Born [Ann Ward], in London, 9 July 1764. Married William Radcliffe, 1787. Occupied with literature, 1789–1802. Spent last twenty years of her life practically in retirement. Died, 7 Feb. 1823. Buried in St. George’s Burial Ground, Bayswater Road. Works: “The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne,” 1789; “A Sicilian Romance,” 1790; “The Romance of the Forest” (anon.), 1791; “The Mysteries of Udulpho,” 1794; “A Journey … through Holland,” 1795; “The Italian,” 1797; “Poems,” 1816. Posthumous: “Gaston de Blondeville,” 1826.

Personal

  The tenor of Mrs. Radcliffe’s private life seems to have been peculiarly calm and sequestered. She probably declined the sort of personal notoriety, which, in London society, usually attaches to persons of literary merit; and perhaps no author whose works were so universally read and admired, was so little personally known even to the most active of that class of people of distinction, who rest their peculiar pretensions to fashion upon the selection of literary society.

  A beautiful little woman of delicate constitution and sequestered habits, as fond, as her own heroines of lonely seashores, picturesque mountains, and poetical mediations.

  Mrs. Radcliffe appears to have possessed a cheerful and equable temper, and to have manifested no peculiarity except the sensitive aversion to notice which she shared with many other authoresses. For the last twelve years of her life she suffered from spasmodic asthma, and succumbed to a sudden attack on 7 Feb. 1823. She was interred at the chapel-of-ease in the Bayswater Road (the resting-place of Laurence Sterne and of Paul Sandby) belonging to St. George’s Hanover Square.

General

  I have read some of the descriptive verbose tales, of which your Ladyship says I was the patriarch by several mothers. (Miss Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe?) All I can say for myself is that I do not think my concubines have produced issue more natural for excluding the aid of anything marvellous.

  Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Mary Robinson, Mrs. &c., &c., though all of them are very ingenious ladies, yet they are too frequently whining or frisking in novels, till our girls’ heads turn wild with impossible adventures, and now and then are tainted with democracy.—Not so the mighty magician of the Mysteries of Udolpho, bred and nourished by the Florentine Muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothick superstition, and in all the dreariness of inchantment; a poetess whom Ariosto would with rapture have acknowledged, as the

  In the productions of Mrs. Radcliffe, the Shakspeare of Romance Writers, and who to the wild landscape of Salvator Rosa has added the softer graces of a Claude, may be found many scenes truly terrific in their conception, yet so softened down, and the mind so much relieved, by the intermixture of beautiful description, or pathetic incident, that the impression of the whole never becomes too strong, never degenerates into horror, but pleasurable emotion is ever the predominating result.

  In the writings of this author there is a considerable degree of uniformity and mannerism, which is perhaps the case with all the productions of a strong and original genius. Her heroines too nearly resemble each other, or rather they possess hardly any shade of difference. They have all blue eyes and auburn hair—the form of each of them has “the airy lightness of a nymph”—they are all fond of watching the setting sun, and catching the purple tints of evening, and the vivid glow or fading splendour of the western horizon. Unfortunately they are all likewise early risers. I say unfortunately, for in every exigency Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines are provided with a pencil and paper, and the sun is never allowed to rise or set in peace. Like Tilburina in the play, they are “inconsolable to the minuet in Ariadne,” and in the most distressing circumstances find time to compose sonnets to sunrise, the bat, a sea-nymph, a lily, or a butterfly.

  Her descriptions of scenery, indeed, are vague and wordy to the last degree; they are neither like Salvator nor Claude, nor nature nor art; and she dwells on the effects of moonlight till we are sometimes weary of them; her characters are insipid,—the shadows of a shade, continued on, under different names, through all her novels; her story comes to nothing. But in harrowing up the soul with imaginary horrors, and making the flesh creep and the nerves thrill with fond hopes and fears, she is unrivalled among her fair country-women. Her great power lies in describing the indefinable, and embodying a phantom. She makes her readers twice children…. All the fascination that links the world of passion to the world unknown is hers, and she plays with it at her pleasure: she has all the poetry of romance, all that is obscure, visionary, and objectless in the imagination.

  Indeed, the praise may be claimed for Mrs. Radcliffe, of having been the first to introduce into her prose fictions a beautiful and fanciful tone of natural description and impressive narrative, which had hitherto been exclusively applied to poetry. Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, even Walpole, though writing upon an imaginative subject, are decidedly prose authors. Mrs. Radcliffe has a title to be considered as the first poetess of romantic fiction, that is, if actual rhythm shall not be deemed essential to poetry.

