ABSTRACT
In 1818, John Keats playfully referred to the modish appetite for Ann Radcliffe’s grandiose Gothic landscapes. He warned his friend Reynolds in a letter, ‘Buy a girdle, put a pebble in your mouth, loosen your braces – for I am going among Scenery whence I intend to tip you the Damosel Radcliffe. I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and solitude you’. 1 Implicit in Keats’s pleasantry was the criticism that the ‘Damosel Radcliffe’ could not refrain from embellishing each topographical feature that she described within her fiction with qualifying adjectives such as ‘immense’ and ‘tremendous’. This impression of Radcliffe’s hyperbolic tendencies gathered further critical strength with Sir Walter Scott’s 1824 assessment of her career in Ballantyne’s Novelists Library. There, Scott remarked that ‘[Radcliffe] has … selected for her place of action the South of Europe, where the human passions, like the weeds of the climate, are supposed to attain portentous growth under the fostering sun; which abounds with ruined monuments of antiquity, as well as the more massive remnants of the middle ages’. 2 Scott specifically linked the ‘portentous growth’ of human passions with the Middle Ages ‘massive remnants’ offered by Radcliffe’s chosen locations, implying a symbiotic relationship between Radcliffe’s choice of grandiose European relics and her exaggeration of certain human characteristics. He suggests that Southern Europe permitted Radcliffe to critique ‘feudal tyranny and Catholic superstition’ in a way that no other location could.
