Ann Radcliffe

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Ann Radcliffe (picture without origin, without year)

Ann Radcliffe (* 9 July 1764 as Ann Ward in London , England ; † 7. February 1823 ibid) was an English writer , one of the most popular representatives of the Gothic novel ( Gothic Novel ) their time.

Life

Ann Ward was born in the London borough of Holborn as the daughter of the haberdashery dealer William Ward and spent her childhood and adolescence with relatives of higher social rank. In 1772 she moved with this family to Bath , where she went to school. At the age of 23 she married William Radcliffe, an Oxford graduate and political reporter who later became the owner and editor of the English Chronicle . He encouraged his wife to write to pass the time.

Her first attempts were the romance novels The Castle of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790), both of which were published anonymously. Her big breakthrough came with The Romance of the Forest (1791). The first edition was published anonymously, but all the others bore the name of the author. This novel established her alongside Clara Reeve as the most influential representative of the Gothic Novel, who represented her own style within the genre , which clearly stood out from that of the previous horror novels . The focus of her books was on the romantic pure and sensitive heroine, who has to learn in the course of the stories through frightening events to let her feelings guide her mind as well.

In an article published posthumously in 1826, Ann Radcliffe presented the soul-expanding terror as a source of the sublime or sublime in the sense of Edmund Burke's theoretical work of 1757 in contrast to the soul-narrowing horror. The sublime (Longinus) refers to the limitless, incomprehensible or not - Reproducible as a pre-romantic alternative to the classicist ideal of limitation and manageability. Unlike Clara Reeve, she ultimately explained all seemingly supernatural events as natural in her novels and thus paved the way for the horror novel to develop into the detective novel .

Many critics also found Radcliffe's talent for detailed atmospheric descriptions of landscapes to be particularly impressive. Her books have been translated into several languages.

Illustration from the French edition of The Mysteries of Udolpho ( Les Mystères d'Udolphe , 1798)

During her lifetime she published two other novels - The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). She liked to travel. In 1795 she published A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany .

Radcliffe's novels in various ways inspired the works of numerous colleagues such as the novel Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen , Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens , The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe , Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and many others. Sir Walter Scott described her as "the first poet of romance novels". She was acquainted with the sisters Sophia and Harriet Lee , whose Canterbury Tales were as popular as Radcliffe's novels.

Despite her great popularity, she lived a very withdrawn life. There were numerous adventurous rumors about her life which, among other things, told her to death several times while she was still alive or which she believed had gone mad. Contemporaries read information on this from the anonymously published Ode to Terror (1810). She suffered from asthma in her later years and died of an attack in 1823. After her death, one last novel by Gaston de Blondeville and parts of a travel diary entitled St. Alban's Abbey were published.

Her four best-known novels, Sicilian Romance , Romance of the Forest , The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian were all translated into German by Meta Forkel-Liebeskind immediately after they were published. A German complete edition of all novels appeared for the first time in the years 2016-18.

Works

  • The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (anonymous, 1789)
  • The castles of Athlin and Dunbayne . Translated by Maria Weber. BoD, Norderstedt 2017, ISBN 978-3-7448-9655-9 )
  • A Sicilian Romance (anonymous, 1790)
  • The Romance of the Forest (first anonymous edition, London 1791)
  • The Mysteries of Udolpho (London, GG and J. Robinson, 1794)
  • Udolpho's secrets . Volumes 1 and 2 (translated by Meta Forkel-Liebeskind, edited by Sylvia Kolbe, after the reprint by Franz Haas, Vienna / Prague, 1798), Engelsdorfer, Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3-95488-385-1 .
  • 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 Obersavtions During a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire and Westmorland, and Cumberland (London 1795)
  • Diary of a critical lady. Translated and introduced by Günther Elbin, Mercator-Verlag, Duisburg 2001, ISBN 3-87463-310-1 (excerpts from Ann Radcliffe's travelogue, concerning the Lower Rhine)
  • The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents , (London 1797)
  • The Italian or the confessional of the black penitentiary monks . Translation by Friedrich Polakovics . (Hanser, Munich 1973)
  • Ode to Terror (1810)
  • The Poems of Ann Radcliffe (1810)
  • Gaston de Blondeville , London (1826)

literature

Web links

Commons : Ann Radcliffe  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Ann Radcliffe  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Rolf Lessenich: Radcliffe, Ann. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 473 .
personal data
SURNAME Radcliffe, Ann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ward, Ann (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1764
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH February 7, 1823
Place of death London