Ann Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe, née Ward (1764-1823), English novelist, born in London and privately educated. Radcliffe's tales, characterized by mystery plots, an atmosphere of terror, and poetically intense landscapes, helped to establish the vogue for the so-called Gothic novel. For a time she was the most popular novelist in England. The group of Romantic novels for which she became most famous includes The Romance of the Forest (3 vols., 1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (4 vols., 1794), and The Italian (3 vols., 1797). Though her works are not faultless (they are flawed by weak characterization, historical inaccuracies, and imposssible turns of the plot), she was hailed by Sir Walter Scott as “the first poetess of Romantic fiction” and her admirers included Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Christina Rossetti. The Mysteries of Udolpho is her most popular work; Jane Austen satirized the work in her novel Northanger Abbey and contrasted the frivolous mystery of the gothic novel with the reality of human foibles.