SOURCE: "'Kidnapped Romance' in Ann Radcliffe," in The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp. 99-128.

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.

The novels of Ann Radcliffe offer something new to the Gothic tradition still in formation. Working in the domain of romance, which had less prestige even than the novel, she transformed the features of romance on which the novel was thought to improve—its remote, extravagant settings, its reliance on conventions and "fancy" rather than close observation of "nature," its use of coincidence—into instruments of didacticism whose lessons addressed real problems of "entering the world...