October 4, 2023 • 37 mins
Once Ann Radcliffe retired from publishing, all kinds of rumors started to spread about her, including some that distressed her greatly. After she died, there was even more speculation.
Research:
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Ann Radcliffe". Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 Jul. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ann-Radcliffe-English-author
- Radcliffe, Ann. “The Romance of the Forest, interspersed with some pieces of poetry.” London. 1824. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64701/pg64701-images.html
- Radcliffe, Ann. “Gaston de Blondeville: Or The Court of Henry III. Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance. St. Alban's Abbey, a Metrical Tale: with Some Poetical Pieces, Volume 1.” H. Colburn. 1826. Accessed online: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=vi03AAAAIAAJ&rdid=book-vi03AAAAIAAJ&rdot=1
- Radcliffe, Ann. “A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, With a Return Down the Rhine: To Which Are Added Observations During a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland and Cumberland, in Two Volumes.” G.G. and Robinson. London. 1795. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/62795/pg62795-images.html
- Facer, Ruth. “Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823).” Chawton House Library. 2012. http://www.chawtonhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Ann-Radcliffe.pdf
- Dugdale, John. “Happy 250th, Ann Radcliffe.” The Guardian. Oct. 31, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/31/ann-radcliffe-gothic-pioneer-snubbed-horace-walpole-the-castle-of-oronto-250-years-celebrations#:~:text=Another%20250th%20anniversary%2C%20of%20Ann,sent%20up%20in%20Northanger%20Abbey.
- Flood, Allison. “Gothic fiction pioneer Ann Radcliffe may have been inspired by mother-in-law.” The Guardian. Jan. 30, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/30/ann-radcliffe-gothic-fiction-mother-in-law
- McIntyre, Clara Frances. “Anne Radcliffe in Relation to her Time.” Yale University Press. 1920. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/annradcliffeinre00mcinuoft/page/n3/mode/2up
- “Mr. Radcliffe … “ Sunday Dispatch/ London. October 30, 1825. https://www.newspapers.com/image/813446539/?terms=%22Ann%20Radcliffe%22&match=1
- McKillop, Alan D. “Mrs. Radcliffe on the Supernatural in Poetry.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 31, no. 3, 1932, pp. 352–59. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27703650
- Clarke, N. (2005). Anna Seward: Swan, Duckling or Goose?. In: Batchelor, J., Kaplan, C. (eds) British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595972_3
- Norton, Rictor. “Mistress of Udolpho.” Leicester University Press. 1999.
- Thomas, Donald. “Queen of Terrors.” The Guardian. July 10, 1964. https://www.newspapers.com/image/259612656/?terms=%22Ann%20Radcliffe%22&match=1
- Townshend, D., & Wright, A. (2014). Gothic and Romantic engagements The critical reception of Ann Radcliffe, 1789–1850. In D. Townshend & A. Wright (Eds.), Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (pp. 3-32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139507448.003
- Schwertfeger, S. 'No spoilers, please': the crux of illustrating the explained Gothic without explaining the mystery. Palgrave Commun3, 16 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0018-z
- Scott, Sir Walter. “The Lives of the Novelists.” London. 1906. Accessed online: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=DXPPAAAAMAAJ&rdid=book-DXPPAAAAMAAJ&rdot=1
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy D. Wilson. It's Accidental Anne Radcliffe
Week YEP. Today is part two of the life of
(00:21):
Anne Radcliffe, who is considered in many ways one of
the pioneers of gothic fiction. You'll see that phrase thrown
about a lot. In part one, we talked about Anne's
early life and her marriage, and her literary career, which
she abruptly stepped away from after publishing her fifth novel,
The Italian. Today, we will pick up right there, starting
(00:43):
with the many theories that people started to come up
with about why she stopped publishing her work. Some of
these are ones that happened right then, and others have
developed over time via literary historians. So yeah, as we
mentioned last time, Radcliffe had a brief but also extremely successful,
few year career of publishing novels, and there were a
(01:05):
lot of theories about why she stopped. One was that
she wanted to step away from writing fiction, and gothic
fiction in particular, because it was a problematic genre. Well
before Anne, this genre had sort of a seedy reputation
at the worst status as more of a pulpy, trash
(01:26):
kind of fiction at best. I feel like this is
not a surprising perception to anyone who has read horror
or other genre fiction today. Anne was really the standout, though,
and her insistence that she was writing romances may have
been an effort on her part to try to align
(01:46):
her work with another genre, one that was not gothic
or horror. And during her again very successful, the very
brief career, she was lauded for elevating gothic writing, other
writers were perceived as going in the opposite direction. For example,
Matthew Lewis released The Monk in seventeen ninety six, and
(02:09):
it featured a monk named Ambrosio and his struggle with
the temptation of lustful desires. It also had a number
of other salacious elements and created a total scandal when
it hit the market, particularly as it featured women also
being tempted by sexual desire and there were comparisons made
(02:30):
between her work and his, and she did not like that,
So this may have been another reason that she stepped
away from a successful career. That was a theory that
Sir Walter Scott publicly supported Yeah, it's kind of like
one of those things where again we mentioned in the
last episode that she made what was for the time
(02:51):
a lot of money on her last two books, and
other people immediately kind of do that thing where they
try to run to where the lightning struck last and
see if they can get in on that same kind
of success. And so a lot of people started churning
out their versions of Gothic romances, which were often very,
very trashy by the standards of the day. If we
(03:13):
read them today, we'd be like, this is really tame.
But at the time, the idea that a woman was
grappling with sexual attraction and whether or not to act
on it was like pornography to them in many ways.
So another aspect of her experience as an author that
may have made her no longer wish to publish was
a barrage of attacks in literary circles. There were a
(03:35):
few different kinds of these, but there's one example which
seems to have been particularly painful for Radcliffe, although it
happened after she had retired, but it may have kept
her from going back to publishing. In this case, confusion
had arisen when a work titled Plays on the Passions
was published anonymously in seventeen ninety eight. Anne and William
(03:55):
were visiting the country for William's health at the time.
They didn't know any about it, but there was a
lot of speculation going around London about whether the plays
were actually Anne Radcliffe's work. They were not. They were
the work of dramatist Joanna Bailey. That was revealed in
eighteen hundred when Bailey acquiesced to include her name on
the third printing. The way this story and Radcliffe's dismay
(04:19):
about it all plays out is a bit of a
social and timeline tangle. So we're going to work through
it pretty carefully. I hope I even got it right.
I read several different accounts of it, like several different
layouts of it. It's very confusing, so we're we're going
slow for my benefit more than anyone's. This particular drama
that happened did not get to Radcliffe until years after
(04:43):
the fact, when she was already retired, and at that
point one of the key players had already died. But
it still was very upsetting. So first we have to
introduce Anna Seward, who was a poet and a woman
of letters. Born in seventeen forty two, her nickname was
the Swan of Litchfield. She was really connected to sort
(05:04):
of everyone of social and intellectual standing in England in
the late eighteenth century. She died in eighteen oh nine,
more than a decade after Plays on the Passions came
out in eighteen eleven. Seward's letters were published posthumously as
Letters of Anna Seward, written between the year seventeen eighty
four and eighteen oh seven. Whereas Anne Radcliffe left behind
(05:28):
almost no examples of personal correspondence when she died, Anna
Seward left behind a lot her letters filled six volumes,
and a letter that was included in the fifth volume
from May seventeen ninety nine, written to Sarah ponsonby, who
he talked about in Our Ladies of lang Coffin episode,
Anne Radcliffe's name comes up specifically. Anna Seward is relaying
(05:52):
to Sarah Ponsonby the impression that another woman named only
as Missus Jackson had of the Plays on the Passion
and why she thought Anne Radcliffe was the anonymous author.
