The shy woman who invented the Gothic thriller then vanished from public life
Ann Radcliffe was the most popular novelist of her day, among the best paid of the eighteenth century, and so private that one reviewer said nothing was known of her except the name on the title page. After The Italian in 1797 she simply stopped publishing and spent twenty-six years out of view.
Ann Ward, as she started life on 9 July 1764, grew up the only child of a Holborn haberdasher. In 1772 her father moved the family to Bath to run a shop for Thomas Bentley and Josiah Wedgwood, selling seconds of their porcelain to tourists. Bentley, her uncle, was the grander relation, and she spent long stays at his house in Chelsea; Wedgwood remembered her as Bentley's shy little niece, and his daughter Sukey is her only known childhood friend.
At 23 she married William Radcliffe, a haberdasher's son with an Oxford degree who abandoned law for journalism and later worked on a radical London newspaper. By most accounts they were happy; she called him her nearest relative and friend. A posthumous biography says she began writing to pass evenings while he worked late. Her first novel came out in 1789, when she was 25, and four more followed within eight years, each better received than the last. Her earnings let William leave his job in 1793 and paid for their travels, including their only trip abroad, to Holland and Germany, in 1794.
That year also brought The Mysteries of Udolpho, her fourth and most popular book. Her stories mixed suspense, exotic historical settings and events that seem supernatural, and admiring critics compared her to Shakespeare and hailed her as an enchantress. For a time Gothic fiction was simply known as the Radcliffe school, and Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Walter Scott all drew on her.
The Italian, in 1797, was the last work published while she lived. She then withdrew almost completely, travelling often with her husband and leaving few records behind. She died in 1823 at 58. Her final writings appeared in 1826, bringing her output to six novels, a travel book and many poems.
Source: Ann Radcliffe
