SOURCE: “Ann Radcliffe and the Extended Imagination,” in Contemporary Review, Vol. 258, No. 1505, June, 1991, pp. 300-308.

[In the following essay, Bruce reviews the theme of the love of liberty in Udolpho, as well as the love of nature, and compares these ideas with some of Radcliffe's other works, including The Italian and The Romance in the Forest.]

‘You, who are so young, have you reason for sorrow?’, Emily St. Aubert is asked at the end of The Mysteries of Udolpho (chapter 38). Emily, the heroine of the book, has every right to answer, ‘Yes’. She has, in a short time, lost both her parents. Her marriage to the exquisite Chevalier de Valancourt has been broken off. There is no end to her troubles. Used though she is to freedom, and rejoicing in it, she is subjected to a series of ever more constricting imprisonments: first in the manor house in Toulouse belonging to her aunt, Mme. Chéron, who becomes her guardian after the death of her father; then, when that silly aunt marries the bandit-chief Montoni, in his palazzo in Venice; afterwards in Montoni's Apennine fortress, the Castle of Udolpho, a place of threats, spectacles and events all equally hideous; again in a cottage in Tuscany, watched over by a pair of Montoni's ruffians; finally, after her aunt has died from privation and disappointment, in still closer duress in Udolpho, until she asserts her own will and resolution, and breaks free, only to be shipwrecked on the coast of Languedoc. She is saved from the wreck to be told stories of Valancourt's depravities in Paris, to which she too credulously, and to her own injury, listens.

It is a vivid tale, located in Italy and the south of France, and invented by a tiny invalid recluse, the whole span of whose travels lay between Westmorland and the Upper Rhine. The author contemplated the Pyrenees and the Apennines from her residences in the flatlands of Chiswick, Lambeth and Lower Belgravia.

The only child of parents who had moved from Chesterfield to London to set up a small haberdashery in East Holborn, Ann Radcliffe was born in 1764, the year in which the first ‘Gothick’ novel, Walpole's Castle of Otranto, was published.¹ When their daughter was seven years old they moved once more, in order to manage Josiah Wedgwood's china-shop in Bath. During the following fifteen years she often stayed in Chiswick with her uncle, a retired Liverpool merchant of bookish tastes. Although shy and no conversationalist herself, Ann Radcliffe heard plenty of literary talk there, which encouraged her in her copious solitary reading of Shakespeare, Milton and her favourite landscape-poets of the eighteenth century, such as James Thomson, an inhabitant of nearby Richmond. At the age of twenty-three she married William Radcliffe, who had drifted into literary hackwork from his study of law in the Inner Temple.² They settled in Lambeth, then a rural suburb, where during eight years of hectic production she wrote five novels which were admired by contemporaries as diverse as Scott, Keats and Byron. The last three published in her lifetime are once more in print: the enchanting and enchanted Romance of the Forest; the intricately cohesive Mysteries of Udolpho; and The Italian, her most concentrated novel, and widely regarded as her masterpiece. She wrote one more novel but would not publish it, withdrawing instead into her new house near the mews of Buckingham Palace and the seclusion she preferred.³ Her experiences were scarcely more adventurous than those of Jane Austen, but how she used them for an imaginative leap!

She heightens the scenery of the Lake District, which she knew, in her descriptions of the Alps, which she did not:

patches of young verdure, fragrant shrubs and flowers, looked gaily among the rocks, often fringing their brows, or hanging in tufts from their broken sides; and the buds of the oak and mountain ash were expanding into foliage

(M.U., chapter 14).

She contrives a landscape from atlases, travellers' stories, guide books, ecological studies and pictorial records; from the same exact researches as those of that other master of detail loaded with suspense, Georges Simenon. The story of The Romance of the Forest is adapted from an eighteenth-century collection of famous French trials. She studied Italian scenery through Mannerist paintings. ‘The scene,’ she declares at one point, ‘was such as only the dark pencil of a Domenichino, perhaps, could have done justice to’ (M.U., chapter 30). She is painstaking in her investigations. She explores even the botany and geology of the Mediterranean coast. The Comte de Villefort, lost with his party in the Pyrenees during a thunderstorm, absurdly entertains his companions with a lecture on the minerals and fossils of those mountains (M.U., chapter 50).