This opinion is not kind so and what's attributed to
this Missus Jackson? The description is as follows quote before
(06:14):
the author was known. I observed so much of the
power and defects of Missus Radcliffe's composition in these dramas
as to believe them hers, and I hear she owns them.
Missus Radcliffe, in whatever she writes, attentive solely to the end,
is not sufficiently attentive to observe probability in the means
she uses to attain it. She bends her plan, or
(06:37):
if it will not bend, she breaks it to her
catastrophe by making it grow out of preceding events. Still,
she always takes hold of the reader's feelings and affects
her purpose boldly, if not regularly. Her descriptive talent used
to satiety in her novels, is here employed with more
temperance and consequently to better purpose. This an interesting setup
(07:01):
in and of itself, because it's like, we already know
who the who the true writer is at this point,
because it opens with before the writer was known. But
then it also says I think she owns them, and
I'm like, I don't. It's what's going on here, gossip.
So at the point when all of this correspondence was published,
it was known to absolutely everyone that Joanna Bailey had
(07:24):
written the plays on the Passions, but it is also
apparent that Seward and her friends continued to gossip about
whether Anne had written them for a while after that letter,
and Seward also accused Radcliffe of basically plagiarizing another writer,
William Godwin, when it came to the plot of the plays,
which she had not written. Seward also wrote to another
(07:46):
person a month after the Sarah Ponsenbee letter, this time
to a Reverend Wally, that quote in all Missus Radcliffe's
writings attentive only to terrific effects, She bestows no care
upon their causes, and rashly cuts the knot of probability,
which she seems to want patients to untie. One has
heard of a laboring mountain bringing forth a mouse. In
(08:07):
missus Ours writings, mice bring forth mountains. Even once the
confusion over who exactly had written Plays on the Passions
had been cleared up, Anna Seward still wrote some barbs
about Radcliffe in her correspondence, noting in one letter that
even though the plays have some of the same problems
that Radcliffe's work has, she did always think some sections
(08:30):
were just too good to have been her work. Biographer
Richter Norton noted in his nineteen ninety nine book that
the missus Jackson who started this rumor that Radcliffe had
written the plays was Eliza E. Jackson, who was a
very smart woman who, along with Seward and several other
ladies of England's Salon Society, seemed to like to just
(08:50):
talk trash about Anne Radcliffe in their letters. Just in
case you thought people hating on successful creatives was a
brand new thing. Yeah, this reads like so many drama
spols within the worlds of like authors and publishing. Yes,
that I've seen play out on social media. Yeah, we're
just doing the same thing over and over. None of
us are. Originally, when Seward's Letters were published in eighteen eleven,
(09:16):
all of this was hugely upsetting to Anne. She tried
to track down Missus Jackson, first hearing that she was
in Bath and then in Edinburgh to set the record straight.
Missus Jackson knew Sir Walter Scott, and Radcliffe was worried
that he might believe the rumors that made her look
like she would let other people think she wrote something
(09:37):
that she had not written. The reality was she didn't
know anything about anyone attributing Bailey's work to her until
just way later. So to outsiders, her silence on this
whole matter may have looked like she was like enjoying
all of this attention. She wasn't. She had no idea
(09:57):
any of this was going on for a decad which
also reminds me of the many times I have seen
someone on whatever social media saying so and so has
not even acknowledged this. It's exactly what it is. Yeah,
because they were not online at the moment. Yeah. She
and William were both very upset about all of this
and how it was going to make her look and
(10:19):
that people might think ill of her for something she
wasn't even aware of. But she didn't manage to find
missus Jackson by the time she looked her up in
Edinburgh I believe through one of her lawyers, she was
not living there any longer, so she could not source
the origin point of this rumor. So she didn't feel
comfortable reaching out to Joanna Bailey, although she wanted to
(10:40):
to assure her that she would never let a rumor
continue that suggested anyone else's work was her own. Because
there was no resolution to this whole thing. It really
weighed on her for a long time. In a biography
written shortly after her death, the writer states, quote the subject,
which was always painful to her, is rather now alluded
(11:00):
to as an instance of the singular apprehensiveness of her
moral sense than as at all required for the vindication
of her character. So one of the aspects of her
having a pretty small social circle in her life that
probably wound up causing her some grief was that in
these instances where other people said something about her that
(11:21):
caused her to feel hurt or wronged, those things seemed
even larger than they might have if she had had
like a bigger, wider social circle as a backdrop to
kind of dilute the impact of all of it. It
really seems like Anne was subjected to the barbs of
fame without really indulging in any of its luxuries. And
(11:43):
to her these comments never seemed offhanded. They always felt
like or seemed to be very pointed attacks. Yeah, you know,
when you're not talking to everybody and you're not in
the noise of like a bigger social sphere, it's seems
like everyone is talking about me and saying that I
let someone think I wrote some something that I didn't
(12:05):
and I never would. But like to those people, probably
anyone who was part of that or had moved on
from it didn't even remember it. But to Anne it
was very, very heartbreaking. Coming up, we're going to talk
about the weird rumors that circulated about Anne, including the
time that she was reported as dead when she was
still very much alive. But before that, we will take
(12:27):
a quick sponsor break. Anne Radcliffe's low profile life also
led at one point to the false rumor that she
had died well before her time came. In eighteen ten,
(12:47):
a poem called Ode to Terror was published and that
stated rather confidently that the author had died a deranged woman.
She was still very much alive. There were also some additional,
extraordinarily outlandish claims about her life. There was one that
went around that she ate raw meat before bed to
fuel nightmares to give her inspiration so she could get
(13:09):
back to writing her terror novels. She chose not to
address any such rumors publicly. Now there is to me
a bit of coincidence in all of this, because Radcliff's
own writings were full of things that seemed terrifying or
fantastic but then turned out to be mundane, and if
her speculating fans or public had learned anything from her novels,
(13:31):
they may have come to the boring but truthful conclusion
that her retirement was just that it was the understandable
and mundane desire of a woman who just wanted to
retire from work. As Anne and William got older, their
twice yearly travels became less frequent and shorter in distance,
although they did keep spending summers traveling by carriage around
(13:53):
London and the surrounding area and just stopping wherever their
hearts desired. Sometime around eighteen ten or eighteen eleven, And
began having serious issues with asthma, and her health generally declined.
In the autumn of eighteen twenty two, she visited the
seaside town of Ramsgate in the hopes of improving her health,
and she was refreshed by it temporarily. In early January,
(14:17):
she had what one biographer called end quote attack of
her disease. Per that account, which we're going to talk
about in a little more depth in a moment, A
doctor was called two days after her issues began, arriving
on January eleventh, eighteen twenty three. In an odd detail
in that account, it stated that she read about a
recent murder a couple of weeks later, and that due
(14:40):
to her weekend state and the shock of this information
that she read, which the biographer says happened accidentally, she
experienced a temporary delirium. But though that passed and she
was doing well the first week of February, Anne Radcliffe
died in her sleep on February seventh, eighteen twenty three.
Perhaps more unsettling than anything Radcliffe ever wrote in her
(15:03):
work was her biographer's claim that quote her countenance after
death was delightfully placid, and continued so for some days.
She was interred at Saint George's at Hanover Square in
the Chapel of Ease. Yeah, I'm like you just watched
her look peaceful for several days, okay. Perhaps indicative of
(15:26):
the quiet style of her life. There were not a
ton of obituaries in the papers, the way that you
would normally expect to see for a famous person. The
ones that do appear are brief. One from the Yorkshire
Harold Reads in its entirety quote on Friday week Missus
Anne Radcliffe. The wife of William Radcliffe, Esquire of Stafford Place, Pimlico.
(15:47):
This is like, that's the whole sentence, because it's like
a list of obituaries. So when you're like, that doesn't
make sense. That's why. She had been indisposed for some
time with a violent cold, which terminated in inflammation and
took from this life. The much admired author of the
Mysteries of Udolpho and other works of imagination and genius,
(16:07):
almost equally popular among the female ornaments of English literature,
she will long hold one of the highest places. Missus
r was we believe, between fifty and sixty years of age.
