Radcliffe, ANN, novelist, was born in London, 9th July 1764, of respectable tradespeople with good connections. Her maiden name was Ward, but in her twenty-third year, at Bath, she married William Radcliffe, a graduate of Oxford and sometime student of law, who became proprietor and editor of the weekly English Chronicle. She took to writing to pass the time when alone, and as early as 1789 published The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, which was followed by A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797). For the last she received £800; for its predecessor, £500. From this time she published no more novels—'like an actress in full possession of her applauded powers,' says Scott, 'she chose to retreat from the stage in the full blaze of her fame.' She travelled with her husband abroad and all over England and Wales, and the jottings in her journal show how keen an eye she had for natural scenery, and how carefully she got up her castles and ruined abbeys. She was a modest and amiable woman, who did not publish herself nor sink the gentlewoman in the writer. So little was she known to the public that in her own lifetime there was widely current an absurd story that her mind had given way under the horrors evoked by her imagination. She suffered for twelve years from asthma, and died 7th February 1823. A sixth romance, Gaston de Blondeville, with a metrical tale, 'St Alban's Abbey,' and other poems, and a short life, was published in 1826.
As a novelist Mrs Radcliffe stands in time between Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve on the one hand and Sir Walter Scott on the other. She was mistress of every art of awakening the curiosity and enchaining the attention of a reader, and she displays great artistic power in the atmosphere of majestic gloom and mystery in which she enwraps her figures. She knew well how to make use of forest solitudes and every aspect of external nature suggestive of terror, but she ever failed lamentably in the conclusion of her stories by resolving the seemingly supernatural effects of the preceding pages into simple natural causes which the reader resents as inadequate. Further, her figures are mere shadows, without touch of reality, and her pages are unrelieved by ever a gleam of humour or even wit. But she was dear to our grandfathers, dearer still to our grandmothers; Crabb Robinson preferred her stories to Waverley; and so sagacious a writer as Dunlop could write, 'life has few better things than sitting at the chimney-corner in a winter evening and reading such absurdities.'
See Sir Walter Scott's Biographical Notices of Eminent Novelists, and Julia Kavanagh's English Women of Letters (2 vols. 1863).