Ann Radcliffe (née Ward; 9 July 1764 – 7 February 1823) was an English novelist, a pioneer of Gothic fiction, and a minor poet.

[5] Her father worked as a haberdasher in London before moving the family to Bath in 1772 to take over management of a porcelain shop for his business partners Thomas Bentley and Josiah Wedgwood.

Her father had a famous uncle, William Cheselden, who was Surgeon to King George II, and her mother descended from the De Witt family of Holland and had a cousin, Sir Richard Jebb, who was a fashionable London physician.

[5] He 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.

On this trip, the Radcliffes were initially meant to go on to Switzerland, but this plan was "frustrated by a disobliging official, who refused to believe that they were English, and would not honour their passports.

"[7] In 1795, William returned as editor of the Gazetteer, and a year later, he purchased the English Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, a Whig newspaper.

While these rumours were later proven false, they were so popular that Talfourd's memoir included a statement from her physician that spoke about her mental condition in her later years.

[13] Although she had suffered from asthma for twelve years previously,[3] her modern biographer, Rictor Norton, argues that she likely died of pneumonia caused by a bronchial infection, citing the description given by her physician, Dr. Scudamore, of how "a new inflammation seized the membranes of the brain".

[17] In 1996, the bibliographer Deborah D. Rogers was able to identify only a limited number of extant documents related to Radcliffe's life: a forty-two page commonplace book, a letter to someone named Miss Williamson, and her original contract for Udolpho.

[17] Rictor Norton, author of Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (1999), argues that these years were "dominated by interpretation rather than scholarship" where information (specifically on her rumoured madness) was repeated rather than traced to a reliable source.

[5] The Monthly Review said that, while the novel was commendable for its morality, it appealed only to women and children: "To men who have passed, or even attained, the meridian of life, a series of events, which seem not to have their foundation in nature, will ever be insipid, if not disgustful”.

[18] One year later, Radcliffe published her second novel, A Sicilian Romance, which proved a success, and, as Walter Scott recalled: "we ourselves well recollect, attracted in no ordinary degree the attention of the public.

At a time when the average amount earned by an author for a manuscript was £10, her publishers, G. G. and J. Robinson, bought the copyright for this novel for £500,[1] and it was a quick success.

Nick Groom, writes that in The Italian, Radcliffe "takes the violence and eroticism that so titillated readers of The Monk and subsumes them beneath the veil and the cowl of oppressive Catholicism.

This novel was published with Talfourd's memoir and Radcliffe's unfinished essay "On the Supernatural in Poetry", which details the difference between the sensation of terror her works aimed to achieve and the horror Lewis sought to evoke.

Regarding Radcliffe's penchant for explaining the supernatural, Walter Scott writes in Lives of the Novelists (1821–1824): “A stealthy step behind the arras may, doubtless, in some situations, and when the nerves are tuned to a certain pitch, have no small influence upon the imagination; but if the conscious listener discovers it to be only the noise made by the cat, the solemnity of the feeling is gone, and the visionary is at once angry with his sense for having been cheated, and with his reason for having acquiesced in the deception.

Italy, along with its Catholicism, had been featured in earlier Gothic literature; Horace Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto claimed in-universe that it was "found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England" and "printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529".

You saw the real light of the sun, you breathed the air of the country, you felt all the circumstances of a luxurious climate on the most serene and beautiful landscape; and the mind thus softened, you almost fancied you hear Italian music in the air.I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure.

In the eighteenth century, she inspired writers like Matthew Lewis (1775–1818) and the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), who praised her work but produced more intensely violent fiction.

The romantic landscape, the background, is the best thing in all her books; the characters are two dimensional, the plots far fetched and improbable, with 'elaboration of means and futility of result'.

"[33] Later in the nineteenth century, Charlotte and Emily Brontë continued Radcliffe's Gothic tradition with their novels Jane Eyre, Villette, and Wuthering Heights.

Radcliffe was also admired by French authors including Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Victor Hugo (1802–1885), Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), George Sand (1804-1876), and Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867).

I dare say, now, you never read a page of her novels, and yet such critics as Ste.-Beuve, such poets as Victor Hugo, such novelists as Balzac and George Sand, to say nothing of a thousand inferior writers, talk of her in raptures.

A number of scholars have noted elements of Gothic literature in Dostoyevsky's novels,[37] and some have tried to show direct influence of Radcliffe's work.