There has been a revival of interest in the Gothic heroine in the twenty-first century, in big budget films such as Crimson Peak, Poor Things, Nosferatu, Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights.

This talk traces the history of the Gothic heroine back to the eighteenth-century novels of Ann Radcliffe, the highest paid author of her day.

Paying particular attention to costume and the iconic image of the woman in white running from a dark house, Professor Catherine Spooner explores the ways in which contemporary writers and film-makers have positioned the Gothic heroine as embodying feminist resistance and dark romance.

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) was “the great enchantress” of her generation, in the words of Thomas de Quincey. She changed the face of fiction in the Romantic period and shaped the development of Gothic romance. The extraordinary impact of her work also helped to cement an association between this genre and women writers and readers.

But, of course, Radcliffe was far from the only woman writing Gothic fiction in the formative early days of the genre. This lecture will explore Radcliffe’s career in the context of the other women who inspired her, imitated her, and contested her vision of the Gothic.

Emeritus Professor Robert Miles is editing Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance as part of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe.

From the evolution of Radcliffe's poeticism to her defining of the Gothic heroine, Miles highlights the importance and brilliance of Radcliffe's second novel.