Ann Radcliffe (1764-1822)

Born in London, the daughter of a London merchant, of the many Gothic writers active at the
end of the 18th century Ann Radcliffe was undoubtedly the most popular. Her fame rested on
two novels in particular: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). As their
titles imply, Radcliffe’s novels are set in picturesque sceneries, generally Italian, featuring
castles, dungeons and darkness. Their main characters are usually an evil and mysterious man
who persecutes a young and innocent girl. Despite all these Gothic elements, Radcliffe’s novels
show the 18th -century faith in reason; the author tries to reconcile reason and religious faith
with the sublime and the horrific by creating vivid pictures of the supernatural, only to dispel
them by rational explanations at the end of the stories.

The Mysteries of Udolpho was very successful in its days. It is Ann Radcliffe’s version of the
theme of the persecuted virgin, very popular in the 18th century, especially in France – in
England it had been inaugurated by Samuel Richardson’s novels. The novel tells the story of
Emily of St Aubert, the beautiful young daughter of a noble family from Gascony, southern
France. Having become an orphan, she is put under the wardship of her aunt, madame
Cheron, a tyrannical woman married to a sinister Italian, Montoni. Madame Cheron opposes
the love between Emily and young Valancourt and, to put an end to it, she removes her niece
to the gloomy Castle of Udolpho, Montoni’s house in the Italian Apennines. After the usual
Gothic horrors – dark dungeons, secret passages, hidden doors, sudden apparitions,
mysterious music – Emily manages to escape and finally marries Valancourt. Montoni, who is
found to be the head of a band of outlaws, is caught by the police and executed.

Typical of the new taste is the episode in which Emily spends a night in a Gothic castle. The
night is stormy, the castle ruinous and guarded by soldiers, the wind sweeps through the
woods around the castle, and poor Emily can hear the laments of unseen beings. She can also
hear a mysterious singer, accompanied by a lute. She tries to find out where the song is
coming from but the music is often drowned by the wind. The Gothic elements are obvious in
this passage, but there is also a pre-Romantic predilection for solitary night landscapes, where
the natural elements take on human attributes: they have a voice and a will of their own.