by Lisa Kröger
Reading List
Not to be missed: The Blazing World is in the public domain and not hard to find with some online searching. The breadth of Cavendish’s imagination makes for a fun read.
Also try: If Margaret Cavendish’s outrageous life sounds like fiction, readers may be interested in Katie Whitaker’s book Mad Madge (Basic Books, 2003), which explores the paradoxes in the real Duchess’s life. For instance, Whitaker speculates that Cavendish was dyslexic, though she pushed herself to read and write.
Related work: The Black Dossier graphic novel from Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series (DC Comics, 2010) takes its characters on a trip to the Blazing World…which appears in 3-D when viewed with the glasses included with the book.
Terror over Horror
Ann Radcliffe
1764–1823
She’s not a horror writer, let’s get that straight. Ann Radcliffe wanted to terrify her readers, make them feel alive through her words. She wrote about blood and murder and terrifically terrifying villains. But she wasn’t a horror writer, not in the least.
She didn’t have to be. Eighteenth-century English readers couldn’t get enough of the macabre, and by the latter half of the century, the Gothic novel was the most popular genre of literature. Enter Ann Radcliffe, who wrote the most popular Gothic romances of the 1790s, making her a best-selling writer in her day and establishing the definitive formula for the genre. She is still considered the most significant Gothic writer in eighteenth-century English literature and, in the last decade of the 1700s, was at the forefront of a uniquely female-driven moment of women writing novels for women.
So who was Ann Radcliffe?
She was born Ann Ward in 1764 in Holborn, England, to a haberdasher and his wife. (Doesn’t that sound like the most British thing you’ve ever heard?) Not much is known about her childhood, though it’s said she was curious and clever—and a voracious reader, thanks in part to an aunt who left young Ann a number of books in her will. She also loved theater and the opera and attended both regularly as an adult. In 1787, around age 23, she married a journalist named William Radcliffe, who edited a radical paper called the Gazette, notable for its pro–French Revolution stance. The couple lived in London, though they traveled across Europe, including Switzerland, Germany, and Austria—places that would later inspire the long, detailed descriptions of landscapes in her writing.
Just two months after her marriage, Radcliffe began to write, anonymously publishing her first novel The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne with Hookham in 1789. It earned Radcliffe three shillings. The setting is the Scottish Highlands; the plot involves a peasant boy who discovers he is in fact an aristocrat. The book was not widely reviewed, but it set Radcliffe on the path to a career writing the Gothic. Her second novel, A Sicilian Romance (Hookham, 1790), was the first to bear her name on the cover; the book drew more reviews, many of them positive. Additional novels followed, including The Romance of the Forest (Hookham, 1791) and her most famous novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794 by G. G. and J. Robinson. By now, Radcliffe’s readership was well established, and the sale of her fourth book brought in £50. She continued to write for enjoyment, and in doing so became one of the era’s most successful female writers.
Mrs. Radcliffe’s Castle
The Mysteries of Udolpho takes place in the sixteenth century in southern France, where the young and beautiful Emily St. Aubert is living the perfect life, full of poetry and long walks in the woods. Emily and her father leave on a trip through the Pyrenees, where she meets the handsome and equally poetic Valancourt. If The Mysteries of Udolpho were a love story, then the tale might end here. However, this is a Gothic novel, so Emily’s father dies, leaving her an orphan. She goes to live with a wealthy aunt in the drafty castle Udolpho, only to be held captive there when her aunt marries the villainous Montoni.
Montoni tries to force Emily to marry his friend, the Count Morano, in a ploy for the two men to steal the women’s large estate. Also, the castle may or may not be haunted…(Spoiler: it’s not.) The castle at first seems haunted, thanks to various ghostly sights and sounds. But Radcliffe preferred the narrative technique of the “explained supernatural,” meaning that the spooky atmosphere turns out to have real-world explanations. For example, Emily is horrified to find, lurking behind an ominous black curtain, what she thinks is a rotting corpse but turns out to be a melted wax figure. That may seem like a letdown to modern horror readers (show us the bloody corpse, please), but Radcliffe’s choice was intentional. Ghosts are spooky, but the true threat was one she saw in the real world: men who were willing to abuse women in order to gain wealth.
Patriarchy and greed. They’ll get you every time, no supernatural phenomenon required.
Radcliffe’s popularity increased with each new book. She published her final Gothic novel, The Italian, in 1797. The plot revolves around a pair of star-crossed lovers, the orphan Vivaldi and the lovely Ellena. Vivaldi woos Ellena, but the girl’s mother and the villainous monk (seeing a trend here?) Father Schedoni scheme to keep the lovebirds apart. The book garnered rave reviews from, among others, writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Frances Burney; Radcliffe did receive some criticism for anti-Catholic sentiment in her narratives. Maybe one less evil monk, Mrs. Radcliffe? Her final work, Gaston de Blondeville, was released posthumously in 1826, though Radcliffe may have had reasons for not publishing it when she was alive. Although it is a typical Gothic novel, it is more than a bit rambling (read: looooooooooong). And the plot doesn’t always make sense, especially when she plays around with the supernatural (with real ghosts this time).
