SOURCE: "Mrs. Radcliffe's Landscapes: The Eye and the Fancy," in The University of Windsor Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, Fall-Winter, 1984, pp. 7-19.

In this essay, Murrah discusses how Radcliffe's reflective verbal pictures found in her published Journey serve as an introduction to her use of imaginative description of nature in her fiction.

Only fifteen years ago, it was still possible to say of Ann Radcliffe that her immense popularity in her own day had not at all survived the early nineteenth century and that only the literary historian or the fancier of fictional oddities continued to appreciate her works. But since that time our contemporary Romantic Movement has so much broadened and diversified its influence that the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century seems to have regained a portion of its former reading public, and the "Great Enchantress" of the English Romantic poets once more receives a certain reverence as...