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 to...

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 cas...

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe Born in London in 1764, Ann Ward moved to Bath in 1772. There is some uncertainty about her education. She perhaps attended a school run by Harriet and Sophia Lee. Sophia, one of the earliest writers of gothic...

The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, was published in the summer of 1794 by G. G. and J. Robinson of London in 4 volumes. Her fourth and most popular novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho follows the fortunes of Emily St. Aubert who suffers, among...

Contemporary debates about the real-world effects of violence in the media have made the idea that popular fictions possess a formidable power to alter and recreate the contours of 'reality', something that anyone engaged with popular culture must sooner or later confront. The attribution...

Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe's 19 poems embedded in her novel, 'The Mysteries of Udolpho,' help readers understand the fiction better. These poems open various levels of meaning within the plot. Like Emily, the heroine restricted by patriarchal society, Radcliffe displays uneasiness and ambivalence toward...

In the following essay, Castle points out that although critics of Udolpho usually focus on the gothic episodes of the novel that occur at the castle, the events in the other sections of the book also deserve attention for their fantastical undertones and preoccupation with death and the dead.

In the following essay, MacKenzie discusses Radcliffe's Gothic style and its effects on the eighteenth-century public mind.

In the following essay, Poovey explains the class values system of nineteenth-century English culture and how Udolpho, though it is set in the sixteenth century, actually reflects the class morality of the author's times. Poovey goes on to note that Radcliffe's insights into the coming rise in feminine values are not followed through to their logical conclusion because of the author's faithfulness to the old status quo.