Again, the Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron, owed much to the mode that Ann Radcliffe established. While their praise of her is qualified, traces of her language can often be discerned in theirs. We also find echoes of Radcliffe in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–7) – especially in the dark secrets of William Dorrit and the Clenham mansion – and again in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). The Brontës, too, were influenced by Radcliffe; for example, the inscrutable Montoni, with his magnetism and ‘animal ferocity’, is a prototype for the brooding and enigmatic Mr Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Radcliffe’s legacy has continued through to popular twentieth-century novels, such as Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), and to the less well-known Possessed, or The Secret of Myslotch: A Gothic Novel (1939) by Polish author Witold Gombrowicz;46 while innumerable Radcliffean motifs have found their way into modern small-scale magical stories, such as some of those by Angela Carter, Isak Dinesen, Christina Stead and Isabel Allende.

Since its publication, Udolpho has been continuously in print and has continued to sell well. Current critical reassessment of Ann Radcliffe’s work will ensure that The Mysteries of Udolpho remains required reading. For those who are not driven by reading for plot and the need for closure, but have the leisure and receptiveness to catch and savour her echoes of the past, the experience is well worth the effort.

NOTES

1. Michael Gamer, ‘“The Most Interesting Novel in the English Language”: An Unidentified Addendum to Coleridge’s Review of Udolpho’, Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 24, No. 1 (winter 1993), pp. 53–4. Rictor Norton in Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), pp. 105–6, argues convincingly that the anonymous review of Udolpho attributed to Coleridge (Critical Review, August 1794, pp. 361–72) was not in fact written by him. The review appears in T. M. Raysor, ed., Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism (London: Constable, 1936), pp. 355–70.

2. See Edward Jacobs, ‘Anonymous Signatures: Circulating Libraries, Conventionality, and the Production of Gothic Romances’, ELH, Vol. 62, No. 3 (fall 1995), pp. 620, 628, for an account of how, once they had literally ‘made a name’ through their success, authors like Ann Radcliffe and Fanny Burney abandoned – for more esteemed, established, better-paying publishers – the circulating-library publishers who had fostered their talent but paid them little. See Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, p. 94, for details of the promotion of Udolpho, which was advertised more often in the London Chronicle than any other novel.

3. Fanny Burney, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778) (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 4.

4. British Critic, Series 1, Vol. IV (August 1794), p. 121.

5. Monthly Review, New Series, Vol.