§16. Ann Radcliffe. XIII. The Growth of the Later Novel. Vol. 11. The Period of the French Revolution. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. 1907

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XI. The Period of the French Revolution.

XIII. The Growth of the Later Novel.

§ 16. Ann Radcliffe.

On Mrs. Radcliffe herself, something of the general revolutionary fermentation, no doubt, worked; yet, there was much else not, perhaps, entirely unconnected with that fermentation, but not directly due to it, though arising out of the taste for the picturesque, for romantic adventure, for something foreign, unfamiliar, new, as well as to the blind search and striving for the historical novel. Her own influence was extraordinary: for it was more or less directly exerted on two writers who exercised a most potent influence, not merely on the English, but on the European, literature or world in the early part of the next century. Not a few other writers in other kinds of novel or book have had bevies of Catherines and Isabellas contending for “the next volume” at circulating library doors. It has not happened to any other to give a novelist like Scott something of his method, and a poet like Byron nearly the whole of his single hero.