Ann Radcliffe's informed imagination often transcends actual experience, as in her descriptions of Venice, which she had never seen:

The rising dawn now enlightened the mountain tops of Fruili; but their lower sides, and the distant waves that rolled at their feet, were still in deep shadow. Emily, sunk in tranquil melancholy, watched the strengthening light spreading upon the ocean, showing progressively Venice with her islets, and the shores of Italy, along which boats with their pointed lateen sails began to move

(M.U., chapter 18).

Under her unremitting inward gaze Venice and its straits become a seascape as timeless as those of Claude Lorrain.

How different from Jane Austen, who would not locate Persuasion in Northampton until her sister Cassandra had verified that there were hedgerows there! Ann Radcliffe worked like Gainsborough, who often painted his landscapes from stones, small scraps of vegetation and pieces of looking-glass arranged in candlelight, and in his visionary recollection, upon a table-top; or Degas, who once used a crumpled handkerchief as the model for a cloud. The inner supposition was everything. Ann Radcliffe did not emulate Turner, who once tied himself to a mast in order to record a snow-storm. She is by no means a camera. A fog from the Thames permeates the trees of her Apennines:

The sun had now set some time; heavy clouds, whose lower skirts were tinged with sulphurous crimson, lingered in the west, and threw a reddish tint upon the pine forests

(M.U., chapter 31).

Re-arranged scenes, re-arranged experiences! Ann Radcliffe does make mistakes. She moves the Pyrenees east and the Apennines north. The Mysteries is set in the sixteenth century, yet the manners, speech and decorums of the characters belong to the reign of George III. The Romance of the Forest is a tale of the early seventeenth century: the heroine, Adeline, shudders at the notion of meeting a young man alone in the forest, although she is in the greatest danger, from which he can rescue her, and she knows him well. When he does not arrive in time for the appointment, her pride is offended and she leaves the place ‘with disgust and self-accusation’ (R.F., chapter 7). These are the sentiments of Richardson rather than those of Shakespeare. For all that, the topographer of the sea-coast of Bohemia would hardly have accused her of inaccuracy. What did it matter? In spite of her careful studies, she was not recording history but a subjective fantasy, lit and darkened by her personal magic, although assigned to a past age.

But one must grumble a little. The plot of The Mysteries of Udolpho, although Emily is forever on the move, is static in effect, possibly because of the frequent descriptive passages, which sometimes achieve almost the shock of poetry but are sometimes repetitious and flat; and because of the sameness of the events, sensational though they are. It does not hasten forward to one main action but cranks along, through a green uniformity of forests and precipices, from one singular experience to another. Emily jogs along on her mule, brooding on the majesty of the Pyrenees, and her father is taken ill and dies. On she plods. She reflects on the grandeur of the Apennine heights, although Ann Radcliffe herself described the main road in Arundel as ‘fearfully steep’ and became giddy whilst climbing the belfry at Utrecht.⁴

Sublime though the scenery is, before long Emily is shut up in a bandits' fortress. Later her friend, Blanche de Villefort, so close to Emily in her character that she could be called another Emily, takes her place as the she-protagonist of the novel. Blanche in turn ambles through the Pyrenees, praising their glories, and is captured by bandits too. Ann Radcliffe heightens their wanderings with the mysteries of her title, mysteries not only at Udolpho but also all over southern France and northern Italy: in Emily's own Gascon chateau, and around the convent of Ste Claire in Languedoc and within the nearby manor house.

There are hints of ‘dreadful import’, spates of spectral music, a ghastly sight behind curtains at Udolpho—a disembodied voice as well—and phantoms in a locked bedroom at the Comte de Villefort's mansion. There are false clues which lead to ‘misleading conjectures’, as Ann Radcliffe calls them and mockingly encourages. She teases her readers by referring to her mysteries again and again. She alludes to the shocking sight behind the curtains seven times in the course of the novel. Then, at last, she provides a rational explanation for everything that has taken place; which is no less than Jane Austen does in her tart satire on Ann Radcliffe's novels in Northanger Abbey. The ghosts in the bedchamber are robbers from a secret tunnel. The figure behind the curtains is a waxwork memento mori. The explanations are not always convincing. Emily's succession of calamities is likewise too protracted for ready belief or, at times, patience. Ann Radcliffe's quotation from Shakespeare as the epigraph of Chapter 33 may occasionally be applied to herself:

I play the torturer, by small and small,
To lengthen out the worst that may be spoken.

