Designing and Undrawing Veils: Anxiety and Authorship in Radcliffe’s The Italian

This essay examines several competing “allegories of authorship” at play in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) against the novel’s generic, political and philosophical contexts. Specifically, the novel seeks alternatives to the “demonic” model of authorship, established at the conclusion of Lewis’s The Monk (1796), wherein an author’s work is conflated with the diabolical “plots” and “designs” of her characters. In The Italian, a key alternative to this model of Gothic authorship comes in the protagonist’s tranquil and self-sufficient “veil of retirement” that nurtures her “genius” for “designs… both in drawing and embroidery.” These allegories of authorship prompt Radcliffe’s sustained engagements with and revisions of Burkean and Kantian aesthetic and moral theories.