Today, Radcliffe is considered not only a pioneer of her genre but also a voice for women’s rights. Her particular (and incredibly popular) take on the female Gothic focused on the abuses women suffered at the hands of men, especially through traditional institutions like marriage.
Though she might not have written horror per se, Radcliffe knew how to terrify, and her work inspired countless writers who came after her. Sir Walter Scott, the Marquis de Sade, and even Edgar Allan Poe have cited her influence. She was particularly important as an example of a successful female author. In her day, so many women writers took to writing Gothic novels that critics began to call them the “Radcliffean school.” It’s difficult to imagine the horror genre without the familiar elements of the Gothic, and without Radcliffe’s captivating storytelling, we may not have had the Gothic horror novel at all.
HORROR VS. TERROR
In an 1826 essay, Ann Radcliffe wrote:
“Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.”
In other words, terror was high art, meant to shake the reader alive. Terror is standing on the edge of a cliff, feeling both fear and the overwhelming beauty of the scene in front of you. Horror pushes you over that cliff, leaving no appreciation for beauty or the sublime, just sheer and blinding fear followed by blood and guts. For Radcliffe, horror was low art, a bomb that destroys feeling, leaving the reader numb—and something true writers shouldn’t aspire to. Fortunately, not all writers of the Gothic agreed!
Reading List
Not to be missed: If you read only one Radcliffe novel, make it The Mysteries of Udolpho. Newer editions are widely available. It’s a long book, and the first third or so is basically a travelogue, with lengthy descriptions of various landscapes. Expect lots of meaningful stares at mountain scenery—Emily St. Aubert and her family love nature and spontaneously break out into poetry when the views so move them. Don’t let this dissuade you; once the orphaned Emily is with her aunt, the action picks up and the book becomes one chill-inducing read. Consider it Terror 101, and enjoy seeing where many of your favorite authors found their inspiration.
Also try: Perhaps more than any of
her other books, The Italian shows Radcliffe’s skills as a writer. It features a scheming monk as the villain, which has led scholars to speculate that Radcliffe wrote the book in response to Matthew Lewis. She famously hated his novel The Monk (Joseph Bell, 1796).
Related work: Jane Austen parodied the Gothic novel in her novel Northanger Abbey (John Murray, 1817). One of the main characters in Austen’s book is presented as rather naïve simply because of her choice of reading material, which includes Radcliffe’s Udolpho and The Italian. In related media, a film about Austen’s life, Becoming Jane (2007), featured an appearance by Helen McCrory as Ann Radcliffe. That may be as close as we get to a biopic of Radcliffe, given how little is known about her life.
The Original Goth Girl
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
1797–1851
The creation of Frankenstein is perhaps the most famous origin story about a work of literature. The setting is about as Gothic as it gets: the moody Villa Diodati in the midst of a thunderstorm on a lake in Switzerland. The book’s author, Mary Godwin, as she was known then, had traveled with her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont to Lake Geneva, where they met up with the poet Lord Byron and his personal physician John Polidori. The trip reeked of teenage angst and clandestine affairs, with a good dose of young rebellion and spring-break hormones mixed in.
It was June 1816; Mary had met Percy two years earlier. She was all of 16 years old then, and he, barely 22, had just left his wife (who committed suicide soon after). In 1814 the happy couple eloped and were expecting a child. Mary’s parents were infuriated and disowned her. The pair struggled financially and, during their first year together, suffered the loss of their first child, Clara, born prematurely. They hoped the Switzerland trip, with their second child William in tow, would bring some relief from their sorrows.
By the time of the gathering, Byron had slept with Claire. He was, to put it mildly, over their dalliance. She, however, was not. It was Claire who suggested that they all go to visit him in Switzerland.
Fate seemed to conspire in creating the perfect writing environment. This was the so-called year without a summer; a volcanic eruption in Indonesia had caused so much sulfur dioxide pollution that global temperatures dropped. The resulting cold and dreary climate, and seemingly never-ending rain, kept everyone at the villa indoors. And as the lightning sparked and the thunder roared, Lord Byron suggested a little contest: Who could write the scariest story?
It was amid this moody atmosphere charged with sexual tension that Frankenstein was born…
Her Mother’s Daughter
Mary Shelley’s story began long before that stormy vacation, of course. She was born in 1797 to the well-known philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, an accomplished writer known for her feminist principles and advocacy of women’s rights. Considered by some to be “Britain’s first feminist,” Wollstonecraft authored A Vindication for the Rights of Woman (J. Johnson, 1792) and was among the first to fight publicly for that cause. She argued that both girls and boys should receive an education and that parental responsibilities should be equally shared.
Wollstonecraft died eleven days after Mary’s birth, so the young girl came to know her mother mostly through her writings. Mary’s other primary source of information was her father’s 1798 biography of her mother, which brought lots of shade to the family because it revealed the Godwins’ relaxed attitude toward monogamy.