The story of The Mysteries of Udolpho is less gripping than that of The Italian, but its purpose is less to unfold a tale than to present a theme. That theme is the love of liberty. In The Mysteries of Udolpho liberty is infringed by physical confinement, by misplaced sensibility, by superstition and female subservience. The shipwreck, an instance of the turbulence of Nature which Emily so much admires, but is happily rescued from, is the turning point of the novel. Emily is restored to her original freedom, but not completely. She is still under the moral duress of her rescuer, the Comte de Villefort, a rationalist who sits up reading Tacitus whilst awaiting the appearance of a supposed ghost; but the Count is far from rational in turning Emily against her intended husband, Valancourt, on the strength of unchecked rumours. He devastates her with a recital of hearsay exaggerations about Valancourt's nights out in Paris, and luridly affirms that Valancourt has joined a set of men ‘who live by plunder, and pass their lives in continual debauchery’ (M.U., chapter 38). Valancourt, admittedly a figure of mist, gauze and tinsel, like the heroes of so many romantic novels, is at least guiltless of the depravities Villefort accuses him of, and later proves the best of husbands to Emily. ‘Is this the wisdom of men,’ Ann Radcliffe implies, ‘to whom we are so obedient?’.

To Villefort's soft tyranny Emily equally softly submits, just as she did to that of her father, a foolish old gentleman who lost them both on a crazy journey along obscure tracks across the Lower Pyrenees when the straightforward roads were well-known to him. He carelessly shoots Valancourt because he looks like a bandit; he impoverishes Emily by his impulsive trust in the banker Motteville; he finally places her in the care of her wilful aunt, Mme Chéron. He ruins himself and nearly ruins his daughter.

Throughout, Emily submits to male dominance: ‘the haughtiness of command and the quickness of discernment’ which awes her when she encounters Montoni (M.U., chapter 2). He is haughty, in fact, because never opposed, and quick only to discern slavish female subterfuges. She mistakes his brutality for courage: ‘the difficulties and tempests of life, which wreck the happiness of others, roused and strengthened all the powers of his mind’ (M.U., chapter 16). To contest Montoni's will, Emily decides, ‘would not be fortitude, but rashness’ (M.U., chapter 33). Like the Marquis de Montalt in The Romance of the Forest, Montoni is seemingly all-powerful, his decisions sealed against any appeal. Only when Montoni tries to frighten her out of the estate she has inherited from her aunt does Emily discover that his ferocity and resolution are no more than a blind for his greed. After that discovery, Emily makes a firm and successful bid to escape from Udolpho, although to lapse into a milder subservience to the Comte de Villefort, who reminds her, anachronistic eighteenth-century savant as he is in this tale set at the time of the Spanish Armada, of her father.

At the head of Chapter Six of The Mysteries of Udolpho Ann Radcliffe quotes her beloved Thomson, whose joy in landscape she shared:

I care not, Fortune! what you me deny;
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace,
You cannot shut the windows of the sky.

Blanche de Villefort, fresh from her convent school, voices the sense of open-air liberation which is so strongly felt by Emily and her suitor Valancourt. ‘If you could know what pleasure I feel in wandering here at liberty, and in seeing the sky and the fields and the woods all round me!’, Blanche exclaims (M.U., chapter 37). Perhaps Ann Radcliffe smiles a little at the elation of Blanche, just released from school, but Blanche's sentiments are basically her own, derived in part from Rousseau, whose Reveries of a Solitary Walker had recently been translated into English. Nature is a restorative to Adeline too, in The Romance of the Forest:

The balmy freshness of the air, which breathed the first pure essence of vegetation … revived Adeline, and inspired her with life and health. As she inhaled the breeze, her strength seemed to return, and, as her eyes wandered through the romantic glades that opened into the forest, her heart was gladdened

(R.F., chapter 1).

As Emily leaves the opera-house in Venice, she reflects on ‘how infinitely inferior all the splendour of art is to the sublimity of nature’ (M.U., chapter 16). Emily's father, M. de St. Aubert, likewise rejoices in landscape, especially after a grave illness:

The refreshing pleasure from the first view of nature, after the pain of illness and the confinement of a sick chamber, is above the conception, as well as the descriptions, of those in health

(M.U., chapter 1).

Ann Radcliffe, who was afflicted with a severe asthma, could speak feelingly about that.

