The unhistorical Matilda and Ellinor, who discover they are the daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots, by her secret marriage to the Duke of Norfolk, are the narrators, and each gives her version of their story. But Lee’s story of romantic love, aristocratic intrigue, treachery and madness was really a well-researched historical romance. Purportedly derived from an ‘obsolete manuscript’ and claiming to be historical truth about the love entanglements revealed, it contained a wealth of historical detail, some of it fabricated or distorted to serve the plot, but with a ring of authenticity which disturbed readers. In contrast, both Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve had represented the ancestral past more vaguely as they sought to describe and justify what they called ‘Gothic’ stories, and to intervene in existing debates about the relative worth of novels and romances and the use of the supernatural in fiction. Nevertheless, in Walpole’s case, this was not before he had initially offered The Castle of Otranto, his first venture into fiction, as a medieval relic. He attributed it to ‘Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church at St Nicholas at Otranto’, whose work was ‘printed at Naples, in the black letter, in 1529’ and had been translated from the Italian by a certain William Marshall, Gent. That mid-to-late-eighteenth-century authors should have felt the need to perpetrate such hoaxes is testimony both to an intense cultural interest in the medieval or Gothic past and to a fear of presenting and reading about supernatural or marvellous events except through authentic products of their own unenlightened time.

In the preface to the second edition of what he now acknowledged as his own pioneering ‘Gothic story’ (1765), Walpole explained his generic purpose and achievement: the creation of ‘a new species of romance’ by blending the best features of the ancient romance and the modern novel. In his view, the former had gone too far in its imaginative excess, while the latter had, by its ‘strict adherence to common life’, restricted the inventive faculty. Walpole’s statement appears to have been a response to novelists like Richardson, who, in his preface to Clarissa, had denigrated the (Catholic) ‘pomp and parade’, ‘improbable and marvellous’, of romance-writing in order to advance his own ‘new species of writing’, which would promote (Protestant) religion and virtue.

In pursuit of his new Gothic ‘blend’, the antiquarian Walpole made use of an ancestral setting – a Gothic castle with subterranean dungeons and labyrinthine passages – supernatural events, and the pursuit of a lonely heroine (Isabella) by her tyrannical guardian (Manfred), spicing this dramatic mix with a pinch of adultery and incest. Such ingredients, with variations, were to become the staple of the Gothic romances which proliferated in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Radcliffe’s colourful Montoni, with his threats of vengeance and lack of any sense of justice, is certainly a descendant of Walpole’s outrageous Manfred. However, Walpole’s five-chapter plot lacked verisimilitude, and his use of the frankly marvellous to provide portents of Manfred’s downfall and to redress his usurpation of Alfonso’s property and titular rights was stagy, disjunctive and melodramatic. Although readers liked The Castle of Otranto’s spirited pace and dramatic qualities, its effect was one of momentary shocks rather than sustained terror.

Clara Reeve, building on Walpole’s theory of a new kind of romance, had argued in The Progress of Romance (1785) that modern Gothic romance could avoid the improbability of the old by portraying closely a Gothic society remote in time in which chivalrous manners, superstition and belief in ghosts were part of the lived fabric of the characters’ everyday life. Thus the manners of real life could be combined with a degree of the marvellous in a way which would not compromise modern readers, as they could readily dismiss superstitious belief as an ancient, aberrant, custom. However, the Gothic past of Reeve’s own romance The Old English Baron (1778), with its mid-fifteenth-century domestic routines of Henry VI’s merry England, was not a successful source of the hauntingly strange. Anxious both to direct her story to a morally ‘useful’ end, and to avoid what Fielding in Tom Jones (1749) had termed ‘a horse-laugh in the reader’ by the introduction of any ‘supernatural agents’ other than those ‘which can be allowed to us moderns’,11 Reeve restricted her supernatural manifestations to the appearance, in dream form, of the ‘respectable’ ghosts of her hero’s true parents. Compared to the sudden, violent depictions of the marvellous in Otranto, with its animated portrait, bleeding statue, walking skeleton and dramatic appearances of gigantic Piranesi-like fragments of the murdered Alfonso, the result seemed dull and was treated with derision by Walpole. It took Ann Radcliffe’s fluid narrative style, her more realistic fictional world, and Emily’s interiority to establish a Gothic mood of pervasive fear into which readers were drawn – a mood in which, as Thomas Noon Talfourd was to put it, ‘the world seems shut out, and we breathe only in an enchanted region where… the sad voices of the past echo through deep vaults and lonely galleries’. Like Sir Walter Scott before him, Talfourd considered Radcliffe ‘the inventor of a new style of romance’. It was, he claimed, ‘equally distinct from the old tales of chivalry and magic, and from modern representations of credible incidents and living manners. Her works partially exhibit the charms of each species of composition; interweaving the miraculous with the probable, and breathing of tenderness and beauty peculiarly her own.’12

