Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004
Subject: [EighteenthCenturyWorlds] Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest, Chs 4-5:
Very rich
Reply-To: EighteenthCenturyWorlds@yahoogroups.com
Tension, pace, depth of apprehension for a psychological atmosphere and in particular the characterization of Pierre de La Motte are kept up as effectively. I find no falling off and think the poem appropriate.
It's harder to sum up the surface content of what happened since now we have a number of angles. There is first of all the development of the characters There's Pierre de La Motte's sudden change in behavior: he goes off alone, behaves in an even more hostile austere way to his wife (he seems to regard her as contemptible, beneath him, a "silly woman"); he is paranoid. He is also driven by] guilt; he is disappointed; he is bitter but he also has a conscience. There is a Dupras who he cries out to at one point: you are already revenged. There's his wife's continual jealousy and resentment of Adeline: Adeline's grief at this loss of comfort and reassurance is developed with subtlety and is moving. At one point she utters the comment: "I have lost that affection ... which was my all. It was my only comfort -- yet I have lost it -- and this without even knowning my offence." I feel the analogy would be the child who looks to the mother who suddenly turns hateful for no reason. All sense of security is gone. Peter's trips provide interest; who is the Marquis? Above all there is the rotting skeleton in that coffin: a man was imprisoned, tortured, murdered here and we are continually re-reminded of this. It's not presented unbelievably but feels true because it's so gradually revealed in bits and pieces and emerges now from this angle and now from that.
I'll attempt to review the story concisely. About where we left off last week, Peter went off to the nearby Auboine for supplies, and La Motte decides to explore the abbey. He goes off into a totally ruined place. When we move into this realm, much realism is dropped for it is not credible to the daylight probable concrete mind that people could live below the ground in the dungeon with just candles and spend even one night. They end up spending two. We are to move into another realm of dreams. There are two different areas of this labyrinth: a ruined tower and a dungeon. High in the tower he encounters a coffin in which are the remains of a skeleton. La Motte recollects there was some story about a murder and imprisonment. Some wretch had lived there. A trap door underneath leads to a dungeon which turns into a hidden suite of apartments. La Motte decides that he could hide here were the police to come after him. Indeed perhaps this is the safest place he could stay.
Peter returns with story that it is a place owned by a powerful nobleman. He also has given away their presence by denying he knows La Motte. Again we are reminded by rumors that someone had once been brought here and never emerged. LaMotte decides they must flee; but irresolute, he decides to rely on dungeon and hopes his family will not notice the corrupted human skeleton. He will move family furniture down there. (You really have to abandon your mind to the gothic; there's no getting away from this requirement -- so too did people in this area abandon their minds to Ossian; Johnson said we need to abandon our minds to Cymbeline to enjoy it.) Again and again we are reminded about someone having been murdered here. There is a destroyed flight of steps, yet more vaults below. Someone was brought to this place and never emerged.
This is actually about that improbable in era of ancien régime, and was certainly something people believed in. We get real stories of terror at imprisonment over letters de cachet from Helen Maria Williams; Smith's gothic is built more out of this real material. Well in terror and irresolution urges his wife and Adeline to live downstairs in this dungeon for the next two days and nights. They do. Life is much much worse below than it was above. (I had a student who wrote about fleeing Pol Pot through living in such a dungeon in Cambodia for a journal entry she wrote on this novel.
Someone shows up; they flee but are without food. The man turns out to be Louis de La Motte their son who had come seeking them after he was discharged from regiment. We get a glimpse of what would have been the profession of a son on the edges of wealthy connected people. He is put into the military and expected to network.
Pierre de La Motte's gloominess is a real problem even when they return to the sky and sun. He goes off by himself continually, and those who follow him find he takes a sudden turn and they can't figure out where he goes. He grows angry at his wife's distress; he goes indignant when anyone follows him. Adeline and Louis make friends while Adeline and Madame de La Motte ever more estranged. Now Madame is jealous of Louis's attraction to Adeline. Louis is told of the change in his father's behavior One day he follows his father and watches him meditating over a tomb .. A slow development of family relationships goes on, one which is felt as perverse and the people driven into isolation by their circumstances. We see a man mistreat his wife as a total inferior who is to obey; we see her violate natural feelings for imagined ideas of status. There are petty squabbles, irritation.