She was a lady of the most amiable and interesting character,
possessed not only of all the accomplishments, but all the
virtues that could adorn her sex. She had lived long
(16:29):
enough to see her own work satirized. Shortly after Jane
Austen's death in eighteen seventeen, her novel Northanger Abbey was published.
This story is a satire of Gothic novels, and one
of the characters is given a copy of Mysteries of Udolpho.
Austin is said to have completed this book in eighteen
(16:50):
oh three, so it would have been a fairly fresh
response to Radcliffe's famous works, being part of the zeitgeist
of the time. In eighteen twenty six, Radcliffe's last work
of fiction was published, titled Gaston de BLANDVILLEU. She probably
called it Gaston de Blondeville. We don't know. She had
actually written this book well before her death in eighteen
(17:11):
oh two, after being inspired by a visit to Kenilworth Castle,
but she chose not to publish it. The book is
set in Anne's contemporary time, but the bulk of it
was a story within a story that's set in the
thirteenth century, and it was, according to the accompanying text,
that it got with publication. Never intended to be published,
but it was written merely as an amusement for Anne
(17:33):
and William. Preceding the release of this book, in October
eighteen twenty five, the Sunday Dispatch of London ran a
blurb that read, mister Radcliffe, husband of the great enchantress
Anne Radcliffe, author of the Mysteries of Udolpho the Italian,
The Romance of the Forest, etc. And who died about
the year eighteen twenty three, has at length though very
(17:55):
reluctantly consented to publish a romance which this celebrated lady
left behind her. The plot of Gaston de Blainville is
very much in line with Radcliffe's other books. The thirteenth
century story unfold at his wedding, which is held in
the court of King Henry the Third, when Gaston is
accused of murder by a merchant. At the event, the
(18:17):
king holds a trial to uncover all of the evidence.
There is a biography of her at the beginning of
the book, written by Sir Thomas Nuon Talford, with information
supplied in part by William This is the biography we
mentioned earlier. I originally was calling it a brief biography,
but then I realized it takes up a full one
(18:38):
third of the book, and the rest of her work
is the next two thirds. This book begins with the
following rather charming and quaint description. And when I say quaint,
I mean I mean that in a way that is
maybe not the kindest quote. The life of Missus Radcliffe
(18:58):
is a pleasing phenomenon in the literature of her time,
during a period in which the spirit of personality has
extended its influence till it has rendered the habits and
conversation of authors almost as public as their compositions. She
confines herself with delicate apprehensiveness to the circle of domestic
duties and pleasures known only by her works. Her name
(19:21):
was felt as a spell by her readers. We'll talk
more about this biography, but Telford's biography, which is written
it's described as a biographical memoir, suggested that Radcliffe retired
from publishing when she did because she didn't see a
way to surpass her last two novels and thought it
better to retire on top. This opening also goes on
(19:43):
to mention that once she'd retired from her fiction career,
the supernatural tone of her writing led her devoted fan
base to come up with all kinds of wild stories
about what had happened to her and why she stopped publishing.
There were rumors that she had died or that she
had a mental illness, but the reality was most likely
(20:04):
that she had made enough money from her work she
didn't need to work anymore unless she wanted to, and
at that point she wrote mostly for herself. This eighteen
twenty six biography states that she was quote thankfully enjoying
the choicest blessings of life with a cheerfulness as equable
as if she had never touched the secret springs of horror. Now,
(20:26):
that mention of horror would have probably irked Anne Radcliffe,
while she was considered the grand d'aume of Gothic fiction.
To her, there was a very important distinction between terror
and horror, and she wrote about that in an unfinished
essay that was included with the publication of Gaston de Blanville,
(20:47):
titled on the Supernatural in Poetry, which means it was
published right alongside this memoir. She wrote in it, terror
and horror are so far opposite that the first expands
the soul and awakens the faculty to a high degree
of life. The other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.
I apprehend that neither Shakespeare nor Milton, by their fictions,
(21:11):
nor mister Burke, by his reasoning anywhere, looked to positive
horror as a source of the sublime, though they all
agree that terror is a very high one. That mister Burke,
she referenced there was Edmund Burke. She was making a
callback to his essay, A philosophical inquiry into the origin
of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, in which
(21:31):
he suggested that terror was a source of the sublime
and that it could be used to produce the strongest
of human emotions. And in a move that seems sort
of weird, there's a statement from Anne's doctor in the
introductory biography. It's intended to put to rest all the
various rumors of madness. Doctor Scudmore's statement reads quote. Missus
(21:53):
Radcliffe had been for several years subject to severe catarrhal coughs,
and also was occasionally afflict with asthma. In March eighteen
twenty two, she was ill with inflammation of the lungs
and for a considerable time remained much indisposed. With the
summer season and change of air, she regained a tolerable
state of health. In the early part of January eighteen
(22:15):
twenty three, in consequence of exposure to the cold, she
was again attacked with inflammation of the lungs, and much
more severely than before. Active treatment was immediately adopted, but
without the desired relief, and the symptoms soon assumed a
most dangerous character. At the end of three weeks, However,
and contrary to all expectation, the inflammation of the lungs
(22:38):
was overcome, and the amendment was so decided as to
present a slight prospect of recovery. Alas, our hopes were
soon disappointed. Suddenly, in the very moment of seeming calm
from the previous violence of disease, a new inflammation seized
the membranes of the brain. The enfeebled frame could not
(22:58):
resist this freshness. So rapid in their course were the
violent symptoms that medical treatment proved wholly unavailing. In the
space of three days, death closed the melancholy scene. The
doctor's statement goes on to say that other than the
end when she had a brain infection, Missus Radcliffe's mind
quote was perfect in its reasoning powers. All of this information,
(23:25):
which is odd to have a doctor's statement of biography,
was included, though, according to Telford, because in the wake
of Anne's death the rumors of mental illness had begun again.
But the rest of the memoir of Anne Radcliffe that
he wrote reads so flowery in its praise of her
that there have been a lot of questions over the
years as to whether this was kind of a very
(23:45):
carefully developed piece of writing intended to establish the most
perfect version of her on the public record. And when
we say flowery praise, here's the kind of thing we're
talking about. It described her in terms like inquisitely proportioned
and perfectly well bred. So it kind of feels like
he's going beyond what you might normally write about someone,
(24:08):
even if you deeply admire them. So is this a
scenario where the biographer was simply prone to flowery wording
or is it one where there is a clear intention
to really puff up the subject's image. We don't really know.
One bit of insight that comes from Telford's analysis of
Radcliffe's work, because that's also included here, is that she
(24:29):
always explained the scary components in her books as simply
following the rules and conventions of Gothic novels. She felt
that she did not have the leeway as a creator
to claim that something supernatural was real. That's something that
she was often criticized for, like, oh, why do you
dial it back at the end, But that is the
explanation that Talford gave. Whether that's true or not, it's
(24:52):
certainly an interesting take. Next, we'll talk about the volume
of poetry that was published after Anne Radcliffe's death, and
we'll get to that. And it's less than enthusiastic reviews
after we hear from the sponsors. That keeps stuffymus in
history class going. Radcliffe's epic poem Saint Alban's Abbey was
(25:20):
also published posthumously. It was not well received. Biographer Ruth
Facer wrote of it, quote, it does her no justice.
