Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic movement behing her literature Research Paper

Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic movement behing her literature - Research Paper Example Ann Radcliffe due to her reclusive nature was made the brunt of her contemporaries’ imagination and was accused of being a mad genius, a sorceress and a madwoman haunted by ghosts etc. Considered the most significant writer of the English Gothic genre, Ann Radcliffe changed the Gothic novel from a mere medium for the depiction of terror into a tool for exploring the psychology of terror and suspense. Her stress on emotion, insight, and the connection between atmosphere and sensibility helped make the way for the Romantic Movement in England. Radcliffes most famous novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), is one of the principal examples of Gothic literature. (Onorato& Cengage, 1997)1 Ann Radcliffe was extremely popular in her day. Her application of Gothic techniques, her talent to rouse terror and curiosity in her readers by setting up events which were seemingly supernatural, but which were afterwards logically explained by ordinary means, was widely imitated by other writers but never surpassed. Her construction of tastefully imaginary horrors (taste was equal to quality) and her stress on the supernatural was modern and Romantic, whereas her logical explanations belonged to the ordered world of eighteenth century England. Thus her novels offered contemporary readers a chance to indulge their penchant for the bizarre, the outrà © and the unusual by generally hinting at the immoral, decadent and the supernatural while in due course rectifying matters ,from a societal viewpoint , by vindicating the old world virtues of a submissive woman. The nature of Ann Radcliffe’s novels was startling to her readers and she was reviled by some critics as a misleader of youth and women. But her admirers called her the mighty enchantress. Ann Radcliffe was born in a lower-middle class family in Holborn, London. Her father was William Ward, a haberdasher and her mother was Ann Oates.troubled with asthma from youth, she was reserved by nature and read widely. In 1787,