Ann Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) was an English novelist who defined the Gothic romance of the 1790s. Born Ann Ward in London, she married a journalist and wrote six novels in little more than a decade, including A Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, before falling silent for the last twenty-five years of her life. Her method was to build dread through landscape, suspense and apparently supernatural events, then to explain them rationally; Jane Austen parodied her affectionately in Northanger Abbey. Radcliffe never appeared in public and was so private that rumors circulated during her lifetime that she had gone mad or died.