It is long, rambling and tedious. I will give you
the poem's opening stanza, which will give you a pretty
clear indication of what the whole thing is like. No, Ye,
(25:41):
that pale and ancient choir, whose Norman tower lifts its
pinnacled spire, where the long abbey aisle extends and battled
roof or rufe ascends, cornered with buttresses shapely and small,
that sheltered the saint in a canopied stall, and enlightened
with hanging turret's fair that's so proudly they're mental coronals
wear they blend with a holy, a warlike air, while
(26:04):
they guard the murder's tomb beneath and patient warriors laid
in death. This wasn't the first time her poetry had
been published, but it was the first time An authorized
book of her poetry was released in eighteen sixteen. An
unauthorized book was assembled from various pieces of poetry that
she had included in the narratives of her prose. Christina Rosetti,
(26:28):
the mid nineteenth century writer famous for Goblin Market and
other poems, attempted a biography of Radcliffe during her career,
but found that there just was not enough material available
to her to complete it. That project was intended to
be part of a series initiated by John Ingram titled
Eminent Women. But aside from a handful of brief biographies
(26:49):
that did not hold a lot of information, there's the
one from Talford we talked about, and one from Sir
Walter Scott Rossetti was only able to turn up a
short letter and a small amount of journal material, which
was about travel details. For example, the kinds of things
that Anne wrote in her travel journals were things like quote,
made our way in the gig through the long, narrow
(27:10):
streets and then leaving Chatham on the left, mounted a
very steep road, having wide views of Chatham, the docks,
the shipping, the new barracks, a town themselves rising up
a hill with cannon and two small artificial hills with
flags a great prospect, but too broken and full of
scars and angles of fortifications and other buildings and excavations
(27:30):
to be quite pleasing. So it's an interesting example of
writing about surroundings and the details she included, but it
doesn't really offer insights into the author's personal story and
probably wouldn't help a biography much beyond lake she was
in this place at this time. Anne Radcliffe had not,
to the best of anyone's knowledge, kept a personal journal
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or written friends or family about her private thoughts and feelings.
Her descriptions of places often read like little stories, but
there about the things she saw and her imagined life
for them. When visiting Noll House in the town of
Seven Oaks, southeast of London in eighteen oh seven, she
wrote of this Holme's impressive portrait gallery quote and the
(28:13):
little closet of entrance. The countenance of Guardini, the composer,
gives you the idea that he is listening to the
long drawn notes of his own violin Holbeinn's Erasmus, and
the gallery must be truth itself. There are some exceptions,
but they're kind of few and fleeting. For example, in
one entry. While she and William were visiting Seaford in
(28:34):
the late seventeen nineties, and who really loved that visit
wrote an entry that gives insight into her religious views
and her feelings on having lost her parents. Quote. Saw
the sunset behind one of the vast hills. The silent
course over this great scene awful, the departure melancholy. Oh God,
(28:55):
Thy great laws will one day be more fully known
by thy creatures. We shall more full understand thee and ourselves.
The God of order and of all this, and of
far greater grandeur. The creator of that glorious sun, which
never fails in its course, will not neglect us. His intelligent,
though frail creatures, not suffer us to perish. Who have
(29:15):
the consciousness of our mortal fate long before it arrives,
And of him, He who called us from nothing, can
again call us from death into life. In this month,
on the twenty fourth of July, my dear father died.
Two years since on the fourteenth of last March, my
poor mother followed him. I am the last leaf on
the tree. The melancholy greatness with which I was surrounded
(29:39):
this evening made me very sensible of this, with lack
of ready information about Anne might have been part of life.
For a long time, scholarly interests in her work really
died back quite a bit. What there was of it
was often riddled with assumptions, are colored by the rumors
of madness that had sprung up while Anne was still
(29:59):
al live. The texts of her books had been the
bulk of what people actually knew and little else. It
wasn't until the late twentieth century that biographers really started
trying to dig deeper into what might be available to
piece together the otherwise disparate pieces of information that were
known about her personal life. Literature professor Dale Townsend, writing
(30:20):
for the British Library in twenty fourteen, points to David
Puncher's book The Literature of Terror, released in nineteen eighty
as the spark that reignited scholarly interest in Radcliffe. We
did find mention of her in major press that predated that, though,
so it wasn't as though no one was talking about
Anne Radcliffe in her work. The press mention that I
(30:43):
found and read was in The Guardian in the summer
of nineteen sixty four, and it was part of an
article by Donald Thomas that was titled Queen of Terrors
and was all about Anne. One of the biographies published
since then, Mistress of Udolpho, was written by historian Richter
Norton in nineteen teen ninety nine, and it offered up
details which had not been known until Norton hunted them
(31:05):
down in obscure places. One of the things that Norton
points out, which is often left out of the more
brief narratives regarding Radcliffe, is that she was definitely a classist.
She could be really condescending to people that she perceived
as of a lower class than herself. Yeah. He shares
some examples of them, and it is a little like
(31:30):
that's a pity. In twenty fourteen, there was a surprise
in the Anne Radcliffe story when a letter that she
had written her mother in law was found amongst a
batch of other miscellaneous letters by Greg Boswell, a British
Library curator. That letter, which is dated August thirty first,
seventeen ninety seven, reads, Dear Madam, we are concerned to
(31:51):
hear such frequent complaints. The reasonableness of things in Yorkshire
is well known, but without insisting upon that if you
cannot be acommodated with the necessaries of life, and without
being a burden to anybody. If the supplies which William
sends are not sufficient, we can only desire you to
come and live with us, where you shall always find plenty.
(32:12):
Whatever you may do elsewhere, you will recollect the unwillingness
which William formerly expressed to send money to you at Broughton,
and your positive desire and assurances upon the subject. In
my last I assured you we did not for a
moment suppose you had received a two pound note when
you assured us to the contrary, and it was therefore
(32:32):
unnecessary for you to vindicate yourself again. He joins me
in love and good wishes to you, and I remain
dear Madam your affectionate A Radcliffe. So it seems like
William and Ann had sent William's mother Deborah Radcliffe some money,
but it had not arrived. So Anne's essentially saying, this
would be a heck of a lot easier if you
would move to London so we could take care of you.
(32:55):
Mister Buzzwell believes this may be an indicator that Anne's
relationship with Zabra Burah had informed the strained relationship between
the character of Elena Rosalba in the book The Italian
and her fictional mother in law. I do love that
bit at the end of like you told me you
didn't get it. I believed you. You don't have to
(33:15):
keep telling me. There are two quotes that make the
most sense to me, at least to end on when
summing up the life of Anne Radcliffe. The first is
by Sir Walter Scott, and it sums up her literary life. Quote.
Missus Radcliffe as an author has the most decided claim
(33:35):
to take her place among the favored few who have
been distinguished as the founders of a class or school.
She led the way in a particular style of composition,
affecting powerfully the mind of the reader, which has since
been attempted by many, but in which no one has
attained or approached the excellencies of the original inventor. In
his biography of Anne Radcliffe, Richter Norton wrote this description
(33:59):
of her, which it seems like a good place to
end things, since it sums her up not so much
as a writer, but as a person. Quote. The public
image of Missus Radcliffe as a mad genius and the
sensational nature of her novels are in sharp contrast to
the ordinary preoccupations of her middle class domestic life. She
loved dogs and music, enjoyed excursions to Dover and Worthing,
(34:22):
was fond of the sound of Greek, though she could
not understand a word of it, and felt it was
at least as important to be considered a gentlewoman as
a genius. Anne Radcliffe, I hope we find tons more
stuff of hers, but I doubt we will. Yeah, like
somewhere there's a cash of letters where she's like those
mean girls. I doubt it. I have listener mail. This
(34:46):
is another one that goes back to William Morgan, the
gift that keeps giving because lots of people have thoughts
about William Morgan. This one is from our listener Alice,
who writes, thank you Holly and Tracy for the recent
podcast on William Morgan. I listened to with special interest
remembering a news article I'd seen on my second great
grandfather's connection to Morgan. Judge Moses Taggart Esquire, my second
(35:07):
great grandfather, was credited with a part in the Memorial
to Morgan in eighteen eighty two. I'm including a link
to one article citing Taggart's participation. My ancestors have a
long history as judges, postmasters and attorneys in Batavia. I
sincerely wish I could get back there to visit. Thank
you for helping to bring this bit of my history
to life. A little from that paper, she includes a quote.