Since I've read the book bofore, I'd like to call attention to the hunter Adeline glimpses from afar. This not Louis, but the hero of the book. The vision reminds me of countless heros suddenly appearing to the heroine in hunter's guise in a wood. It's a lyrical depiction, an effeminized figure: sexuality is clearly of intense interest in this book as Pierre's supposed attraction to Adeline would be incestuous were he her real father. We have a mother figure intensely jealous of the daughter. Louis offers himself as a friend to Adeline, but he is attracted too.
Adeline is the innocent but since she has her history of pain and distress, and have these nightmares and walks into the woods -- is endowed with depths through her walks and poetry and respond to Madame de La Motte in particular, I don't respond to her as I would to as priggish. She is vulnerable, lost, trying to help.
While the second poem could be pruned, perhaps partly because I am used to the later 18th century poetry of sensibility and the picturesque (I like Collins, the Wartons, the later Georgics of landscape and the night), I find it appealing enough, or at least it evokes the image of a female poet in deep retreat into the world of the night. Its problem is it doesn't tell us at all what are the specific psychological experiences of the woman which led to this retreat or what the woman finds there that gives her such pleasure.
The poem is on the Net so I'll end this posting by copying and pasting what I think are the powerful stanzas. Johnson said of Thomson's poetry that you could cross out every other line and never miss them; well the way to read Radcliffe is not so very different. I cross out almost every other stanza :):
To Night:When, wrapt in clouds, and riding in the blast,
Thou [Night] roll'st the storm along the sounding shore,
I love to watch the whelming billows, cast
On rocks below, and listen to the roar ...
But chief I love thee, when thy lucid car
Sheds through the fleecy clouds a trembling gleam,
And shews the misty mountain from afar,
The nearer forest, and the valley's stream:
Then let me stand amidst thy glooms profound
On some wild woody steep, and hear the breeze
That swells in mournful melody around,
And faintly dies upon the distant trees.
What melancholy charm steals o'er the mind!
What hallow'd tears the rising rapture greet!
While many a viewless spirit in the wind
Sighs to the lonely hour in accents sweet!
Ah! who the dear illusions pleas'd would yield,
Which Fancy wakes from silence and from shades..."
Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2004
Subject: Re: [EighteenthCenturyWorlds] Radcliffe's _Romance of the Forest_, Chs 4-5
Reply-To: EighteenthCenturyWorlds@yahoogroups.com
I have to say that so far I find this book dragging. Perhaps I should read on and not stop at such short intervals because I have lost all sense of interest in the plot except for the man Adeline sees when she is out on one of her walks. The mystery which Radcliffe does develop seems disjointed to me. I think I shall pick and and read more this week and see whether I can really interest myself in the book at all. I did not have this reaction to Udolpho. Could I have really liked all the developing scenery that was around?
Joan
Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2004
Subject: [EighteenthCenturyWorlds] Romance of the Forest, chps 4 to 5
Reply-To: EighteenthCenturyWorlds@yahoogroups.com
I'm enjoying this book very much. The stop-start narration is, of course, very reminiscent of modern horror fiction or movies: something's going to happen, uh-oh, here it comes, oh no, watch out! And then all that tension dissipates when what happens turns out to be harmless. This happens when La Motte moves his family into the underground vaults and waits for the person moving around upstairs (who is it? is it someone sent to bring La Motte in? and just what did La Motte do to be the object of such dogged pursuit, anyway? we know it's about money mismanagement and some sort of fraud, but no details yet) to find them, finally sending Adeline out to reconnaitre; seeing an unknown man, she flees through the ruined cloisters and arches. Finally, the trap door lifts, and La Motte emerges, only to clasp the mysterious man in his arms: it's the missing soldier son. This pattern occurs repeatedly and is a basic technique of suspense fiction, then and now. Every time the tension starts to rise, we respond, because maybe this time something disastrous really will happen; we know it's bound to, eventually, but we don't know when so we ride the rollercoaster as it continues. And the tension continues, subtly, to rise; when the rollercoaster comes down, it doesn't come down quite to where it was before. After all, we know awful things must be around the corner; we're just not sure what corner.
