Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now

Hailed by the Romantic literati as the 'first poetess of Romantic fiction', the 'Shakespeare of Romance Writers', the 'mighty magician of The Mysteries of Udolpho' and 'the great enchantress of that generation', Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) was a central figure in British culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Influential upon the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, Austen and Scott, she was read across the world in her time. Her later works, almost instantly pirated, translated, abridged, adapted and reissued in new editions for global readerships, were sought out by some of the major publishers of the 1790s and commanded hitherto unprecedented financial advances. Consequently, no history of British Romanticism is complete without a consideration of Radcliffe's works and reputation, the latter resting upon her five Gothic fictions, a substantial European and domestic travelogue, and her posthumously published historical romance and poetry. Despite the writer's success in her day ('then'), and beyond the appearance of some of her fictions on university curricula in eighteenth-century, Romantic and Gothic literary studies worldwide, Ann Radcliffe today ('now') is not well known or read beyond academic circles and anything but a household name: tellingly, a commentator on BBC Radio Four's Woman's Hour, responding to Sheffield University's commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the writer's birth in 2014, opened with a question that would not have been asked of a contemporary such as Byron or Austen: 'Who was Ann Radcliffe?' Seeking to breach the divide between the 'then' and the 'now' of Radcliffe's reputation, this project has three primary aims. First, it seeks to bring the writer's works to a new generation of readers by overseeing the production of The Cambridge Edition of Ann Radcliffe, a major new edition of her complete oeuvre. Secondly, it aims to address in an accompanying volume, Ann Radcliffe in Context, the conditions that made her distinctive in the period 1789-1826 as well as some of the challenges that the editing and reading Radcliffe in the twenty-first century bring to light. Thirdly, through an exciting programme of outreach and knowledge exchange, the project seeks to intervene in current perceptions of Radcliffe beyond immediate academic contexts. In order to achieve these aims, the project seeks funding for two face-to-face meetings of the edition's editorial and advisory boards; the three-year appointment of a named full-time Research and Innovation Associate (RIA) who will oversee the work of collation, resource-finding, website management and dissemination; four public lectures; buyout for the Project Lead (PL) and three Project Co-Leads (PcL); and the resourcing of a series of podcasts on the theme of 'Ann Radcliffe: A Gothic Heroine for Today?' Through such scholarly and public-facing interventions, the project will make available the complete works of Ann Radcliffe to a new generation of students, scholars and readers, contributing in the process to the ongoing diversification of the English literary canon and restoring her culturally to the position of centrality that she enjoyed during the Romantic period.