Ann Radcliffe was the most popular writer of her day and and she is universally admired. Her popularity continued through
the nineteenth century.
As little is known about her life, many stories sprang up about her. Some said that she had gone mad as a result of her
dreadful imagination and that she been confined to an asylum. Others argued that she had been captured as a spy in Paris, or
that she ate rare pork chops before retiring to stimulate nightmares for her novels. She was also falsely rumoured to be
dead many times.
What seems to be true is that she was happily married to William Radcliffe who was the owner and editor of The English
Chronicle. He encouraged her to write but nobody knows why she stopped publishing at the age of 32.
In 1833, years after her death, her husband published some of her poems and a historical romance, Gaston de Blondville; we
do not know if she intended to publish these works. Gaston de Blondville is of interest because it is her only novel that
does not explain away the supernatural happenings and because it contains, apparently as a preface, her thoughts on the
sublime and Gothic fiction.
