RADCLIFFE, Mrs. Ann, the celebrated author of the Romance of the Forest, and the Mysteries of Udolpho, was born in London on the 9th of July 1764. She was the daughter of William and Ann Ward, who, though in trade, were respectably connected, and nearly the only persons of their two families not living in handsome, or at least easy independence. Her paternal grandmother was a Cheselden, the sister of the celebrated surgeon, of whose kind regard her father had a grateful recollection; and her maternal grandmother was Anne Oates, sister of Dr. Samuel Jebb of Stratford, the father of Sir Richard, on which side she was also related to Dr. Halifax, bishop of Gloucester, and to a gentleman of the same name, who was physician to the king. Of the history of her early years, during which the mind usually gives indications of its prevailing tendencies, no record whatever has been preserved. About the time of her twentieth year, however, she is described as possessing a figure exquisitely proportioned, a fine complexion, a beautiful and expressive countenance, and tastes which led her to take delight in contemplating the glories of creation, particularly the grander features they display, listening to music skilfully performed, hearing passages from the Greek and Latin classics recited and translated, and preferring the pleasures of meditation to those of society.

Thus respectably born and connected, Miss Ward, at the age of twenty-three, acquired the name which she subsequently rendered so celebrated, by marrying Mr. William Radcliffe, a graduate of Oxford, and then a student of law. This gentleman, however, renounced the prosecution of his legal studies, and afterwards became proprietor and editor of the English Chronicle. Mrs. Radcliffe having thus a [7:19:9]strong inducement to cultivate her literary powers, first came before the public as a novelist in 1789, two years after her marriage, and when she was yet only twenty-five years of age. The romance which she then produced, however, gave but a faint indication of the eminent powers afterwards displayed by the author. In the Castles of Athlin and Dun-bayne, the scene is laid in Scotland during the dark ages, but without any attempt to delineate the peculiar manners or scenery of that country; and although we may trace some germs of that talent for the wild, the romantic, and the mysterious, which she afterwards employed with so much effect, yet, on the whole, this production cannot be regarded as at all worthy of her pen. Mrs. Radcliffe’s genius, however, was more advantageously displayed in the Sicilian Romance, which appeared in 1790, and attracted a considerable share of public attention. This work displays the exuberant fertility of imagination which formed the principal characteristic of the author’s mind. Adventures heaped on adventures, in rapid and brilliant succession,with all the hair-breadth charms of escape or capture, hurry the reader along with them; whilst the imagery and scenery by which the action is relieved, resemble those of a splendid oriental tale. Still the work bore marked traces of the defects incident to an unpractised author. The scenes were inartificially connected, and the characters hastily sketched, without any attempt at individual distinctions; the staple materials consisted of ardent lovers and tyrannical parents, with domestic ruffians, guards, and others, who had wept or stormed through the scenes of romance, without much change of character or features, for half a century before. Nevertheless, this praise may be claimed for Mrs. Radcliffe, that she was 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. Her style was as full of imagination as her subject, and she established a clear title to be considered as the first poetess of romantic fiction, that is, taking poetry in its true acceptation, apart from the mere accessory of rhythm.

The Romance of the Forest appealed in the year 1791,and at once raised the author to that pre-eminence in her own style of composition, which her works have ever since maintained. In this new effort, her fancy was more regulated, and subjected to the fetters of a regular story. The characters, too, were depicted with skill far superior to that which the author had hitherto displayed, and the work attracted the public attention in proportion. That of La Motte, indeed, is sketched with particular talent, and the interest of the piece mainly depends upon the vacillations of a character, which weakness and vice are at every moment on the point of rendering an agent in the greatest atrocities. He is the exact picture of the needy man who has known better days; one who, spited at the world, from which he had been driven with contempt, and condemned to seek an asylum in a desolate mansion full of mysteries and horrors, avenges himself by playing the gloomy despot within his own family, and tyrannising over those who were subjected to him only by their strong sense of duty. The heroine, too, has some pleasant touches of originality, which she displays in her grateful affection for the La Motte family, and her reliance on their truth and honour, when the wife had become unkind, and the father treacherous. But this was not the department of art on which Mrs. Radcliffe’s popularity rested. “The public,” says Sir Walter Scott, “were chiefly aroused, or rather fascinated, by the wonderful conduct of a story, in which the author so successfully called out the feelings of mystery and awe, while chapter after chapter, and incident after incident, maintained the thrilling attraction of awakened curiosity and suspended interest. Of these every reader felt the force, from the sage in his study, to the family group in middle life, which assembles round the evening taper, to seek a solace from the toils of ordinary existence, by an excursion into the regions of imagination. The tale was the more striking, because varied and relieved by descriptions of the ruined mansion, and the forest with which it is surrounded, under so many different points of view, now pleasing and serene, now gloomy, now terrible; scenes which could only have been drawn by one to whom nature had given the eye of a painter, with the spirit of a poet.”