(35:31):
A few weeks later, it is reported in the same
paper that the Wetland Ladies had supplemented Missus Morgan's little
New Year's gift with twenty dollars. Her card of acknowledgment
is worth reading. The undersign tenders to the Ladies of
Wheatland her warmest expressions of gratitude for their friendly condolence
and benevolent and well timed donation. Such expressions of kindness
(35:53):
serve to gladden the heart of a disconsolate and helpless
female suffering under one of the most singular and distressing
bereavings that has ever befallen her sex. She is a
stranger in a strange land, and dependent on charity for support.
This affecting epistle was written, it is said, by mister Taggart,
a lawyer of Batavia, who, at the dedication of Morgan's
(36:14):
monument at Batavia September eleventh, eighteen eighty two, was among
the liveliest in his reminiscences of that martyr. Alice also
attaches pictures of fur babies. Yeah, Gandolf, the Gray and
Bonds who are twelve years old and very beautiful babies,
(36:34):
both of them. I don't know. We have twelve year
old cats that I think are speeding up. I'm a
little scared of it, but we'll see what happens. Alice,
thank you so much for sharing this. I always love
when people have connections to the stories that we tell.
If you have such a connection, maybe you have a
secret letter from Mann Radcliffe, please write us. If you do,
(36:56):
you can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History and it's a great time to subscribe to
the show if you haven't already. You can do that
on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your
favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
(37:17):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy D. Wilson. It's Accidental Anne Radcliffe
Week YEP. Today is part two of the life of
(00:21):
Anne Radcliffe, who is considered in many ways one of
the pioneers of gothic fiction. You'll see that phrase thrown
about a lot. In part one, we talked about Anne's
early life and her marriage, and her literary career, which
she abruptly stepped away from after publishing her fifth novel,
The Italian. Today, we will pick up right there, starting
(00:43):
with the many theories that people started to come up
with about why she stopped publishing her work. Some of
these are ones that happened right then, and others have
developed over time via literary historians. So yeah, as we
mentioned last time, Radcliffe had a brief but also extremely successful,
few year career of publishing novels, and there were a
(01:05):
lot of theories about why she stopped. One was that
she wanted to step away from writing fiction, and gothic
fiction in particular, because it was a problematic genre. Well
before Anne, this genre had sort of a seedy reputation
at the worst status as more of a pulpy, trash
(01:26):
kind of fiction at best. I feel like this is
not a surprising perception to anyone who has read horror
or other genre fiction today. Anne was really the standout, though,
and her insistence that she was writing romances may have
been an effort on her part to try to align
(01:46):
her work with another genre, one that was not gothic
or horror. And during her again very successful, the very
brief career, she was lauded for elevating gothic writing, other
writers were perceived as going in the opposite direction. For example,
Matthew Lewis released The Monk in seventeen ninety six, and
(02:09):
it featured a monk named Ambrosio and his struggle with
the temptation of lustful desires. It also had a number
of other salacious elements and created a total scandal when
it hit the market, particularly as it featured women also
being tempted by sexual desire and there were comparisons made
(02:30):
between her work and his, and she did not like that,
So this may have been another reason that she stepped
away from a successful career. That was a theory that
Sir Walter Scott publicly supported Yeah, it's kind of like
one of those things where again we mentioned in the
last episode that she made what was for the time
(02:51):
a lot of money on her last two books, and
other people immediately kind of do that thing where they
try to run to where the lightning struck last and
see if they can get in on that same kind
of success. And so a lot of people started churning
out their versions of Gothic romances, which were often very,
very trashy by the standards of the day. If we
(03:13):
read them today, we'd be like, this is really tame.
But at the time, the idea that a woman was
grappling with sexual attraction and whether or not to act
on it was like pornography to them in many ways.
So another aspect of her experience as an author that
may have made her no longer wish to publish was
a barrage of attacks in literary circles. There were a
(03:35):
few different kinds of these, but there's one example which
seems to have been particularly painful for Radcliffe, although it
happened after she had retired, but it may have kept
her from going back to publishing. In this case, confusion
had arisen when a work titled Plays on the Passions
was published anonymously in seventeen ninety eight. Anne and William
(03:55):
were visiting the country for William's health at the time.
They didn't know any about it, but there was a
lot of speculation going around London about whether the plays
were actually Anne Radcliffe's work. They were not. They were
the work of dramatist Joanna Bailey. That was revealed in
eighteen hundred when Bailey acquiesced to include her name on
the third printing. The way this story and Radcliffe's dismay
(04:19):
about it all plays out is a bit of a
social and timeline tangle. So we're going to work through
it pretty carefully. I hope I even got it right.
I read several different accounts of it, like several different
layouts of it. It's very confusing, so we're we're going
slow for my benefit more than anyone's. This particular drama
that happened did not get to Radcliffe until years after
(04:43):
the fact, when she was already retired, and at that
point one of the key players had already died. But
it still was very upsetting. So first we have to
introduce Anna Seward, who was a poet and a woman
of letters. Born in seventeen forty two, her nickname was
the Swan of Litchfield. She was really connected to sort
(05:04):
of everyone of social and intellectual standing in England in
the late eighteenth century. She died in eighteen oh nine,
more than a decade after Plays on the Passions came
out in eighteen eleven. Seward's letters were published posthumously as
Letters of Anna Seward, written between the year seventeen eighty
four and eighteen oh seven. Whereas Anne Radcliffe left behind
(05:28):
almost no examples of personal correspondence when she died, Anna
Seward left behind a lot her letters filled six volumes,
and a letter that was included in the fifth volume
from May seventeen ninety nine, written to Sarah ponsonby, who
he talked about in Our Ladies of lang Coffin episode,
Anne Radcliffe's name comes up specifically. Anna Seward is relaying
(05:52):
to Sarah Ponsonby the impression that another woman named only
as Missus Jackson had of the Plays on the Passion
and why she thought Anne Radcliffe was the anonymous author.
This opinion is not kind so and what's attributed to
this Missus Jackson? The description is as follows quote before
(06:14):
the author was known. I observed so much of the
power and defects of Missus Radcliffe's composition in these dramas
as to believe them hers, and I hear she owns them.
Missus Radcliffe, in whatever she writes, attentive solely to the end,
is not sufficiently attentive to observe probability in the means
she uses to attain it. She bends her plan, or
(06:37):
if it will not bend, she breaks it to her
catastrophe by making it grow out of preceding events. Still,
she always takes hold of the reader's feelings and affects
her purpose boldly, if not regularly. Her descriptive talent used
to satiety in her novels, is here employed with more
temperance and consequently to better purpose. This an interesting setup
(07:01):
in and of itself, because it's like, we already know
who the who the true writer is at this point,
because it opens with before the writer was known. But
then it also says I think she owns them, and
I'm like, I don't. It's what's going on here, gossip.
