‘I can see as if in a glass’

Ann Radcliffe, then Ann Ward, was born 260 years ago today: July 9, 1764. First published at age twenty-five, within the next ten years she became the most highly paid professional writer of the 1790s and her works had an incredible influence on popular culture, novels, and writers of that time and for many years afterward.

Her fourth novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, sold to publishers for 50 times the usual amount paid for a manuscript. The windfall allowed her husband, William Radcliffe, to temporarily quit his job and then he, Ann, and their dog, Chance, went on a tour of the Netherlands and Germany. Talk about living the dream.

Writing in what is now termed “gothic” style, Radcliffe considered her novels “romances” (in the literary sense, not in today’s romance genre sense). She integrated terror and threats of the supernatural in her writings, often exaggerated by heightened emotional states and heavily atmospheric settings, but always ultimately provided rational and physical causes, including characters exploiting superstition for their own gain per Scooby Doo, in order to explain away any hint of actual spirits or ghosts.

Time runs round! it is now many years, since she died; but I remember every thing, that happened then, as if it was but yesterday. Many things, that have passed of late years, are gone quite from my memory, while those so long ago, I can see as if in a glass.

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

I liked this quote because it evokes a relatable sensation and also represents the atmospheric and emotional landscape of Radcliffe’s style: things that happened many years ago continue to affect people’s lives, becoming present issues that seem to carry more substance than current reality.

Radcliffe published five novels during her lifetime, all before she was thirty-five, and spent her latter years in relatively quiet domesticity. Her novels are what remain clear to us after all these years, while her later life for a long time defied biographers with its seeming absence of record. However, recently more scholarship has been done on the subject and Radcliffe’s life has been memorialized along with her works. After suffering from asthma for twelve years, Ann Radcliffe contracted a chest infection and died in 1823 at the age of fifty-eight.