Radcliffe now avoids public life and ceases to publish.

1798 Her father dies on 24 July. Trip to Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight in September.

1800 In early January the Radcliffes take up residence in China Terrace, Lambeth. Her mother dies on 14 March. Tour of the south coast in July.

1801 Tour of Southhampton, Lyndhurst, Lymington and the Isle of Wight.

1802 Visits Kenilworth Castle, Warwick Castle and Blenheim Palace. Radcliffe writes much of Gaston de Blondeville in the winter of 1802–3, but puts it aside, ‘so disinclined had she become to publication’ (Talfourd’s ‘Memoir’ – see 1826).

1810 Publication of the Revd Charles Apthorp Wheelwright’s unauthorized Poems, which include an ‘Ode to Terror’ and a footnote claiming that ‘Mrs Ann Radcliffe… is reported to have died under that species of mental derangement, known by the name of the horrors.’*

1812–15 Radcliffe retires to a small cottage in Windsor. In August 1815 she moves with her husband to a new home in Pimlico. Publication (editor anonymous) of The Poems of Mrs Radcliffe, a collection of the poems from The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho.

1823 Radcliffe dies on 7 February from bronchial asthma and possibly pneumonia, after a high fever accompanied by delirium. Buried on 15 February in a vault in the burying ground at St George’s church, Hanover Square.

1825 In November a claim is made in the Monthly Review that Radcliffe died ‘in a state of mental desolation not to be described’. The reviewer also questions ‘whether, for several of the last years of her life, her mind was in a situation to produce a work comparable in any degree to the Mysteries of Udolpho’.

1826 Posthumous publication in May of Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance and St Alban’s Abbey, a Metrical Tale in four volumes, prefaced with ‘Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs Radcliffe’, by Thomas Noon Talfourd, a Unitarian barrister engaged by the publisher, Henry Colburn. Radcliffe’s essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, written as an introduction to Gaston de Blondeville, is published in Colborn’s New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, No. 16, pp. 145–52.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The Mysteries of Udolpho has been continuously in print since its initial publication in London by G. G. and J. Robinson in May 1794, being printed twice in that year, with further editions in 1795, 1799, 1803, 1806 and 1809. It appeared again in Mrs (Aikin) Barbauld’s collection The British Novelists in 1810, in a four-volume edition printed by Mason in 1823, and in another two-volume edition by C. S. Arnold in 1823 and yet another by S. Fisher in 1824. In that year a more expensive edition, ‘With Critical Remarks, and a Memoir of the Author, Embellished with Numerous Engravings on Wood’, was also published by J. Limbird, this being reprinted with its many unfortunate typographical errors and emendations as Volume I of Limbird’s The British Novelist collection in 1832 and 1833. Again in 1824, an edition supposedly edited by Sir Walter Scott, who also supplied a substantial ‘Prefatory Memoir of the Author’, was published as Volume X of Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library, by Ballantyne in Edinburgh and Hurst, Robinson & Co. in London.

During the rest of the nineteenth century Udolpho remained in steady demand, appearing in a variety of editions, some of them undated. Following translations into German in 1795, French in 1797 and Italian in 1816, it circulated widely on the Continent throughout the nineteenth century. Irish and American editions had dated from 1794 and 1795 respectively. In the twentieth century the work continued to maintain interest, with at least five editions appearing. In 1931 J. M. Dent published Udolpho in Everyman’s Library, for which Ernest Rhys modernized to some extent Radcliffe’s spelling and punctuation and Austin Freeman wrote an introduction. Bonamy Dobrée’s 1966 edition for Oxford University Press, which makes very few emendations, has been reprinted many times – most recently in 1998, with a new introduction and notes by Terry Castle.

The text used here is that of the first edition of 1794; unlike her next romance, The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1796), Udolpho was not revised by either Radcliffe or the publisher for subsequent editions.