Ann Radcliffe - The Italian

Ann Radcliffe (ne Ward) was born in London in 1764. Her father was a reputable haberdasher who took up the management of a porcelain showroom in Bath for the business partners Thomas Bentley and Josiah Wedgwood. Anns childhood was subsequently spent with her parents in Bath, and with her uncle in fashionable Chelsea, which may have exposed her to radical politics and philosophy, as well as immersing her in the vibrant Dissenting culture of rationalism, radicalism, and republicanism.

In 1787 Ann Ward married William Radcliffe, an Oxford-educated journalist, who wrote for and soon became the editor of the Gazetteer, and New Daily Advertiser, a campaigning newspaper that celebrated the French Revolution, freedom of the press, and Dissenters rights. Ann, meanwhile, appears to have taken up writing out of boredom. She wrote a succession of increasingly popular romance novelsThe Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), and The Romance of the Forest (1791)before The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) set a dazzling new standard in supernatural romantic fiction, variously dubbed at the time the Terrorist System of Novel Writing, the hobgoblin-romance, and ultimately the Radcliffe school. Radcliffes profits from her writing enabled her husband to quit his job, and the two of them toured the Netherlands and Germany, which she later described in a travelogue, A Journey made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany to which are added Observations during a Tour to the Lakes (1795). The Italian (1797), written at the height of her powers, was also the last of the works of the great Enchantress to be published in her lifetime. Despite her international celebrity, little is known of the remainder of Radcliffes life, and she died in 1823. Her last novel, Gaston de Blondeville, was published in 1826, together with poetry, further travel writings, and a memoir by Thomas Noon Talfourd.

Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter. He has published widely for both academic and popular readerships, and his many books include The Forgers Shadow (2002), The Union Jack (2006), The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (2012), The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year (2013), and several editions of eighteenth-century texts. He has edited Horace Walpoles The Castle of Otranto (2014) and Matthew Lewiss The Monk (2016) for Oxford Worlds Classics.