Nature Descriptions in Ann Radcliffe's Novels
This Gothic Author Uses Scenery to Set the Mood for Her Plot
Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) had a gift with words, an ability to describe a scene or feeling that few other authors can match. She wrote of loneliness bordering on horror, and also of feelings so sublime that it is almost awe-inspiring that someone found words in which to describe them.
The scenery around her characters was, in reality, a character itself and comes alive to this day through her vivid words and imagery.
Scenery in The Mysteries of Udolpho
This famous novel, written in 1794, influenced the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott and the Romanticists with its dream-like depictions of scenery and the almost illusionary descriptions of the characters’ thoughts.
- A sunrise, in a happy moment in the novel, is described in words of such beauty that the reader can envision the rapture of a new day: “…Emily watched the progress of the day, first trembling on the tops of the highest cliffs, then touching them with splendid light, while their sides and the vale below were still wrapt [sic] in dewy mist. Meanwhile, the sullen grey of the eastern clouds began to blush, then to redden, and then to glow with a thousand colours, till the golden light darted over all the air, touched the lower points of the mountain’s brow, and glanced in long sloping beams upon the valley and its stream. All nature seemed to have awakened from death into life …”
- Likewise, in a tense, darker moment, Ann Radcliffe describes the characters’ surroundings so well that readers, 300 years ago up to today, feel the anxious dread and nervousness of those making their way through a strange forest: “The moon now threw a faint light over their path, and, soon after, enabled them to distinguish some towers rising above the tops of the woods. Still following the note of the bell, they entered the shade of those woods, lighted only by the moonbeams, that glided down between the leaves, and threw a tremulous uncertain gleam upon the steep track they were winding. The gloom and the silence that prevailed, except when the bell returned upon the air, together with the wildness of the surrounding scene, struck Emily with a degree of fear…”
The Mysteries of Udolpho, referred to repeatedly by Jane Austen in her novel Northanger Abbey, offers visionary descriptions that made Ann Radcliffe famous in her day, and makes her still necessary reading today for anyone who cherishes the Gothic romance style, or who appreciates masterful writing.
Scenery in The Romance of the Forest
Written before The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, the third of her five novels, fills the mind’s eye of the reader with images of both subtle, ethereal beauty and concrete tension and horror.
- During a nerve-wracking scene of escape and certain death if captured, Ann Radcliffe has her characters drive into a scene straight out of anyone’s nightmares: “The night was dark and tempestuous…(the driver) was unable to supply the necessary direction, and the extreme darkness made it dangerous to proceed without one…”
The fear of the unknown, in a wide open space, is the stuff of sheer terror. Artists and other writers have sought to depict this feeling for centuries, and here, Ann Radcliffe achieves the evocation of that fear.
- Later, once the characters have found shelter and some solace from the terrors of the night, the landscape evolves into a respite of its own sort for the characters: “… (the environs) were sweetly romantic, and the luxuriant woods, with which they abounded, seemed to sequester this spot from the rest of the world. Frequently a natural vista would yield a view of the country, terminated by hills, which retiring in distance, faded into the blue horizon. A stream, various and musical in its course, wound at the foot of the lawn…here it silently glided beneath the shades, feeding the flowers that bloomed on its banks, and diffusing dewy freshness around…”
A Masterful Wordsmith
Ann Radcliffe is a master at using scenery to symbolise her characters’ emotions and situations. It is as if she can see through the veil of the everyday and discover a treasure of image or precise feeling previously hidden in the rush of common life.
With her words, Ann Radcliffe is able to stop the clock for a moment, to make time stop, as readers breathlessly follow the action set so skillfully in a multitude of scenes designed expressly to set up feelings of dread, horror, or sublime worship and gratitude.
Ann Radcliffe’s work, as relevant today as when Jane Austen was reading it, is a gift of pure escapism into a realm of almost-magical settings that depict particular feelings from all who are lucky enough to visit them.
Sources:
The Romance of the Forest, by Ann Radcliffe, Barnes & Noble Books, 2004.
The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, Oxford University Press, 1998, 2008.
Photo by Ian Britton
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Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)
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