RADCLIFFE’S USE OF HISTORY AND
THE SUPERNATURAL

Unlike Walpole, Radcliffe in Udolpho does not admit the frankly supernatural or marvellous. Nor does she take up the possibility, suggested by Reeve, of situating her fiction in a Gothic world of folk superstition in which belief in the supernatural is universally accepted. She chooses instead the late sixteenth century, which, in popular historical understanding, was considered the transitional period between the Gothic era and the modern – the ‘Gothic cusp’ as Robert Miles has aptly termed it.13 Consequently Radcliffe can people her romance with two sorts of characters: those whose attitudes and practices are those of the old feudal order of tyranny, Machiavellian intrigue and popish superstition (Montoni, Madame Montoni, Laurentini di Udolpho), and those who embody the new order of liberty and enlightenment, anachronistically having the fashionable sensibility, manners, and tastes of eighteenth-century England (Monsieur St Aubert, Count de Villefort, Valancourt, Emily, Blanche, Henri). So, while the convent of St Clair with its gloomy cloisters and the castle of Udolpho with its cruel torments and macabre relic are both Gothic or medieval to the core, elsewhere in the novel anachronism is frequently in evidence. St Aubert’s ‘botanizing’ at his chateau and his taste for the sublime and picturesque, his dispute with his brother-in-law, Monsieur Quesnel, about the re-landscaping of his boyhood home, Emily’s creative sensibility and accomplishments, Montoni’s conversing with ladies about ‘the French opera’, and Emily’s being offered coffee by La Voisin at his cottage and ‘coffee and ice’ and ‘collations of fruits and ice’ in glittering Venice – these are all obviously characteristic of Radcliffe’s own century. What is more, such anachronism is not to be disparaged. This is anachronism with a purpose.

Robert Mighall, discussing the motivations and development of Gothic fiction, has argued convincingly that, from its inception, ‘the idea of Gothic carries a (pseudo-) historical inflection, and testifies to one culture’s view about its perceived cultural antithesis’. He takes up Chris Baldick’s important reminder that Radcliffe’s romances derive their ‘Gothicity’ primarily from the fact that the main events occur in Catholic countries.14 Although the word ‘Gothic’ was originally associated with the barbarism with which the ancient northern Germanic tribes, the Goths, had sacked Rome, in the hands of Radcliffe it becomes synonymous with the Latin South, a region still considered to harbour despotic power and Catholic superstition even in 1824, when Sir Walter Scott remarked on it.15 Only from an enlightened, modern perspective could such despotism and irrationality take on their full meaning and significance as barbarous cultural adversary. As Mighall puts it,

The modern heroine or hero (the reader’s counterpart who is equipped with an appropriate sensibility and liberal principles) is located in the Gothic past, forced to contend with the supposed delusions and iniquities of its political and religious regime. It is the conflict between the civilized and the barbaric, the modern and the archaic, the progressive and the reactionary which provides the terrifying pleasures of these texts.

Thus Radcliffe’s geographical choice of the southern Catholic culture of sixteenth-century Europe, articulated with eighteenth-century sentiments and practices, reinforced for her contemporary readers ‘a distance between the enlightened now and the repressive or misguided then’.