In most of her misadventures, Emily is partly the victim of that late eighteenth-century malady, an over-acute sensibility. She seldom meets Valancourt, or parts from him, except in tears. Sometimes they weep in unison (M.U., chapter 6). She induces and protracts her emotions. Moved by a premonition of the death of her father, she leans from a window in ‘contemplation of Futurity’:

Elevated and enwrapped, while her eyes were often wet with tears of sublime devotion and solemn awe, she continued at the casement till the gloom of midnight hung over the earth

(M.U., chapter 6).

Emily weeps much and sleeps little, as do most of Ann Radcliffe's heroines. Adeline's nights in The Romance of the Forest are mostly wakeful: ‘Adeline's thoughts were too busy to suffer her to repose, and … she indulged the sorrow which reflection brought’ (R.F., chapter 4). One of Ann Radcliffe's loveliest passages recounts how Adeline, after a restless night, rises at dawn, surrounded by beauty difficult for her not to heed:

The faint light of day now trembled through the clouds, and, gradually spreading from the horizon, announced the rising sun … and the fresh gale came scented with the breath of flowers, whose tints glowed more vivid through the dewdrops that hung on their leaves

(R.F., chapter 5).

A Keatsian landscape!

Most of Emily's adventures take place at night. There is a strongly morbid constituent in her sensibility. Although still depressed by hearing of the scandals about Valancourt, she feels a ‘thrilling curiosity’ to see the deathbed of the Marquise de Villeroi. Her ‘solemn emotions’ are ‘in unison with the present tone of her mind, depressed by severe disappointment’:

Cheerful objects rather added to, than removed this depression; but perhaps she yielded too much to her melancholy inclination

(M.U., chapter 41).

Emily, shaky and easily afeared, but with remarkable powers of recovery, goes out of her way to seek danger. Like Blanche de Villefort, she loves to be out in a thunderstorm. She listens with ‘a gloomy pleasure’ to the thunder in the distance and rejoices in ‘the arrowy lightnings’ (M.U., chapter 29). Jane Austen's heroines would have been afraid of wet shoes. At Udolpho, Emily ‘would lean on the wall of the terrace and, shuddering, measure with her eye the precipice below till the dark summits of the woods arrested it’ (M.U., chapter 19). Fear merely incites her curiosity. Locked up in a room in the castle, Emily is dismayed to find that the room has a second, unlocked door, which she tries to secure by placing a chair against it. A blast of wind swings the door inwards, and the chair with it, to reveal a secret stairway:

She took the lamp to the top of the steps, and stood hesitating whether to go down; but the profound stillness and the gloom of the place awed her: and determined to inquire further when daylight might assist the search, she closed the door, and placed against it a stronger guard

(M.U., chapter 18).

Similarly, the inquisitiveness of Adeline in The Romance of the Forest generally overcomes her timidity. Hidden in a room in a ruined abbey, she discovers, by the light of ‘a shattered casement placed high from the floor’, a second door behind a billowing tapestry, and then a third door. After ‘some moments of hesitation’ she ‘gained courage, and determined to pursue the inquiry.’ She determines, ‘I will, at least, see to what that door leads’. Beyond the door she finds a rusty dagger and an indecipherable manuscript (R.F., chapter 8). Here we perceive three elements in Ann Radcliffe's fascination: surprise, foreboding and a riddle.

These doors blown in the wind typify Ann Radcliffe's passion for Nature, even at its most violent. In The Mysteries of Udolpho she prefers the natural life to the man-made life; admittedly a preference common amongst the writers of the late eighteenth century. It is a novel about escape from human enclosures. As in Smollett's representation of London in Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker, great cities are seen as centres of corruption. The highest praise Emily's father can offer Valancourt is, ‘This young man has never been at Paris’ (M.U., chapter 4). It is little wonder that Emily, a thoroughly proper girl influenced by her father's mistrust of the big city, credits the Comte de Villefort's gossip to the extent of ending her engagement to Valancourt when Valancourt does go to Paris. ‘Why was I forced to Paris,’ exclaims Valancourt, weeping, ‘and why did I yield to allurements which were to make me despicable for ever?’ (M.U., chapter 39). When at last Valancourt is vindicated from the spiteful inventions about his conduct there, and Emily, convinced of his rectitude of character, consents to marry him, they retire into the guileless countryside. Emily's old peasant housekeeper concludes, in her rural simplicity, ‘To see how some people fling away their happiness, then cry and lament about it, just as if it was not their own doing, and as if there were more pleasure in wailing and weeping than in being at peace!’ (M.U., chapter 52).

