Ann Ward Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) was born Ann Ward in London and married the journalist William Radcliffe in 1787. She published six novels in barely a decade: The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), with Gaston de Blondeville following after her death, in 1826. Udolpho earned her £500, an unprecedented sum for a novel at the time, and her technique of resolving every apparent supernatural event into a natural cause by the final chapter shaped much Gothic fiction after her. The Alpine and Italian settings she described so vividly came from paintings and travel accounts rather than any journey of her own — her own travels reached only as far as the Rhine. She wrote almost nothing for publication after 1797 and lived quietly in London until her death.