Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe, and: Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840, and: Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century (review)

Rictor Norton. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London: Leicester University Press, 1999). Pp. xi + 307. $19.95 paper.

Rictor Norton. Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840 (London: Leicester University Press, 2000). Pp. xiii + 370. $18.99 paper.

George E. Haggerty. Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Pp. 211. $18.95 paper.

The Gothic is becoming an increasingly popular avenue of research in eighteenth-century studies; not only books but Gothic websites have proliferated. ¹ If such activity attests to our relentless interest in the Gothic, the books under discussion here constitute nothing less than spectacular contributions to our understanding of its manifestation in literature. George Haggerty offers new perspectives through the lens of feminist and queer theory; Rictor Norton is similarly provocative in his survey of Gothic writers, as he is exceptionally thorough and insightful in uncovering new and fascinating information on Ann Radcliffe.

Norton's Gothic Readings reprints selections from first editions of works by both major and minor Gothic writers. Although it is easy enough to regret the inadequacies of this volume such as the brevity of the introduction and the lack of explanatory notes, this compilation is not a scholarly edition. Rather, it makes available short excerpts not only from canonical and noncanonical novels, but also from relatively inaccessible contemporary sources such as plays, diaries, poetry, parodies, correspondence, reviews, and criticism. Appropriately, Ann Radcliffe, perhaps the most important founder of the Gothic novel, is one of the best represented writers in a collection that helps situate the Gothic in its literary and cultural contexts.

Norton's Mistress of Udolpho, a highly readable and thoroughly researched biography of Radcliffe, is also welcome, especially as we know so little about the cultural icon who was, by all counts, the most popular novelist in England from at least 1790 to 1815. During this time Radcliffe helped create and sustain a vogue for the Gothic in her electrifying and influential bestsellers. Even so, from her death to the present, she has inspired only some twenty full-length studies. Of this number, just four are biographies. These include (besides Talfourd's "Memoir" described below) Aline Grant's short 1951 account, which is both undocumented and highly speculative, Pierre Arnaud's 1976 psycho-biography, which relates Radcliffe's works to her neuroses, and my own 1996 bio-bibliography, which contributes new material from Radcliffe's commonplace book.

Reasons for the seeming neglect of Radcliffe's biography are many. Of course, writing life stories in general is challenging due to the elusive and flawed nature of biographical truth, the problematic power relationships between the biographer and the subject, and the inherently voyeuristic and intrusive nature of the genre. Writing life stories of women like Radcliffe invites further problems since many of their important papers are nonextant. In fact, the paucity of information about Radcliffe prompted Christina Rossetti to abandon her projected biography. Arguing that the almost complete disappearance of Radcliffe's journals, letters, manuscripts, and other documents is due to her husband's remarriage and his death in Versailles, Norton provocatively suggests that Radcliffe manuscripts "may survive in an archive in France, unsigned and unattributed, provenance unknown" (249).

Given the scarcity of material, any biographer is forced to rely to some extent on Sir Thomas Noon (Serjeant) Talfourd's 1826 "Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Radcliffe" prefixed to her posthumous novel, Gaston de Blondeville. The earliest biography of Radcliffe, this account, which includes extracts from Radcliffe's journals that have disappeared, was written from information furnished by Radcliffe's husband. It forms the (necessarily biased) foundation of all subsequent biographies. Despite assertions to the contrary, Norton is also often forced...