So at the point when all of this correspondence was published,
it was known to absolutely everyone that Joanna Bailey had
(07:24):
written the plays on the Passions, but it is also
apparent that Seward and her friends continued to gossip about
whether Anne had written them for a while after that letter,
and Seward also accused Radcliffe of basically plagiarizing another writer,
William Godwin, when it came to the plot of the plays,
which she had not written. Seward also wrote to another
(07:46):
person a month after the Sarah Ponsenbee letter, this time
to a Reverend Wally, that quote in all Missus Radcliffe's
writings attentive only to terrific effects, She bestows no care
upon their causes, and rashly cuts the knot of probability,
which she seems to want patients to untie. One has
heard of a laboring mountain bringing forth a mouse. In
(08:07):
missus Ours writings, mice bring forth mountains. Even once the
confusion over who exactly had written Plays on the Passions
had been cleared up, Anna Seward still wrote some barbs
about Radcliffe in her correspondence, noting in one letter that
even though the plays have some of the same problems
that Radcliffe's work has, she did always think some sections
(08:30):
were just too good to have been her work. Biographer
Richter Norton noted in his nineteen ninety nine book that
the missus Jackson who started this rumor that Radcliffe had
written the plays was Eliza E. Jackson, who was a
very smart woman who, along with Seward and several other
ladies of England's Salon Society, seemed to like to just
(08:50):
talk trash about Anne Radcliffe in their letters. Just in
case you thought people hating on successful creatives was a
brand new thing. Yeah, this reads like so many drama
spols within the worlds of like authors and publishing. Yes,
that I've seen play out on social media. Yeah, we're
just doing the same thing over and over. None of
us are. Originally, when Seward's Letters were published in eighteen eleven,
(09:16):
all of this was hugely upsetting to Anne. She tried
to track down Missus Jackson, first hearing that she was
in Bath and then in Edinburgh to set the record straight.
Missus Jackson knew Sir Walter Scott, and Radcliffe was worried
that he might believe the rumors that made her look
like she would let other people think she wrote something
(09:37):
that she had not written. The reality was she didn't
know anything about anyone attributing Bailey's work to her until
just way later. So to outsiders, her silence on this
whole matter may have looked like she was like enjoying
all of this attention. She wasn't. She had no idea
(09:57):
any of this was going on for a decad which
also reminds me of the many times I have seen
someone on whatever social media saying so and so has
not even acknowledged this. It's exactly what it is. Yeah,
because they were not online at the moment. Yeah. She
and William were both very upset about all of this
and how it was going to make her look and
(10:19):
that people might think ill of her for something she
wasn't even aware of. But she didn't manage to find
missus Jackson by the time she looked her up in
Edinburgh I believe through one of her lawyers, she was
not living there any longer, so she could not source
the origin point of this rumor. So she didn't feel
comfortable reaching out to Joanna Bailey, although she wanted to
(10:40):
to assure her that she would never let a rumor
continue that suggested anyone else's work was her own. Because
there was no resolution to this whole thing. It really
weighed on her for a long time. In a biography
written shortly after her death, the writer states, quote the subject,
which was always painful to her, is rather now alluded
(11:00):
to as an instance of the singular apprehensiveness of her
moral sense than as at all required for the vindication
of her character. So one of the aspects of her
having a pretty small social circle in her life that
probably wound up causing her some grief was that in
these instances where other people said something about her that
(11:21):
caused her to feel hurt or wronged, those things seemed
even larger than they might have if she had had
like a bigger, wider social circle as a backdrop to
kind of dilute the impact of all of it. It
really seems like Anne was subjected to the barbs of
fame without really indulging in any of its luxuries. And
(11:43):
to her these comments never seemed offhanded. They always felt
like or seemed to be very pointed attacks. Yeah, you know,
when you're not talking to everybody and you're not in
the noise of like a bigger social sphere, it's seems
like everyone is talking about me and saying that I
let someone think I wrote some something that I didn't
(12:05):
and I never would. But like to those people, probably
anyone who was part of that or had moved on
from it didn't even remember it. But to Anne it
was very, very heartbreaking. Coming up, we're going to talk
about the weird rumors that circulated about Anne, including the
time that she was reported as dead when she was
still very much alive. But before that, we will take
(12:27):
a quick sponsor break. Anne Radcliffe's low profile life also
led at one point to the false rumor that she
had died well before her time came. In eighteen ten,
(12:47):
a poem called Ode to Terror was published and that
stated rather confidently that the author had died a deranged woman.
She was still very much alive. There were also some additional,
extraordinarily outlandish claims about her life. There was one that
went around that she ate raw meat before bed to
fuel nightmares to give her inspiration so she could get
(13:09):
back to writing her terror novels. She chose not to
address any such rumors publicly. Now there is to me
a bit of coincidence in all of this, because Radcliff's
own writings were full of things that seemed terrifying or
fantastic but then turned out to be mundane, and if
her speculating fans or public had learned anything from her novels,
(13:31):
they may have come to the boring but truthful conclusion
that her retirement was just that it was the understandable
and mundane desire of a woman who just wanted to
retire from work. As Anne and William got older, their
twice yearly travels became less frequent and shorter in distance,
although they did keep spending summers traveling by carriage around
(13:53):
London and the surrounding area and just stopping wherever their
hearts desired. Sometime around eighteen ten or eighteen eleven, And
began having serious issues with asthma, and her health generally declined.
In the autumn of eighteen twenty two, she visited the
seaside town of Ramsgate in the hopes of improving her health,
and she was refreshed by it temporarily. In early January,
(14:17):
she had what one biographer called end quote attack of
her disease. Per that account, which we're going to talk
about in a little more depth in a moment, A
doctor was called two days after her issues began, arriving
on January eleventh, eighteen twenty three. In an odd detail
in that account, it stated that she read about a
recent murder a couple of weeks later, and that due
(14:40):
to her weekend state and the shock of this information
that she read, which the biographer says happened accidentally, she
experienced a temporary delirium. But though that passed and she
was doing well the first week of February, Anne Radcliffe
died in her sleep on February seventh, eighteen twenty three.
Perhaps more unsettling than anything Radcliffe ever wrote in her
(15:03):
work was her biographer's claim that quote her countenance after
death was delightfully placid, and continued so for some days.
She was interred at Saint George's at Hanover Square in
the Chapel of Ease. Yeah, I'm like you just watched
her look peaceful for several days, okay. Perhaps indicative of
(15:26):
the quiet style of her life. There were not a
ton of obituaries in the papers, the way that you
would normally expect to see for a famous person. The
ones that do appear are brief. One from the Yorkshire
Harold Reads in its entirety quote on Friday week Missus
Anne Radcliffe. The wife of William Radcliffe, Esquire of Stafford Place, Pimlico.
(15:47):
This is like, that's the whole sentence, because it's like
a list of obituaries. So when you're like, that doesn't
make sense. That's why. She had been indisposed for some
time with a violent cold, which terminated in inflammation and
took from this life. The much admired author of the
Mysteries of Udolpho and other works of imagination and genius,
(16:07):
almost equally popular among the female ornaments of English literature,
she will long hold one of the highest places. Missus
r was we believe, between fifty and sixty years of age.
She was a lady of the most amiable and interesting character,
possessed not only of all the accomplishments, but all the
virtues that could adorn her sex. She had lived long
(16:29):
enough to see her own work satirized. Shortly after Jane
Austen's death in eighteen seventeen, her novel Northanger Abbey was published.
This story is a satire of Gothic novels, and one
of the characters is given a copy of Mysteries of Udolpho.
Austin is said to have completed this book in eighteen
(16:50):
oh three, so it would have been a fairly fresh
response to Radcliffe's famous works, being part of the zeitgeist
of the time. In eighteen twenty six, Radcliffe's last work
of fiction was published, titled Gaston de BLANDVILLEU. She probably
called it Gaston de Blondeville. We don't know. She had
actually written this book well before her death in eighteen
(17:11):
oh two, after being inspired by a visit to Kenilworth Castle,
but she chose not to publish it. The book is
set in Anne's contemporary time, but the bulk of it
was a story within a story that's set in the
thirteenth century, and it was, according to the accompanying text,
that it got with publication. Never intended to be published,
but it was written merely as an amusement for Anne
(17:33):
and William. Preceding the release of this book, in October
eighteen twenty five, the Sunday Dispatch of London ran a
blurb that read, mister Radcliffe, husband of the great enchantress
Anne Radcliffe, author of the Mysteries of Udolpho the Italian,
The Romance of the Forest, etc. And who died about
the year eighteen twenty three, has at length though very
(17:55):
reluctantly consented to publish a romance which this celebrated lady
left behind her. The plot of Gaston de Blainville is
very much in line with Radcliffe's other books. The thirteenth
century story unfold at his wedding, which is held in
the court of King Henry the Third, when Gaston is
accused of murder by a merchant. At the event, the
(18:17):
king holds a trial to uncover all of the evidence.
