56 pages • 1 hour read
Ann RadcliffeA Sicilian Romance
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1790A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Radcliffe’s Reputation
Ann Radcliffe was born Ann Ward in London on July 9, 1764, into a well-connected and well-educated family. Despite her connections, Radcliffe was known for being shy and withdrawn. Her sole childhood companion was Sukey Wedgwood, future mother of the naturalist Charles Darwin. In 1787 Ann married the Oxford-educated journalist William Radcliffe, who worked for a progressive newspaper and encouraged her interest in a literary career.
Radcliffe published her first novel The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789, followed the next year by A Sicilian Romance. Her third novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), made her famous, and her next work, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), made her the most popular novelist in England. Radcliffe was paid handsomely for the novel, and the establishment of her reputation and the income she received from publishing allowed the Radcliffes to spend time traveling. When Radcliffe published The Italian in 1797, she earned £800, a sum significantly higher than most men’s or other authors’ annual income. This was the last novel that she would publish in her lifetime, and the Radcliffes spent much of their later years traveling.
Radcliffe died of a chest infection leading to pneumonia on February 7, 1823, at the age of 58. She had continued to write poetry throughout her lifetime as well as a final novel, Gaston de Blondeville, published later that year. The novel contained a significant amount of verse, expanding on Radcliffe’s habit of including lyric poems within her prose. A Sicilian Romance features several poems about nature intended to mirror the characters’ moods and desires.
Radcliffe influenced many later authors, who further developed the genre of Gothic fiction and wrote parodies of her works. Writers such as Matthew Lewis and the Marquis de Sade were inspired by Radcliffe and praised her work, but they used bloodshed and violence to develop the type of “horror” she had disdained in the genre. Jane Austen later parodied The Mysteries of Udolpho in her novel Northanger Abbey (1817), and some scholars have perceived allusions to Radcliffe in Austen's other works. Radcliffe’s use of terror also made its mark in the writing of 19th century authors Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Walter Scott.
Historical Context: 18th Century Perspectives and Philosophy
The late 18th century was a time of social, political, and economic upheaval in England. There had been several major wars, and the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment synthesized ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity into a new worldview. These ideas centered on the value of happiness and the pursuit of knowledge obtained through reason. These views also created a small shift in views of women–while many Enlightenment thinkers maintained that women were subordinate to men, John Locke suggested that this notion was created by man, rather than the natural order of things. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that women should receive education equal to that of their male peers (but relative to their social class). In A Sicilian Romance, the emerging criticism of The Oppression of Women in Patriarchal Society is evident.
Radcliffe, as a well-educated and upper-class woman, was familiar with these Enlightenment ideals and also knew their potential for controversy in a society that still adhered to rigid gender and class structures. The women in A Sicilian Romance are educated and talented but still the chattel of the men in their families. There are not one but four pairs of lovers whose romance is thwarted by patriarchal authority or class differences. Despite this, Radcliffe’s heroines often reflect her own progressive attitudes, making their own choices and rebelling against the idea that their fate can be controlled by the men in their lives. To a large extent, Julia demonstrates these traits in A Sicilian Romance: When an escape planned by her brother and her lover fails to rescue her from an unwanted marriage, she escapes with the assistance of a female servant. Other women in the novel also negotiate and manipulate relationships with powerful men. However, the novel does, in other ways, conform to the conventions of the time; women in the novel represent gendered ideas about the value of a woman’s reputation and purity, and it is ultimately men who come to the rescue.
Enlightenment ideals are also evident in Radcliffe’s approach to nature, religion, and the supernatural in the novel. The novel highlights the theme of Romanticization of the Natural World, placing nature in direct contrast with the power and violence of civilization. Radcliffe uses vivid flowery language to describe the landscape. An emphasis on nature was essential to the Enlightenment, which pushed back against the industrial growth of the time. This idea of the natural versus civilized world also appears in Radcliffe’s critiques of Catholicism, due both to prevailing religious attitudes in Protestant England and to the idea that reason and the evidence of the senses (based on theories of empiricism) were to be trusted above all. Thus, Radcliffe describes the night itself as having “sacred stillness” (138), while the monastery is “a monument of barbarous superstition” (102).
Genre Context: Gothic Style and the Supernatural
Though she referred to her novels as “romances,” Radcliffe was an early innovator of the Gothic novel and drew a clear line between terror and horror in Gothic literature. Her narratives used mystery and suspense to generate “terror” in the reader: a dread of what might happen next. She scorned the work of some of her contemporaries, who focused on the blood and gore of pure horror. In Radcliffe’s work, drawn-out descriptions of dark chasms and dreadful groans that hint at supernatural occurrences are gradually revealed to have rational, though often nefarious, explanations.
In 1764, Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, later subtitled “A Gothic Story.” A generation later, authors including Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, William Thomas Beckford, and Matthew Lewis expanded on the genre, and in the 19th century it influenced works by the Romantic poets and novelists including Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Gothic fiction takes its name from the Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages. As in A Sicilian Romance, medieval castles, monasteries, and crypts frequently featured as the settings of early Gothic novels.
These settings provide ample opportunity to develop Gothic fiction’s primary trait: a claustrophobic environment of fear and foreboding, where the past and the supernatural intrude upon the present reality. In A Sicilian Romance and other Gothic fiction, there is often a contrast between a thriving past and a decaying present, made manifest by the decrepit buildings the characters inhabit. Radcliffe makes this idea overt in her introduction to the novel when the narrator remarks, “[t]hus [...] shall the present generation–he who now sinks in misery–and he who not swims in pleasure, alike pass away and be forgotten” (1). Stylistically, the novel is characteristic of the time period, since it relies heavily on exposition and figurative language but features little dialogue.
The plots of Gothic fiction frequently include vengeful persecution, imprisonment, and murder; they are often disjointed and convoluted, including framing devices such as discovered manuscripts, tales within the tale that reveal secret histories, and parallel plots. All of these elements are present in A Sicilian Romance. However, Radcliffe approached the supernatural differently from many of her male counterparts, using mysterious events that suggest the presence of disembodied spirits to heighten tension but later offering a rational explanation for the frightening events. This is representative of what is known as the Female Gothic (also developed by Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë), in which the underlying cause of terror is not the supernatural, but patriarchal and societal horrors, such as threatening fathers, abusive husbands, and women’s fears of entrapment within restrictive roles. For Radcliffe, the disembodied spirits of the past are the results of patriarchal power, or they exist only in her characters’ psyches. Her emphasis on The Use of Rational Thought to Explore the Supernatural is in line with the influence of Enlightenment ideals on her writing.
Related Titles
By Ann Radcliffe
