#anne radcliffe

[whatcannotbesaid-shallbewept]

If you haven't read Jane Austen's bookshelf (which you should for the record), I want to bring to your attention: some of Austen's favourite books.

Jane Austens male influences are of course, extremely well read staples of the English canon but her favourite female writers are barely read today at all.

These were the novelists thar her characters would mention as great examples of novels. Elizabeth Inchbald, Anne Radcliffe, Frances Burney all show up in Jane Austens novels in the plot themselves.

Maria Edgeworth was a big influence on Emma, Jane Austen even sent her a copy, and Northanger Abbey owes a huge debt to Female Quixote, the premise is exactly the same. I've seen the same said of Mansfield Park and Charlotte Smith. Mary Brunton was a major inspiration for Sense And Sensibility.

In their day all of these authors were highly critically acclaimed and popular - they were just forgotten. The male authors of the time are still remembered, still among the canon, still known by the general public but the female authors are forgotten for some reason. You wouldn't know from this but in the 1700s, more women were writing books than men! There was a gender disparity in fiction. For some reason that's not reflected in the books remembered today at all!

Recently I bought a copy of Evelina, and my book was actually annotated by somebody! In pencil, this massive Jane Austen fan would note scenes that felt strikingly familiar to Austen books. She wore her influences on her sleeve after all!

I was reading a book that said something very interesting about this exact problem. When the canon wasn't as set in stone , women would just read and share their own favourite books with each other, but as the canon got set in stone, women would go to university and read the assigned reading list of Approved male classics. The same books the men were reading. (And they weren't reading the women)

You know the phrase "beauty is in the eye of beholder"? It comes from Molly Bawn, a 1870s novel. It was popular enough to have spawned a phrase everyone reading this post will recognise. Today the book doesn't even have 20 ratings on Goodreads.

Anyway, thank you to that Jane Austen fan who annotated my copy of Evelina. It's very important to keep your favorite books alive. Especially the ones by women. Because unfortunately, no one else will.

[lightthereis]

“...he brought music of his own, and awakened every fairy echo with the tender accents of his oboe...” ― Ann Radcliffe

[marsbymoonlight]

“Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them"

Anne Radcliffe, 1826

[cynicalclassicist]

Reading The Mysteries of Udolpho now and am really reminded of Sansa's Vale plotline. As in, I am almost certain that GRRM was inspired by this seminal Gothic novel. I was reading the bit today where Count Morano comes into her room and hits Emilie's dog and something like that happens with Sansa, Marillion and an old blind dog.

[timothywinters]

I gave up on the Mysteries of Udolpho- I just don’t care that much about early Gothic horror and I find the prose style overwrought- however the funniest thing that happened before I gave up on it, funnier even than everyone knowing Venetian glass explodes when exposed to poison, is that Radcliffe makes a point of having the heroine stop to buy a hat so she won’t be scandalously bareheaded while running for her life

[juliennenicolehussey]

Northanger Abbey pt. i

“’Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?’

‘Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.’ 

Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question. . .” (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 935). 

This quotation is from chapter seven of the novel, when Catherine is trying to make conversation while on a carriage ride with John Thorpe. She was bored of his droning on and on about his horses and his frustrations with women, so she ventured to discuss something of interest for her.

This conversation solidified my disdain for John Thorpe. Given the importance of literature and reading to Catherine and her character progression, I felt like Thorpe’s seeming repulsion with literature (and his lack of knowledge of female authorship), was a clear indication from Austen that Thorpe was one of the male antagonists. I was also struck by Catherine’s feelings of shame and her desire to apologize to him. She continues on this trajectory when she corrects him when he says Udolpho isn’t an Ann Radcliffe work, and feels regret because she doesn’t want to “mortify” him. This interaction and her reaction to it paints a clear picture of the gender roles of the time; women were to quietly harbor their opinions, were not to correct men if they were wrong, and men were the clear experts on all topics, even those they knew nothing about. Even though Catherine experiences some trepidation at correcting Thorpe, and at questioning what he’s read, she does it anyway, which leads me to believe she is going to continue on this trajectory of challenging the status quo by not allowing men to silence her thoughts. I already love Catherine, and can’t wait to see how she progresses in her societal and literary education. 

[witchcult-flowers]

Anne Radcliffe / 2020

Titans of Gothic Literature

Caleb Seavey

[grand-r-siecle]

Okay so I am 100 pages or so into the Mysteries of Udolpho and can I just say Valancourt is an absolute cad.

He basically forces a girl who's in mourning and whose family/financial/social situation is very precarious to confess she has feelings for him even though she is clearly uncomfortable with doing so AND she was literally crying about her dead father just a minute before AND he could perfectly have just waited sometime or something

Gimme Mr Tilney over this nonsense any day