what the governess encounters can be interpreted as either demonic possession of the children in her care or her own displaced desire and jealousy. So gothic romance became a way of talking about the unconscious before Freud gave us the vocabulary for it.