In 1798 Mrs. Radcliffe visited the scenery on the Rhine, and it is supposed that the Mysteries of Udolpho were written, or at least corrected, after the period of this journey; the mouldering castles of the robber-chivalry of Germany, situated on the romantic banks of that celebrated stream, having, it is thought, given a bolder flight to her imagination, and a more glowing character to her colouring. The scenery on the Lakes of Westmoreland, which Mrs. Radcliffe had about the same period visited, was also calculated to awaken her fancy; nature having in these wild but beautiful regions, realised the descriptions in which she delighted toin-dulge. Her remarks upon the countries through which she travelled were given to the public in 1793, under the title of a Journey through Holland, &c. This, however, was merely a sort of intercalary production. As already hinted, her next effort in the province of romance, was the Mysteries of Udolpho, Of this much was of course expected; and the booksellers felt themselves authorised in offering for the work, what was then considered as an unprecedented sum, namely, L.500. But although a writer’s previous reputation often proves the greatest enemy he has to encounter in a second attempt upon public favour, yet Mrs. Radcliffe’s popularity stood the test, and was enhanced rather than abated by the Mysteries of Udolpho. “ The very name,” says Scott, “was fascinating; and the public, who rushed upon it with all the eagerness of curiosity, rose from it with unsated appetite.” The author pursuing her own favourite bent of composition, and again waving her wand over the world of wonder and imagination, had judiciously employed a spell of broader and more potent command. Every thing in the Mysteries of Udolpho is on a larger and more sublime scale than in the Romance of the Forest. The interest is of a more agitating and tremendous nature; the scenery is of a wilder and more terrific description; the characters are distinguished by fiercer and more gigantic features. “Mon-toni, a lofty-souled desperado, and captain of Condottieri, stands beside La Motte and his Marquis, like one of Milton’s fiends beside a witch’s familiar. Adeline is confined within a ruined mansion-house; but her sister-heroine, Emily, is imprisoned in a huge castle, like those of feudal times. The one is attacked and defended by bands of armed banditti; the other only threatened by a visit from constables and thief-takers. The scale of the landscape is equally different; the quiet and limited woodland scenery of the one work, forming a contrast with the splendid and high-wrought descriptions of Italian mountain grandeur which occur in the other. In a word, the Mysteries of Udolpho was, at its first appearance, considered as a step beyond Mrs. Radcliffe’s former work, high as it had justly raised her; and this impression has been confirmed by subsequent comparative perusal.”

The next production by which Mrs-Radcliffe arrested the attention of the public, was destined to be her last. The Italian, which appeared in 1797, was purchased by the booksellers for L.800, and favourably received by the public. Sir Walter Scott praises the author for her judgment “in taking such a point of distance and distinction, that while employing her own peculiar talent, and painting in the style of which she may be considered the inventor, she cannot be charged with repeating or copying herself.” But mere change of subject, or taking a point of distance and distinction, as remote as possible from the scenes in which her imagination had previously expatiated, does not necessarily imply originality of invention in the construction and [7:19:10]development of her story. On the contrary, she selected a species of machinery afforded her by the most vulgar conceptions entertained of the Catholic religion, when established in its paramount superiority; and instead of contemplating it calmly as reflected in the glass of history, she adopted all the conventional and ready-made horrors that came in her way; and had thus at her disposal the usual apparatus of monks, spies, dungeons, the mute obedience of the familiars of the Inquisition, and the dark, domineering spirit of the crafty emissaries of Rome. “This fortunate adoption,” as Sir Walter Scott calls it, “placed in the hands of the authoress, a set of agents powerful enough to act forcibly on imaginations in which they were associated with all imaginable kinds of atrocity and wickedness, and furnished at once the means of producing a strong effect, without the trouble of inventing new characters, or creating original combinations. But it may be questioned whether such agents, with all their conventional attributes, were suited to the purposes for which they were employed, or whether, even by their instrumentality, any tinge of probability could be imparted to those parts of the story which are most at variance with the ordinary course of human actions and events.” The Italian, however, was well received by the public, to whom delineations which flatter their religious pride or hatred are always welcome; and after its publication in 1797, the world were not favoured with any more of Mrs. Radcliffe’s works. “Like an actress in full possession of applauded powers, she chose to retire from the stage in the very blaze of her fame; and, for more than twenty years, an imagination naturally so prolific, was, for reasons which we are left in vain to conjecture, condemned to inaction and sterility.”