  Up to the close of “The Italian,” her mind seems gradually to have ascended; and perhaps she felt as if the next step might be downward. It may be that she was right. “Gaston de Blondeville,”—not given to the world till after her death, and written scarcely five years after “The Italian,”—though showing a surprising improvement in style, discovers, at the same time, a subsiding of those energies by which she had held us with such fearful mastery.

  Miss Edgeworth would scarcely venture into the region of the picturesque, and Mrs. Radcliffe is good for nothing out of it, except, indeed, when she is in her horrors.

  But all this, though impressive, and sometimes grand, is unnatural; such fictions could not last—they were not of God, and so they failed. The authoress lived long enough to see the fabric which she had reared melt away, and Nature resume her reign with the same ease and quietness that the moon succeeds the tempest.

  We would not pass over, without a tribute of gratitude, Mrs. Radcliffe’s wild and wondrous tales. When we read them, the world seems shut out, and we breathe only in an enchanted region, where lovers’ lutes tremble over placid waters, mouldering castles rise conscious of deeds of blood, and the sad voices of the past echo through deep vaults and lonely galleries. There is always majesty in her terrors. She produces more effect by whispers and slender hints than ever was attained by the most vivid display of horrors. Her conclusions are tame and impotent almost without example. But while her spells actually operate, her power is truly magical.

  Mystery is the whole spell. Nothing can be poorer and more conventional than the personages: they are not human beings, nor even the types of classes; they have no more individuality than the pieces of a chessboard; they are merely counters; but the skill with which the author juggles with them gives them a kind of awful necromantic interest. The characters are mere abstract algebraical expressions, but they are made the exponents of such terrible and intense fear, suffering and suspense, that we sympathise with their fate as if they were real.

  In her verses, she is a tinselled nymph in a pantomime, calling up commonplaces with a wand.

  Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances are, indeed, of a wholly fantastic kind of Gothic, with no whit of foundation in actual knowledge of mediæval history. Her characters are but vague melodramatic phantoms that flit through her descriptions of scenery, and serve as agents for her terrific situations. There is something like treachery also to the true theory of her style in her habit of always solving the mystery at the end by purely natural explanations.

  Whose name everybody knows, but whose works, great as their power and effect was in their day, are less known now than their merit deserves. The “Mysteries of Udolpho” is old-fashioned, but it is fine reading for those who have leisure to trace the meanderings of the threads so carefully entangled, and to follow the most ethereal of heroines through the piled-up troubles which make her reward all the sweeter when it comes: and that reward aways does come…. Her landscapes, even now, though literature has done a great deal since then in the pictorial art, are full of an elaborate and old-fashioned yet tender beauty. She is not familiar with them, nor playful, but always at the height of a romantic strain; not graphic, but refined and full of perception. There are scenes that remind us of the learned Poussin, and some that have a light in them not unworthy of Claude before he was put down from his throne by the braggart energy and rivalship of Turner—since when the modern spectator has scarcely had eyes for those serene horizons and gleaming moonlight seas. Perhaps of all others Mrs. Radcliffe’s art is most like that of the gentle painter whom people call Italian Wilson. There is a ruined temple in the distance, a guitar laid against a broken column; but the lights, how mellow and soft, the skies how full of tempered radiance, the pastoral valleys unprofaned by ungracious foot—full of the light that never was on sea or shore!

  But what Mrs. Radcliffe attempted, she carried out with a very great skill.

  A hundred years later, women touched the novel of plot and adventure with a bolder grasp, and Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances seemed the joint offspring of “big bow-bow” and nightmare parentage. But they too moved with sweep and power; she was strong in description and invention; she bridged the interval between the mediæval and modern novel, and painted landscape so well that even Byron sometimes borrowed from her.

  Mrs. Radcliffe sometimes writes powerfully and well, but sometimes she writes very badly. Her style is stiff and inflated; she is fond of fine words and involved sentences, and has a righteous detestation of calling a spade a spade. Her forte is description, she has a peculiar talent for drawing link after link of detail. She brings us into a suite of mysterious rooms, with high casements, a dagger eaten with rust on the floor, an old bedstead, a heap of lumber, and a dusty manuscript—each completes a chain of horrors.