There is a biography of her at the beginning of
the book, written by Sir Thomas Nuon Talford, with information
supplied in part by William This is the biography we
mentioned earlier. I originally was calling it a brief biography,
but then I realized it takes up a full one
(18:38):
third of the book, and the rest of her work
is the next two thirds. This book begins with the
following rather charming and quaint description. And when I say quaint,
I mean I mean that in a way that is
maybe not the kindest quote. The life of Missus Radcliffe
(18:58):
is a pleasing phenomenon in the literature of her time,
during a period in which the spirit of personality has
extended its influence till it has rendered the habits and
conversation of authors almost as public as their compositions. She
confines herself with delicate apprehensiveness to the circle of domestic
duties and pleasures known only by her works. Her name
(19:21):
was felt as a spell by her readers. We'll talk
more about this biography, but Telford's biography, which is written
it's described as a biographical memoir, suggested that Radcliffe retired
from publishing when she did because she didn't see a
way to surpass her last two novels and thought it
better to retire on top. This opening also goes on
(19:43):
to mention that once she'd retired from her fiction career,
the supernatural tone of her writing led her devoted fan
base to come up with all kinds of wild stories
about what had happened to her and why she stopped publishing.
There were rumors that she had died or that she
had a mental illness, but the reality was most likely
(20:04):
that she had made enough money from her work she
didn't need to work anymore unless she wanted to, and
at that point she wrote mostly for herself. This eighteen
twenty six biography states that she was quote thankfully enjoying
the choicest blessings of life with a cheerfulness as equable
as if she had never touched the secret springs of horror. Now,
(20:26):
that mention of horror would have probably irked Anne Radcliffe,
while she was considered the grand d'aume of Gothic fiction.
To her, there was a very important distinction between terror
and horror, and she wrote about that in an unfinished
essay that was included with the publication of Gaston de Blanville,
(20:47):
titled on the Supernatural in Poetry, which means it was
published right alongside this memoir. She wrote in it, terror
and horror are so far opposite that the first expands
the soul and awakens the faculty to a high degree
of life. The other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.
I apprehend that neither Shakespeare nor Milton, by their fictions,
(21:11):
nor mister Burke, by his reasoning anywhere, looked to positive
horror as a source of the sublime, though they all
agree that terror is a very high one. That mister Burke,
she referenced there was Edmund Burke. She was making a
callback to his essay, A philosophical inquiry into the origin
of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, in which
(21:31):
he suggested that terror was a source of the sublime
and that it could be used to produce the strongest
of human emotions. And in a move that seems sort
of weird, there's a statement from Anne's doctor in the
introductory biography. It's intended to put to rest all the
various rumors of madness. Doctor Scudmore's statement reads quote. Missus
(21:53):
Radcliffe had been for several years subject to severe catarrhal coughs,
and also was occasionally afflict with asthma. In March eighteen
twenty two, she was ill with inflammation of the lungs
and for a considerable time remained much indisposed. With the
summer season and change of air, she regained a tolerable
state of health. In the early part of January eighteen
(22:15):
twenty three, in consequence of exposure to the cold, she
was again attacked with inflammation of the lungs, and much
more severely than before. Active treatment was immediately adopted, but
without the desired relief, and the symptoms soon assumed a
most dangerous character. At the end of three weeks, However,
and contrary to all expectation, the inflammation of the lungs
(22:38):
was overcome, and the amendment was so decided as to
present a slight prospect of recovery. Alas, our hopes were
soon disappointed. Suddenly, in the very moment of seeming calm
from the previous violence of disease, a new inflammation seized
the membranes of the brain. The enfeebled frame could not
(22:58):
resist this freshness. So rapid in their course were the
violent symptoms that medical treatment proved wholly unavailing. In the
space of three days, death closed the melancholy scene. The
doctor's statement goes on to say that other than the
end when she had a brain infection, Missus Radcliffe's mind
quote was perfect in its reasoning powers. All of this information,
(23:25):
which is odd to have a doctor's statement of biography,
was included, though, according to Telford, because in the wake
of Anne's death the rumors of mental illness had begun again.
But the rest of the memoir of Anne Radcliffe that
he wrote reads so flowery in its praise of her
that there have been a lot of questions over the
years as to whether this was kind of a very
(23:45):
carefully developed piece of writing intended to establish the most
perfect version of her on the public record. And when
we say flowery praise, here's the kind of thing we're
talking about. It described her in terms like inquisitely proportioned
and perfectly well bred. So it kind of feels like
he's going beyond what you might normally write about someone,
(24:08):
even if you deeply admire them. So is this a
scenario where the biographer was simply prone to flowery wording
or is it one where there is a clear intention
to really puff up the subject's image. We don't really know.
One bit of insight that comes from Telford's analysis of
Radcliffe's work, because that's also included here, is that she
(24:29):
always explained the scary components in her books as simply
following the rules and conventions of Gothic novels. She felt
that she did not have the leeway as a creator
to claim that something supernatural was real. That's something that
she was often criticized for, like, oh, why do you
dial it back at the end, But that is the
explanation that Talford gave. Whether that's true or not, it's
(24:52):
certainly an interesting take. Next, we'll talk about the volume
of poetry that was published after Anne Radcliffe's death, and
we'll get to that. And it's less than enthusiastic reviews
after we hear from the sponsors. That keeps stuffymus in
history class going. Radcliffe's epic poem Saint Alban's Abbey was
(25:20):
also published posthumously. It was not well received. Biographer Ruth
Facer wrote of it, quote, it does her no justice.
It is long, rambling and tedious. I will give you
the poem's opening stanza, which will give you a pretty
clear indication of what the whole thing is like. No, Ye,
(25:41):
that pale and ancient choir, whose Norman tower lifts its
pinnacled spire, where the long abbey aisle extends and battled
roof or rufe ascends, cornered with buttresses shapely and small,
that sheltered the saint in a canopied stall, and enlightened
with hanging turret's fair that's so proudly they're mental coronals
wear they blend with a holy, a warlike air, while
(26:04):
they guard the murder's tomb beneath and patient warriors laid
in death. This wasn't the first time her poetry had
been published, but it was the first time An authorized
book of her poetry was released in eighteen sixteen. An
unauthorized book was assembled from various pieces of poetry that
she had included in the narratives of her prose. Christina Rosetti,
(26:28):
the mid nineteenth century writer famous for Goblin Market and
other poems, attempted a biography of Radcliffe during her career,
but found that there just was not enough material available
to her to complete it. That project was intended to
be part of a series initiated by John Ingram titled
Eminent Women. But aside from a handful of brief biographies
(26:49):
that did not hold a lot of information, there's the
one from Talford we talked about, and one from Sir
Walter Scott Rossetti was only able to turn up a
short letter and a small amount of journal material, which
was about travel details. For example, the kinds of things
that Anne wrote in her travel journals were things like quote,
made our way in the gig through the long, narrow
(27:10):
streets and then leaving Chatham on the left, mounted a
very steep road, having wide views of Chatham, the docks,
the shipping, the new barracks, a town themselves rising up
a hill with cannon and two small artificial hills with
flags a great prospect, but too broken and full of
scars and angles of fortifications and other buildings and excavations
(27:30):
to be quite pleasing. So it's an interesting example of
writing about surroundings and the details she included, but it
doesn't really offer insights into the author's personal story and
probably wouldn't help a biography much beyond lake she was
in this place at this time. Anne Radcliffe had not,
to the best of anyone's knowledge, kept a personal journal
(27:51):
or written friends or family about her private thoughts and feelings.