The tenor of Mrs. Radcliffe’s domestic life seems to have been peculiarly calm and sequestered. She appears to have declined the notoriety which, in London society, usually attaches to persons of literary distinction; and perhaps no author whose works were so universally read and admired, was so little known personally, even to the most bustling of that class who rest their pretensions to fashion upon the selection of literary society. She no doubt consulted her own feelings, happy in equally avoiding the stare of the curious or the scrutiny of the malignant. Nor did it at all disturb her domestic comforts, although many of her admirers believed, that from brooding over imaginary terrors, her reason had at length been overcome, and that the gifted author of the Mysteries of Udolpho existed only as the inmate of a private madhouse. For this belief, however, there neither was, nor ever had been the most distant foundation; although the rumour on which it was founded had been generally spread, and confidently repeated in print as well as in conversation. During the last twelve years of her life, Mrs. Radcliffe suffered from a spasmodic asthma, which considerably affected both her health and her spirits. This chronic disorder, however, at length took a more fatal turn, on the 9th of January 1823, and on the 7th of February ensuing, it terminated the life of this ingenious and gifted woman, at her own house in London.

Mrs. Radcliffe, considered as an author, is fully entitled to take her place amongst those who have been distinguished as the founders of a class or school. She led the way in a species of composition, which has since been attempted by many, but in which no one has attained, or even approached the excellencies of the original inventor. The species of romance which she introduced bears nearly the same relation to the novel that a melodrama does to the legitimate drama. It does not appeal to the judgment, by searching delineations of human feeling, nor stir the passions by scenes of deep pathos, nor awaken the fancy, by tracing out the higher marks of life and manners, nor excite mirth, by strong representations of the ludicrous or the humorous. It attains its interest neither by the path of comedy nor by that of tragedy; and yet it has, notwithstanding, a deep, decided, and powerful effect, gained by means independent of both; in other words, by an appeal to the passion of fear, whether excited by natural dangers, or by the suggestions of superstition. The force of the production consists in the delineation of external incidents, whilst the character of the agents are entirely subordinate to the scenes in which they are placed, and only distinguished by such outlines as to make them seem appropriate to their respective situations. The persons introduced bear the features, not of individuals, but of the class to which they belong; and if they be dressed in the proper costume, and converse in language sufficiently appropriate to their stations and qualities, nothing more is required. The primary object is the generation of awe and terror, and everything ministers to the production of this effect. It is enough if the characters be truly and forcibly sketched in outline; they are accessaries rather than principals, and for the most part rather passive than active, so that in throwing upon them and their actions just enough of that dubious light which mystery requires, Mrs. Radcliffe does all that is requisite for the accomplishment of her object. It were easy to find fault with a proceeding like this, which, dispensing with scenes of passion such as those of Richardson, or delineations of life and manners, as in the pages of Fielding and Smollett, carries us back to the fare of the nursery, and gorges us with the wild and improbable fictions of an overheated imagination. And there might be some truth in this, if it were only predicated of the crowd of copyists who came forward as imitators of Mrs. Radcliffe, and assumed her wand, without having the power of wielding it with the same magical effect. But no author can be arraigned for the deficiencies of servile imitators, who present an obscure, distorted, and indistinct outline of what is in itself clear, precise, and distinct; nor can it be truly said that the applause with which the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe were received, argued a great and increasing degradation of the public taste, the corruption of which is almost never the consequence of power and originality; whilst the inferiority of the servile race is much more likely to put the style they imitate out of fashion, than to engraft its peculiarities upon that of a nation. [See Sir Walter Scott’s Biographical Notice of Mrs Ann Radcliffe.] (a.)