RADCLIFFEAnn Ward (1764-1823), novelist, was born in London on 9th July 1764. She was the author of three novels unsurpassed of their kind in English literature, The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797). The interval of three years between the successive publications is noticeable; works so elaborate, intricate, and closely interwoven could not be written in a hurry. The second of the three novels is the one commonly associated with Mrs Radcliffe’s name, but the preference is probably due to the title; each is an improvement on its predecessor, and the last is considerably the best on the whole in style as well as in plot and character. She wrote two other novels before any of these, the Castles of Atldin and Dunbayne (1789) and the Sicilian Romance (1790), but they attracted no special attention and deserve none, although in them she works with the same romantic materials—dreadful castles, wild adventures, terrible characters. One other was written after the famous three, but not published till 1826, three years after her death— Gaston de Blondeville , interesting as an elaborate study of costume and scenery, and valuable as a monument of her accurate archaeological learning, but comparatively tedious as a story, though not without passages in her best style. The circumstances that turned Mrs Radcliffe to literature are not recorded in the meagre memoir published under her husband’s direction. Her maiden name was Ward, and her parents, who are described as “persons of great respectability, though engaged in trade,” in London, had literary relations. Her husband was an Oxford graduate and proprietor and editor of the English Chronicle. After The Italian she gave up writing for publication, and was reported to have been driven mad by the horrors of her own creations. This was purely mythical. It appears that she never saw the Italian scenery which she depicts with such minuteness, and never left England but once, in the summer of 1794, after the completion of her TJdolpho. A record of the tour was published in the following year, along with descriptions of a visit to the English Lakes, the beauties of which she was one of the first to celebrate. Of scenery, as might be judged from her novels, where the descriptions are often felt as a tedious impediment, Mrs Radcliffe was an enthusiastic amateur, and made driving tours with her husband every other summer through the English counties. She died in February 1823.

As a novelist Mrs Radcliffe deserves a much higher place than is accorded to her in general estimation. Critics familiar with her works, from Sir Walter Scott downwards, have shown themselves fully alive to the difference; but the general public confound her with puerile and extravagant imitators, who have vulgarized her favourite “properties” of rambling and ruinous old castles, dark, desperate, and cadaverous villains, secret passages, vaults, trapdoors, evidences of deeds of monstrous crime, sights and sounds of mysterious horror. She deserves at least the credit of originality, but apart from this there are three respects in which none of her numerous imitators approach her,—ingenuity of plot, fertility of incident, and skill in devising apparently supernatural occurrences capable of explanation by human agency and natural coincidence. Except in her last and posthumously published work she never introduces the really supernatural, and, whether or not we agree with Sir Walter Scott that this limitation was a mistake in art, it must at least be acknowledged to impose a heavier burden on the author’s ingenuity. Her imitators found it easier to follow Horace Walpole in this point. Some of the tragic situations in The Italian are worked out with a vivid power of imagination which it would be hard to parallel in English literature outside the range of the Elizabethan drama, with the minor celebrities of which Mrs Radcliffe may fairly challenge comparison.