Angela Wright
Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Specialist in Gothic Literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Particular fan of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley.
Location Sheffield, UK
Activity
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Hello Elva. Gothic can be an indirect method of addressing many anxieties in culture. Sex is just one of them, and I think that Catherine's breathless anticipation of the 'horrid' nature of these works may be read in that way. However, her anticipation is also more generally about imagination and curiosity, where she reads the works actively, and comes to...
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Hello Elaine,
Ann Radcliffe was born in 1764, the year that Walpole first published 'The Castle of Otranto', but it is clear that she read and appreciated Walpole, as she quotes from him in her epigraphs to her penultimate novel 'The Italian' (1797), another great read from her, published after 'The Mysteries of Udolpho'. On your second point, it is... -
HI Rosalind, That's a very good question! Radcliffe did, surely, read Rousseau in translation and we can deduce this from the rural idylls from which her heroines are torn. I have written about the relationship between the two authors. I don't think that the Rousseau/Radcliffe relationship is uncritical, however, for Radcliffe seems to argue that Rousseau's...
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Hello Timothy, this is a very good question, and one that was asked of me just this weekend at the special Ann Radcliffe at 250 conference that we held in Sheffield this weekend. It was actually the French translations of Udolpho which stole the march in respect of illustrations, engraving the works of Ann Radcliffe as early as 1798. 'Les Mysteres...
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Hello Rosmond, Thanks for this prompt. Radcliffe was ahead of her time in allowing her young heroines to experience the sublime; whereas Burke in his earlier Enquiry had made an implicit link between gender and experiencing the sublime, arguing that the beautiful had feminine qualities, whereas the sublime had masculine qualities, what is really interesting...
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Hello Jennifer and Pauline, For decades, critics believed Ann Radcliffe to be a conservative author, against the principles of the French Revolution, but Rictor Norton's 2000 biography The Mistress of Udolpho, and Robert Miles's work Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (1995) both argue for her (one from biographical evidence, the other from literary...
