Ann Radcliffe's Gothic Method

Traces Ann Radcliffe’s experimentations with history and playfulness with genre

Addresses Ann Radcliffe’s best known works, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian alongside her lesser-known writings including her poetry

Reflects on Ann Radcliffe’s works in light of contemporaneous writers including Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Joanna Baillie, among others

Uses Eelco Runia’s historical philosophy, ‘presence’, to better access history-writing through the Gothic

Suggests parallels between contemporaneous controversies and current affairs in the eighteenth century, from the French Revolution to the Diamond Necklace Affair, and Radcliffe’s fictions using archival material

Advocates for continued exploration of women’s writing and explores the viability of the Female Gothic as a category

This book sketches the methodological and experimental qualities of Ann Radcliffe’s works, considering the use of history, fragmentation, generic slippage and narrative construction across her oeuvre. It provides a new reading of Radcliffe’s works, encompassing novels, travel writing and verse, in the light of historical philosophies around ‘presence’ and previously unstudied archival material. The book places her writings in fruitful dialogue with archival material that not only gives those works a sense of their late eighteenth-century context but also reveals the ways in which Radcliffe incorporated the concerns of her times, offering a broader reflection on what it means to write history. It draws parallels between the works of Radcliffe and significant late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Joanna Baillie, showing Radcliffe’s transformative influence on late-eighteenth century literary tastes.