Contents 1 Haunts of a best-selling Gothic author 1.1 Vivienne Smith explores the Derbyshire links of the best-selling Gothic author Ann Radcliffe. 1.2 A classic tale of spooky goings-on 1.3 FEEDBACK

Haunts of a best-selling Gothic author

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Vivienne Smith explores the Derbyshire links of the best-selling Gothic author Ann Radcliffe.

BELIEVE it or not, the world’s first best-selling novel had its origins in Derbyshire. Published just over 200 years ago, The Mysteries of Udolpho was a phenomenal success in its day.

The book’s author, Mrs Ann Radcliffe, had close family ties with the county and is even said to have found her inspiration while visiting Haddon Hall.

Born in London on July 9, 1764, Ann was the only child of haberdasher William Ward, who was originally a Leicestershire man. Her Derbyshire blood came from her mother’s side of the family. Mrs Ann Ward, nee Oates, was Chesterfield-born and bred and her sister, Hannah, married a man from Scropton called Thomas Bentley who played a key role in the future novelist’s upbringing.

Sadly, Hannah died in childbirth in 1759, after just five years of marriage. However, her older sister, Elizabeth, took on the job of housekeeping for the grief-stricken Bentley, thus maintaining the family connection.

At the time, the young man was working as a merchant in Liverpool. His big break came a few years later, around the time that Ann was born. A chance encounter with pottery manufacturer, Josiah Wedgwood, resulted in a lifelong friendship and a business partnership.

Bentley soon took charge of the company’s showrooms in London. He even used his influence to help his in-laws when William Ward’s business failed in 1772, by arranging for him to manage Wedgwood’s new showroom in Bath.

Yet, when Ann’s parents duly moved to the West Country, the eight-year-old remained in the capital with her uncle and his new wife. That June, at All Saints’ Church, in Derby, Bentley had married Mary, daughter of local engineer Thomas Stamford.

Ann had often visited her uncle before. As Josiah Wedgwood wrote to his partner that same year: “I wish we had your little niece with us at Etruria (his Staffordshire works), but give my love to her.”

Over the next few years, the young girl spent much of her time at her uncle’s London home and became acquainted with his circle of literary friends. Yet, the links with Derbyshire were not forgotten.

For instance, in August 1776, shortly after her 13th birthday, Ann made a trip to Derby to stay with the family of Bentley’s second wife. There may even have been an excursion to Dovedale during this visit.

Certainly, she later wrote a poem entitled To the River Dove, which included dramatic descriptions of the cliffs and caves along the celebrated gorge.

Ann was just 16 when her beloved uncle died. There is no question that the man from Scropton had an important influence over the author’s early life. She shared his love of art and poetry along with Bentley’s passion for Gothic architecture and beautiful scenery which eventually found expression in her novels.

Ann appears to have first taken up writing at the age of 23, following marriage to journalist William Radcliffe. As a parliamentary reporter, he was often out late in the evening so this was how she whiled away the hours. The quality of her work impressed her husband.

In fact, William Radcliffe was his wife’s number one fan right from the start. Thanks to him, we also have the only known description of Ann’s appearance. As he later wrote of his young bride: “Of figure exquisitely proportioned, while she resemble her father...in being low in stature.

“Her complexion was beautiful, as was her whole countenance, especially her eyes, eyebrows and mouth.”

Mrs Radcliffe’s first novel The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne appeared in 1789 but made little impact. Undeterred, she carried on writing. Only after the publication of her third effort The Romance of the Forest, did she begin to get rave reviews.

However, it was her next novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, which catapulted the author to fame. Published in May 1794, it quickly caught the public’s imagination, appealing to readers of all ages. For example, the 72-year-old critic Joseph Warton admitted he “could not go to bed till he had finished it and that he actually sat up the greater part of the night for that purpose”.

A classic Gothic novel, it was packed with accounts of spooky old buildings, suspicious deaths and things that go bump in the night. The majority of Mrs Radcliffe’s contemporaries believed that Haddon Hall had been the source of her inspiration.

