In 1883, baffled by an almost complete lack of information about one of her favorite romance writers, the poet Christina Rossetti abandoned her projected biography of Ann Radcliffe. "Someone else, I daresay, will gladly attempt the memoir," she wrote...

One of the most popular novelists of her era, Ann Ward Radcliffe created a female Gothic that transformed the emotional extravagances of the classic male Gothic novel, pioneered by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Usually set in haunted...

Ann Radcliffe - (1764 - 1823) (Born Ann Ward) English novelist, poet, and journal writer. Considered one of the most important writers of the English Gothic tradition, Radcliffe transformed the Gothic novel from a mere vehicle for the depiction of...

Ann Radcliffe (July 9, 1764 - February 7, 1823) was an English author, a pioneer of the gothic...

Even within a critical climate largely sympathetic to its aspirations, the eighteenth-century Gothic is still perceived as fluctuating between peaks of rhetorical hyperactivity and valleys of intellectual torpor--almost as if a Radcliffean villain and heroine, each more caricatured than anything actually seen in...

MILES, ROBERT. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). vi + 201 pp. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. The resurgence of interest in gothic novels and romances over the last ten years has created a body of criticism that...

In the following excerpt, Ellis suggests that in her Gothic novels Radcliffe elevates the character of romance by using the fanciful conventions of the Gothic tradition as a means of addressing the real problems encountered by a young lady or gentleman entering the world in the eighteenth century.

In the following excerpt, Spacks argues that Radcliffe bases the structure of her fiction on the "moral implications of [Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime."]

In the following excerpt, Todd provides a detailed overview of Radcliffe's novels and discusses the traits that distinguish her from both her eighteenth-century predecessors, such as Samuel Richardson, and her nineteenth-century successors and contemporaries, such as Mary Wollstonecraft.