The First Poetess of Romantic Fiction

Ann Ward was born in London on July 9, 1764, about 7 years before Walter Scott.  Like Scott, her first novel - The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) - was published anonymously.  This novel was published in the year following her marriage to journalist William Radcliffe.

The title of today’s post is a comment on Ann Radcliffe made by Walter Scott.  Radcliffe was influential in her time, and according to Scott’s journal entry of February 3^rd, 1826, the author consciously dealt with that influence:

‘…James Ballantyne is severely critical on what he calls imitations of Mrs.

Radcliffe in Woodstock. Many will think with him, yet I am of opinion

he is quite wrong, or, as friend J. F[errier] says, vrong. In the

first place, I am to look on the mere fact of another author having

treated a subject happily as a bird looks on a potato-bogle which scares

it away from a field otherwise as free to its depredations as any one's

else! In 2d place, I have taken a wide difference: my object is not to

excite fear of supernatural tilings in my reader, but to show the effect

of such fear upon the agents in the story--one a man of sense and

firmness--one a man unhinged by remorse--one a stupid uninquiring

clown--one a learned and worthy, but superstitious divine. In the third

place, the book turns on this hinge, and cannot want it. But I will try

to insinuate the refutation of Aldiboronti's exception into the

prefatory matter…’

Ann Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe lived and wrote contemporaneously with Walter Scott.  Mrs. Radcliffe, as she published her name, wrote of the supernatural, though with reasoned understanding of its evidence.  Radcliffe wrote some of the earliest gothic novels, being best known for "The Mysteries of Udolfo".  Regarding her writing, Ann said: "Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakes the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and there lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreader evil. "(from http://home.clara.net/heureka/art/radcliff.htm)

"A Sicilian Romance" was Radcliffe's second novel, which Walter Scott regarded as the first English poetical novel.  Scott wrote a short biography of Ann Radcliffe in his "Biographical Memoirs of Eminent Novelists, and Other Distinguished Persons".  Speaking of Radcliffe's early works, Scott wrote that:

"...Mrs. Radcliffe's genius was more advantageously displayed in the Sicilian Romance which appeared in 1790...This work displays the exuberance and fertility of imagination, which was the author's principal characteristic..."