With all of her Derbyshire connections, it is hardly surprising that personal knowledge of the county should find a place in Ann’s fiction. Following her father’s retirement in the early 1790s, the Wards had actually moved there and settled in Chesterfield.

Unfortunately, there is no record of exactly when or how often the writer visited Haddon Hall. At the time, the medieval manor house had been long abandoned as a place of residence by the Dukes of Rutland in favour of Belvoir Castle.

Nevertheless, the deserted rooms, with their frayed old tapestries, were remarkably popular with people touring the Peak. Having a keen eye for ruins and natural scenery, Mrs Radcliffe was no exception.

The novelist’s attraction for the place is recorded by several writers of the day. As Ebenezer Rhodes wrote in his tourist guide Peak Scenery in 1819: “Mrs Ann Radcliffe, who was a native of Derbyshire, often visited Haddon Hall for the purpose of storing her imagination with those romantic ideas and impressing upon it those sublime and awful pictures which she so much delighted to portray: some of the most gloomy scenery of her Mysteries of Udolpho was studied within the walls of this ancient structure.”

Although her plots were on the wild side, Ann Radcliffe was the mistress of suspense and had a real talent for creating evocative settings. In fact, she was one of the very first novelists to include vivid descriptions of landscape and the weather in her work.

For The Mysteries of Udolpho she was paid an incredible £500 by the publishers, an unprecedented sum at the time. Almost 20 years later, Jane Austen received only a fifth of this for Pride and Prejudice.

The novel proved so immensely popular, both at home and abroad, that Mrs Radcliffe was offered £800 for her next book The Italian. She was fast becoming one of the most celebrated novelists of the age. Then, suddenly, at the height of her career, aged just 33, Ann Radcliffe stopped publishing.

The general public, who could not get enough of her fiction, were mystified. Before long, rumours began circulating that she had died. There was even speculation that the writer’s passion for terror had actually driven her mad.

According to the testimony of one contemporary, Mrs Radcliffe had “been obliged to retire into a remote part of Derbyshire under the most direful influence of deep-rooted and incurable melancholy”. Just why the novelist dropped out of the limelight remains a mystery to this day.

Some sources claim it was because she hated all the public attention which came with celebrity. Whatever the reason, Ann Radcliffe spent the rest of her life in happy obscurity with her husband. She died at their London home on February 7, 1823, aged 58.

By then, her Gothic romances had succeeded in inspiring such literary greats as Byron, Shelley and Sir Walter Scott. The Mysteries of Udolpho became such a cult hit that Jane Austen poked gentle fun at it in her own novel Northanger Abbey by making the heroine a huge fan of the Gothic novel.

Ann Radcliffe’s blockbusting fiction went on to influence the work of such writers as Charles Dickens, the Brontes and Edgar Allan Poe. And, in the 200 years since its first publication, The Mysteries of Udolpho has never gone out of print.

A classic tale of spooky goings-on

AFTER an idyllic childhood in France, heroine Emily St Aubert is tragically orphaned. She is left in the hands of her tyrannical aunt, Madame Cheron, who prevents her from forming a romantic attachment with the soldier Valancourt because of his lack of wealth.

But then, her aunt unwisely marries an unprincipled adventurer by the name of Montoni. She and Emily are taken to his crumbling castle of Udolpho in the Apennines. There, the villain proceeds to starve his wife to death in the east turret.

Emily soon finds her own life, honour and fortune under threat as Montoni attempts to force her to surrender her inheritance. The young woman is surrounded by supernatural terrors at the castle, including ghostly music and the sound of footsteps under her window at night.

There is also the mystery of what lies behind the black veil in one of the rooms, “something too ghastly to be described”.

After managing to escape, Emily returns to France and finally solves all the mysteries. Meanwhile, the evil Montoni is captured and brought to justice. The young heroine is, at last, reunited with her lover Valancourt for a happy ending.

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