The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents is not primarily a thematic novel in the manner of The Mysteries of Udolpho, although the outcry against the coercion of women persists alongside an exposition of the inhumane divisions caused by social class. The heroine, Ellena, is less subservient to men than imperilled by them and in their stranglehold; although a woman, the heartless Marchesa, directs the men. From the tightening grip Ellena makes spirited attempts to extricate herself, aided by her suitor, Vicentio di Vivaldi—a flat character but more active than Valancourt, who never comes near the Castle of Udolpho. Ellena, constantly in danger in her struggle for survival, has no leisure to develop her sensibilities as Emily does, and the rush of dangers gives Ann Radcliffe no time to explore her personality as closely as that of Emily. Ellena remains blank, ingenuous and neutral: a good schoolgirl.

The deepest and the dominating character in The Italian is the monk Schedoni, who wolfishly abuses his priestly authority. That is not to say that Ann Radcliffe is an Evangelical bigot: she makes Vivaldi shed tears of relief at the justice of the Roman Inquisition during the middle of the eighteenth century, the period in which the novel is set (Ital., volume 3, chapter 7). Schedoni, mistrusted even by his fellow monks, is more ferocious than Montoni, who at least stops short of murder. Schedoni, morally contorted and inwardly tormented, is a more intricate character than that gluttonous, conceited autocrat. Ellena is threatened by Schedoni in dire reality, whereas Emily only thinks she is by Montoni. The Italian is a sterner, barer tale than The Mysteries of Udolpho but all the more forceful for that.

Ann Radcliffe, guide-book at her elbow, plunges into The Italian with an anecdote about some English tourists who visit the convent church of the Order of the Black Penitents in Naples and witness the frenzy of an assassin who has sought sanctuary there. Schedoni too, likewise an assassin—a fratricide, in fact—is a wretched being, cast out by God and Man for his persisting crimes. Having taken refuge in the Order of the Black Penitents, he becomes confessor to Vivaldi's mother, with whom, in the hope of ecclesiastical advancement, he conspires to prevent Vivaldi's marriage to the apparently low-born Ellena.

Schedoni abducts her and shuts her up in a remote convent, where she meets a motherly nun called Sister Olivia, who is later revealed to be indeed Ellena's mother, the former Contessa di Bruno. It is a short spell of tenderness in Ellena's harsh world. Ann Radcliffe is at her best in her tense account of Ellena's escape from the convent, although Ellena has Adeline-like misgivings about the propriety of escaping in the sole company of Vivaldi. Her misgivings are curtailed when she is swiftly recouped by Schedoni, who is about to murder her on the orders of the Marchesa di Vivaldi when he finds evidence, misleading in fact, that she is his own daughter. By this time the affair has come to the notice of the Inquisition in Rome, before which both Vivaldi and Schedoni appear. Schedoni, betrayed by his confessor and his own confederates, poisons himself. Ellena, proved to be the daughter of the brother Schedoni murdered, the true Conte di Bruno, is now acceptable to Vivaldi's family, and he is allowed to marry her without more ado.

The sombre narrative frees Ann Radcliffe's descriptive powers to the full. She is able to depict the dark and silent vastness of the Roman Inquisition's dungeons, of which she certainly had no experience, where Vivaldi is imprisoned. Without speaking, two men dressed in black unbar his cell and advance upon him. They take him down to a large hall, ‘and thence through an avenue, and down a long flight of stairs, that led to subterranean chambers: His conductors did not utter a syllable during the whole progress’ (Ital., volume 3, chapter 5). Contrary to his expectations, he is being led not to a torture-chamber but to a court of justice, before which he is acquitted: another ‘misleading conjecture’.

The straightforwardness, by Ann Radcliffe's standards, of the narrative allows her room to explore the troubled character of Schedoni, terrific but terrified, determined in his ends but irresolute in his means, self-destructively destructive. To his fellow monks his lofty bearing betrays ‘the gloomy pride of a disappointed man’ instead of the ambition of a noble mind. ‘There was something terrible in his air,’ Ann Radcliffe remarks, ‘something almost superhuman.’ Schedoni clearly owes something to the Satan of Milton, one of her favourite poets:

His cowl, too, as it threw a shade over the livid features of his face, increased its severe character, and gave an effect to his large melancholy eye, which approached to horror. His was not the melancholy of a sensible and wounded heart, but apparently that of a gloomy and ferocious disposition

(Ital., volume I, chapter 2).