  There is generally some mystery afloat; when one has been cleared up, we are not suffered long to breathe freely before we are caught in the toils of another. Yet all the time only human agents are at work; there is nothing improbable except the extraordinary combination of circumstances, nothing supernatural except in the superstitious imaginings of the personages of the story. Every thing that seemed as if it must be the work of spirits is carefully and fully explained as the story goes on. Mrs. Radcliffe has been censured for these explanations, as if they were a mistake in point of art, destroying the illusion and making us ashamed of ourselves for having been imposed upon. This censure I can regard only as an affectation, unless when it comes from a convinced believer in ghosts. Such persons might resent the explanation as casting doubts upon their cherished belief. But for other people I can see nothing that could be gained by leaving the mysterious incidents unexplained, except by the authoress, who would undoubtedly have saved herself an immense deal of trouble if she had made free use of ghosts and other supernatural properties, whenever she required them, without taking any pains to explain how the facts occurred. I read the story myself with a double interest; I enjoy the excitement of superstitious wonder and awe while the illusion lasts, and when the mystery is cleared up, and the excitement is gently subsiding, I am in a mood to get additional enjoyment from reflecting on the ingenuity of the complication that gave to the illusion for the moment the force of truth. Yet it was no less a person than Sir Walter Scott that set the fashion of objecting to Mrs. Radcliffe’s explanations.

  Her ignorance of the world at the time when she wrote was complete and many-sided. Human character she knew, not from observation but from dreams. The landscapes for which she is so justly famous are pictures of countries she never saw. There is nothing in her books that she did not create. And it is a testimony to the power of her art that her fancy first conceived a type of character that subsequently passed from art into life. The man that Lord Byron tried to be was the invention of Mrs. Radcliffe.

  The actual literary value is, on the whole, low; though Mrs. Radcliffe is not without glimmerings.

  It was, indeed, in the melodramatic manipulation of landscape that this artist was most original. “The scenes that savage Rosa dashed” seem to have been her model, and critics who were fond of analogy called her the Salvator Rosa of fiction. It is here that her influence on Byron and Chateaubriand is most apparent. Mrs. Radcliffe’s scenery is not quite to our modern taste, any more than are Salvator’s paintings. Her Venice by moonlight, her mountain gorges with their black pines and foaming torrents, are not precisely the Venice and the Alps of Ruskin; rather of the operatic stage. Still they are impressive in their way, and in this department she possessed genuine poetic feeling and a real mastery of the art of painting in distemper.

  Mrs. Radcliffe wrote for the story, and not for the characters, which are all types, and soon became conventional. There is always the young lover, a gentleman of high birth, usually in some sort of disguise, who, without seeing the face of the heroine, may fall in love with her “distinguished air of delicacy and grace” or “the sweetness and fine expression of her voice.” The only variation in the heroine is that she may be either dark or fair. The beautiful creature is confined in a castle or a convent because she refuses to marry some one whom she hates. She finally has her own way and marries her lover. The tyrant is always the same man under different names; add to him a little softness, and he becomes the Byronic hero.

  Does any one now read Mrs. Radcliffe, or am I the only wanderer in her windy corridors, listening timidly to groans and hollow voices, and shielding the flame of a lamp, which, I fear, will presently flicker out, and leave me in the darkness? People know the name of “The Mysteries of Udolpho;” they know that boys would say to Thackeray, at school, “Old fellow, draw us Vivaldi in the Inquisition.” But have they penetrated into the chill galleries of the Castle of Udolpho? Have they shuddered for Vivaldi in face of the sable-clad and masked Inquisition? Certainly Mrs. Radcliffe, within the memory of man, has been extremely popular. The thick double-columned volume in which I peruse the works of the Enchantress belongs to a public library. It is quite the dirtiest, greasiest, most dog’s-eared, and most bescribbled tome in the collection. Many of the books have remained, during the last hundred years, uncut, even to this day, and I have had to apply the paper knife to many an author, from Alciphron (1790) to Mr. Max Müller, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Bozzy’s “Life of Dr. Johnson.” But Mrs. Radcliffe has been read diligently, and copiously annotated…. Mrs. Radcliffe does not always keep on her highest level, but we must remember that her last romance, “The Italian,” is by far her best. She had been feeling her way to this pitch of excellence, and, when she had attained to it, she published no more…. “The Italian” is an excellent novel. The Prelude, “the dark and vaulted gateway,” is not unworthy of Hawthorne, who, I suspect, had studied Mrs. Radcliffe.