SOURCE: "'The Great Enchantress': Ann Radcliffe," in The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction 1660-1800, Virago Press Limited, 1989, pp. 253-72.

In the following excerpt, Todd provides a detailed overview of Radcliffe's novels and discusses the traits that distinguish her from both her eighteenth-century predecessors, such as Samuel Richardson, and her nineteenth-century successors and contemporaries, such as Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mrs Radcliffe came into the public consciousness with her third novel, The Romance of the Forest, in 1791. This was followed in 1794 by The Mysteries of Udolpho and in 1797 by The Italian. The three novels span the 1790s, the years of liberal welcome for the early moderate phase of the French Revolution and the later comprehensive reaction in an England now at war. They also surround the publication of the two most notorious works of Wollstonecraft and Hays, and the sensational gothic novel The Monk of Matthew Lewis.

Ann Radcliffe...