His eyes, staring from a face scored with many extinguished passions, ‘were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate, at a single glance, into the hearts of men, and to read their most secret thoughts; few persons could support their scrutiny, or even endure to meet them twice’ (Ital., volume I, chapter 2).

Schedoni is as ruthless with himself as he is with others until at last, like the Marquis de Montalt in The Romance of the Forest, he is cornered by the law. When Schedoni's associates turn against him and give their evidence to the Roman Inquisition, he is unmoved even by the certainty of being sentenced to death: ‘and when the dreadful sentence of the law was pronounced, it made no visible impression on his mind’ (Ital., volume III, chapter 8). Before poisoning himself, to avoid what he calls ‘an ignominious death’, Schedoni takes care also to poison his accomplice and betrayer, Father Nicola.

At only one point in the story does Schedoni's fixity of purpose weaken: when he is about to murder Ellena at the instigation of the Marchesa di Vivaldi, whose patronage has restored his respectability, and even given him spiritual authority after his earlier degradation. Faced with Schedoni, Ellena is up against dangers and perplexities more urgent than those of Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Taking his dagger, although with shaking hands, Schedoni mounts the stairs to plunge it into her. What a difference between his slaughtering crudity here and his smooth hauteur in Naples!

Schedoni and his underlings, having kidnapped Ellena, drag her across the plains of southern Italy to the Adriatic coast where, in a disused villa owned by the marchesa, he is to carry out the marchesa's ‘baleful resolutions’:

It seemed highly improbable that the Marchesa di Vivaldi had sent her here merely for imprisonment … not for long imprisonment but for death

(Ital., volume II, chapter 7).

Secular influence and a vitiated priesthood combine to destroy the guiltless Ellena. Schedoni hopes to rise from her gore to an incense-clouded dignity.

Terrified, Ellena tries to escape along the beach to a fishing village in the distance. Up and down the sands Schedoni stalks her. Comforted by his monk's habit, under which he carries a knife, Ellena takes hope: ‘It is probably as much his wish, as it is his duty, to succour the unfortunate.’ To her plea for help he replies, ‘Poor insect! Who would wish to crush thee?’. He speaks to her as something less than human, but the answer to his question is that he means to crush her. To move forward from that distressing seashore to the actual atrocity: as Schedoni uncovers Ellena's bosom to twist his dagger in, he discovers, on a chain about her neck, a miniature portrait in his own image. Schedoni finds his resemblance on the trembling form which he, himself trembling, intends to stab: a token of kinship? As Ann Radcliffe's favourite Milton asked in Paradise Lost: ‘Of whom such massacre / Make they but of their brethren, men of men?’ (P.L. XI 679). Schedoni shares her humanity as well as her ancestors.

It may be asked why Ann Radcliffe, withdrawn, ailing and seldom leaving her house, where she was imprisoned more direly than any of her heroines by her asthma, was so busy writing stories about captive maidens in intemperate regions she had never visited. There may be something Godwinian in Ann Radcliffe's reading of history. In his Enquiry concerning Political Justice of 1793, Godwin distinguishes between private reason, or self-aggrandisement; and public reason, which subordinates private reason to political justice. Without public reason, the rulers of feudal times were, in the words of William Hazlitt, ‘speedily converted into hordes of barbarians and banditti.’⁵ Hazlitt cites the opening of Sir Walter Scott's Quentin Durward, a tale of the late fifteenth century, when, Scott writes, ‘in Auvergne alone there were three hundred nobles whose most ordinary actions were robbery, rape and murder.’ Although Ann Radcliffe's heroines escape the hazards of the ancient times which her admirer Scott deplored whilst recording them, she was, like Hazlitt, glad to live in the same age as Scott, when public justice restricted the private will of such polished banditti as the Marquis de Montalt, Signor Montoni and the Marchesa di Vivaldi.

Notes

1. Aline Grant. Ann Radcliffe, Denver, 1951, p.12.

2. ibid, pp.38-43.

3. ibid, p.77.

4. ibid, pp.68 & 100.

5. William Hazlitt. The Spirit of the Age, ed. E. D. Mackerness, 1969, p.44.

The texts cited are those of the first editions of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) and the revised fourth edition of The Romance of the Forest (1794), which are accurately reproduced in The World's Classics series issued by the Oxford University Press, 1979-86.