As proof of the scandal, Mary was raised in a blended family with an older half-sister, Fanny, daughter of Wollstonecraft and her lover, Gilbert Imlay. In 1801 Mary’s father married his lover, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom he’d had a daughter, Claire. Born only a few months apart, Claire and Mary grew up together and were close friends. Mary and her stepmother, however, had a contentious relationship throughout their lives.
As you might expect, Mary received more education than most women of her day. She seemed to share her mother’s intellectual prowess as well as her penchant for breaking with social norms—particularly when it came to her affair with the poet Shelley. Early on, the two arranged for secret liaisons at Mary’s mother’s grave; it’s been said that she lost her virginity there. After declaring their mutual love and eloping, Mary and Percy lived together for more than two years before marrying.
The death of Clara in 1815 shattered the young mother, and the loss was one of Mary’s primary inspirations for Frankenstein. She wrote in her journal about harrowing dreams in which she was able to bring her infant back to life by rubbing her beside a fire. The nightmares continued even after the birth of William the following year, as well as during her travels through Switzerland that summer. In the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary recounts a nightmare she had while at Villa Diodati, in which she saw a “hideous” man waking to a new life: her first imaginings of her famous monster.
There was more behind Frankenstein’s provenance than bad dreams and painful memories, though. While the rain pelted the Swiss villa, the friends kept themselves busy by reading; Mary was particularly inspired by Étienne-Gaspard Robert’s Phantasmagoria, a French book about German ghost stories. She was likely influenced by Percy and Byron’s frequent philosophical debates on the nature of life. She was also knowledgeable about scientific experiments of the day; she’d seen demonstrations at the Royal Institute in London showing how electricity could be used to induce movement in dead muscles. In addition, some critics have speculated the Shelleys visited the actual Castle Frankenstein, located along the Rhine River in Germany, where they would have heard the story of Konrad Dippel, a mad scientist trying to make an oil that would ensure immortal life.
It was under these unique circumstances that an eighteen-year-old girl created the Gothic and horror genres as we know them today. In fact, the contest—which Mary won—produced not one, but two of the most famous modern Gothic stories: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818) and Polidori’s The Vampyre (New Monthly Magazine, 1819), the first modern vampire novel written in English. But it’s Frankenstein that went on to become an undying, foundational text of horror.
Mary Shelley wrote her book in nine months, while pregnant with her third child. Both Byron’s and her now-husband Percy’s publishers refused to publish the book. But on January 1, 1818, the novel was published in three volumes by Lackington and Company, with an initial printing of 500 copies. The author remained anonymous, although the book contained a preface by Percy Bysshe Shelley and a dedication to Mary’s father.
Some reviewers assumed that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written the novel, but even early on many readers knew that “William Godwin’s daughter” was responsible. Negative reviews focused on the story’s excessive romanticism, and in September 1818 the British Critic wrote, “the horror that abounds…is too grotesque and bizarre.” But many more people loved Frankenstein. Walter Scott wrote in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (March 1818) that Mary Shelley possessed “original genius and happy power of expression.” In 1823, the novel was published in a new edition, this time with a cover bearing Mary Shelley’s name.
For the first edition, scholars believe that Shelley’s husband helped with both editing the manuscript and finding a publisher; he heavily revised the book, focusing on making the language more poetic (maybe those negative reviewers were on to something). By 1831, Shelley wanted to release a revised text. After all, she’d been a teenager when the first version was published; she wanted her most famous novel to reflect her talents as a more experienced author. Most editions published today use this 1831 version.
Mary Shelley had begun writing as a child, and she would keep writing and publishing until the years right before her death. She continued even after the untimely death of her husband in 1822, when his small boat was lost in a storm off the coast of Italy. She became a well-known, best-selling author, though for mo
st of her life she was still considered “the daughter of William Godwin” or “the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” Despite it all, she remained a voice for her mother’s feminism, both in her writing and in her donations to women shunned by society (usually for some kind of sexual scandal). As for her personal life, there’s no denying that it was marked by grief. Only one of her four children outlived her, and she never fully recovered from Percy’s death.
THE HEART OF A POET
Legend has it that Mary Shelley kept her late husband Percy’s heart wrapped in some paper printed with his poetry, which upon her death was interred in the family burial vault. Keeping a memento from the corpus of a deceased loved one was not unusual in her day, but nonetheless the story appears to be apocryphal. Percy Bysshe Shelley was cremated, so it’s unlikely his heart would have survived the flames. Most scholars believe that Mary did keep some part of his body—a bone fragment or part of a calcified organ, perhaps—which may be the source of the legend.
Today, Mary Shelley’s two-hundred-year-old reanimated monster is ubiquitous across genres, living on in countless iterations in film, television, books, comic books, cartoons, and video games. But her legacy is deeper than that. Horace Walpole established the Gothic novel, and Ann Radcliffe claimed it for women writers, but it was Mary Shelley who forever linked Gothic with horror as a literary combination, one so effective that it’s still in use today. She lived a life that contained remarkable success and intense sorrow; she endured tremendous personal loss and knew passionate love. For Shelley, death and romance were never far apart. It’s no wonder that she defined what Gothic literature looked like for those who came after her…and it’s no surprise that numerous books and films have been written about her macabre-laden life. She was the original Goth girl.