Her descriptions of places often read like little stories, but
there about the things she saw and her imagined life
for them. When visiting Noll House in the town of
Seven Oaks, southeast of London in eighteen oh seven, she
wrote of this Holme's impressive portrait gallery quote and the
(28:13):
little closet of entrance. The countenance of Guardini, the composer,
gives you the idea that he is listening to the
long drawn notes of his own violin Holbeinn's Erasmus, and
the gallery must be truth itself. There are some exceptions,
but they're kind of few and fleeting. For example, in
one entry. While she and William were visiting Seaford in
(28:34):
the late seventeen nineties, and who really loved that visit
wrote an entry that gives insight into her religious views
and her feelings on having lost her parents. Quote. Saw
the sunset behind one of the vast hills. The silent
course over this great scene awful, the departure melancholy. Oh God,
(28:55):
Thy great laws will one day be more fully known
by thy creatures. We shall more full understand thee and ourselves.
The God of order and of all this, and of
far greater grandeur. The creator of that glorious sun, which
never fails in its course, will not neglect us. His intelligent,
though frail creatures, not suffer us to perish. Who have
(29:15):
the consciousness of our mortal fate long before it arrives,
And of him, He who called us from nothing, can
again call us from death into life. In this month,
on the twenty fourth of July, my dear father died.
Two years since on the fourteenth of last March, my
poor mother followed him. I am the last leaf on
the tree. The melancholy greatness with which I was surrounded
(29:39):
this evening made me very sensible of this, with lack
of ready information about Anne might have been part of life.
For a long time, scholarly interests in her work really
died back quite a bit. What there was of it
was often riddled with assumptions, are colored by the rumors
of madness that had sprung up while Anne was still
(29:59):
al live. The texts of her books had been the
bulk of what people actually knew and little else. It
wasn't until the late twentieth century that biographers really started
trying to dig deeper into what might be available to
piece together the otherwise disparate pieces of information that were
known about her personal life. Literature professor Dale Townsend, writing
(30:20):
for the British Library in twenty fourteen, points to David
Puncher's book The Literature of Terror, released in nineteen eighty
as the spark that reignited scholarly interest in Radcliffe. We
did find mention of her in major press that predated that, though,
so it wasn't as though no one was talking about
Anne Radcliffe in her work. The press mention that I
(30:43):
found and read was in The Guardian in the summer
of nineteen sixty four, and it was part of an
article by Donald Thomas that was titled Queen of Terrors
and was all about Anne. One of the biographies published
since then, Mistress of Udolpho, was written by historian Richter
Norton in nineteen teen ninety nine, and it offered up
details which had not been known until Norton hunted them
(31:05):
down in obscure places. One of the things that Norton
points out, which is often left out of the more
brief narratives regarding Radcliffe, is that she was definitely a classist.
She could be really condescending to people that she perceived
as of a lower class than herself. Yeah. He shares
some examples of them, and it is a little like
(31:30):
that's a pity. In twenty fourteen, there was a surprise
in the Anne Radcliffe story when a letter that she
had written her mother in law was found amongst a
batch of other miscellaneous letters by Greg Boswell, a British
Library curator. That letter, which is dated August thirty first,
seventeen ninety seven, reads, Dear Madam, we are concerned to
(31:51):
hear such frequent complaints. The reasonableness of things in Yorkshire
is well known, but without insisting upon that if you
cannot be acommodated with the necessaries of life, and without
being a burden to anybody. If the supplies which William
sends are not sufficient, we can only desire you to
come and live with us, where you shall always find plenty.
(32:12):
Whatever you may do elsewhere, you will recollect the unwillingness
which William formerly expressed to send money to you at Broughton,
and your positive desire and assurances upon the subject. In
my last I assured you we did not for a
moment suppose you had received a two pound note when
you assured us to the contrary, and it was therefore
(32:32):
unnecessary for you to vindicate yourself again. He joins me
in love and good wishes to you, and I remain
dear Madam your affectionate A Radcliffe. So it seems like
William and Ann had sent William's mother Deborah Radcliffe some money,
but it had not arrived. So Anne's essentially saying, this
would be a heck of a lot easier if you
would move to London so we could take care of you.
(32:55):
Mister Buzzwell believes this may be an indicator that Anne's
relationship with Zabra Burah had informed the strained relationship between
the character of Elena Rosalba in the book The Italian
and her fictional mother in law. I do love that
bit at the end of like you told me you
didn't get it. I believed you. You don't have to
(33:15):
keep telling me. There are two quotes that make the
most sense to me, at least to end on when
summing up the life of Anne Radcliffe. The first is
by Sir Walter Scott, and it sums up her literary life. Quote.
Missus Radcliffe as an author has the most decided claim
(33:35):
to take her place among the favored few who have
been distinguished as the founders of a class or school.
She led the way in a particular style of composition,
affecting powerfully the mind of the reader, which has since
been attempted by many, but in which no one has
attained or approached the excellencies of the original inventor. In
his biography of Anne Radcliffe, Richter Norton wrote this description
(33:59):
of her, which it seems like a good place to
end things, since it sums her up not so much
as a writer, but as a person. Quote. The public
image of Missus Radcliffe as a mad genius and the
sensational nature of her novels are in sharp contrast to
the ordinary preoccupations of her middle class domestic life. She
loved dogs and music, enjoyed excursions to Dover and Worthing,
(34:22):
was fond of the sound of Greek, though she could
not understand a word of it, and felt it was
at least as important to be considered a gentlewoman as
a genius. Anne Radcliffe, I hope we find tons more
stuff of hers, but I doubt we will. Yeah, like
somewhere there's a cash of letters where she's like those
mean girls. I doubt it. I have listener mail. This
(34:46):
is another one that goes back to William Morgan, the
gift that keeps giving because lots of people have thoughts
about William Morgan. This one is from our listener Alice,
who writes, thank you Holly and Tracy for the recent
podcast on William Morgan. I listened to with special interest
remembering a news article I'd seen on my second great
grandfather's connection to Morgan. Judge Moses Taggart Esquire, my second
(35:07):
great grandfather, was credited with a part in the Memorial
to Morgan in eighteen eighty two. I'm including a link
to one article citing Taggart's participation. My ancestors have a
long history as judges, postmasters and attorneys in Batavia. I
sincerely wish I could get back there to visit. Thank
you for helping to bring this bit of my history
to life. A little from that paper, she includes a quote.
(35:31):
A few weeks later, it is reported in the same
paper that the Wetland Ladies had supplemented Missus Morgan's little
New Year's gift with twenty dollars. Her card of acknowledgment
is worth reading. The undersign tenders to the Ladies of
Wheatland her warmest expressions of gratitude for their friendly condolence
and benevolent and well timed donation. Such expressions of kindness
(35:53):
serve to gladden the heart of a disconsolate and helpless
female suffering under one of the most singular and distressing
bereavings that has ever befallen her sex. She is a
stranger in a strange land, and dependent on charity for support.
This affecting epistle was written, it is said, by mister Taggart,
a lawyer of Batavia, who, at the dedication of Morgan's
(36:14):
monument at Batavia September eleventh, eighteen eighty two, was among
the liveliest in his reminiscences of that martyr. Alice also
attaches pictures of fur babies. Yeah, Gandolf, the Gray and
Bonds who are twelve years old and very beautiful babies,
(36:34):
both of them. I don't know. We have twelve year
old cats that I think are speeding up. I'm a
little scared of it, but we'll see what happens. Alice,
thank you so much for sharing this. I always love
when people have connections to the stories that we tell.
If you have such a connection, maybe you have a
secret letter from Mann Radcliffe, please write us. If you do,
(36:56):
you can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History and it's a great time to subscribe to
the show if you haven't already. You can do that
on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your
favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
(37:17):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
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Tracy Wilson
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