SOURCE: "Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors of Power," in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 4, July, 1994, pp. 327-46.

In the following essay, Michasiw discusses the ways in which individual characters in Radcliffe's novels struggle with other characters and with the political and social institutions that define and determine the limits of power relations. In particular, he focuses on ways in which terror becomes not only an irrational response to illusory horrors in the story, but also a rational response to personal and institutional abuses of power.

Late in Ann Radcliffe's last novel, Gaston de Blondeville, the narrator pauses to consider the burdens of kingly and other authority:

Sorrow and remorse . . . alone seemed to occupy the King, who now, with the intention, as he persuaded himself, of preventing further evil, was about to execute an act of injustice and stern cruelty. And thus it is, if kingly power pertain to a...