Radcliffe is, in many ways, working very self-consciously; she wants to understand the appeal and effect of what she's doing. So we get passages like this, when La Motte finds the skeleton in the chest: "Horror struck upon his heart, and he involuntarily stepped back. During a pause of some moments, his first emotions subsided. That thrilling curiosity, which objects of terror often excite in the human mind, impelled him to take a second view of this dismal spectacle" (54; Oxford World's Classics edition).
Madame La Motte's rising suspicions are handled very well; they grow gradually, yet irresistibly, and Adeline's small spot of safety is inexorably worn away as they increase.
Leslie
Leslie Robertson
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB, Canada
Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004
Subject: [EighteenthCenturyWorlds] Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest, Chs 4-5:
Like a Film; Obsessive Repetition Patterns
Reply-To: EighteenthCenturyWorlds@yahoogroups.com
IN quick response to Joan,
Those who would like to read on, should do so. Follow your own emotional trajectory. In a way this book requires page-turning. It's meant to read through with intensity -- at least the first time.
The mystery is disjointed -- or it's a way of rationalizing what Radcliffe is driven to tell and imagine and dramatize for us. We might regard it as a plot-design imposition over some profoundly deep material coming out.
The romance is reminiscent of a film. It's only in the last few years that I have become accustomed to the lack of conjointure in movies. That because I look at them archetyally and fill in what's left out by montage. This novel would not only make a great film; in a way it has made one. The BBC Northanger Abbey of several years ago was more like Radcliffe's books than Austen's NA. It's ironic since Austen sought to replace Radcliffe.
There is also this obsessive-repetition pattern. Freud suggested this kind of behavior is a response to what is felt as violation-trauma. You attempt to control the hysteria by carefully repeating a routine -- over and over again. I find the obsessive repetition pattern in Radcliffe comes out in all sorts of ways. Leslie's description of the subtly disjunctive plot steps are one. There's also this labyrinth. It doesn't quite make sense. It's all in a mist; door after door from corridor after corridor: like a rat in a maze which is only glimpsed partially. Think if you saw just a piece on a board where someone was playing chess. That's the feel of the paths Radcliffe's characters take.
And then there's the repeating details. Heroine after heroine finds herself in a room where she can't lock the door from within; it only locks from without. In other words someone can lock her in; she can't lock someone else out. There is also the second door. If I am remembering correctly, Scott uses this to great effect in the tower Amy Robsart lives in in Kenilworth It will be remembered what happened when she fled that place at the close of the novel.
At any rate, those who want, read ahead. Just be careful when you post to post about this week's chapters or if you go ahead, don't tell what is revealed at the end of the book.
Ellen
Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2004
Subject: [EighteenthCenturyWorlds] Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest, Chs 4-5:
Like a Film
Reply-To: EighteenthCenturyWorlds@yahoogroups.com
Ellen wrote
There is also this obsessive-repetition pattern. Freud suggested this kind of behavior is a response to what is felt as violation-trauma. You attempt to control the hysteria by carefully repeating a routine -- over and over again. I find the obsessive repetition pattern in Radcliffe comes out in all sorts of ways. Leslie's description of the subtly disjunctive plot steps are one. There's also this labyrinth. It doesn't quite make sense. It's all in a mist; door after door from corridor after corridor: like a rat in a maze which is only glimpsed partially. Think if you saw just a piece on a board where someone was playing chess. That's the feel of the paths Radcliffe's characters take.
Thank you for this - I've been trying to visualise the layout of the ruined abbey and find it impossible to do so; the corridors and doors and dungeons seem to blur together in my mind. I'm also reading a modern novel at the moment, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, which is set in a a sort of Kafka type landscape with the hero constantly wandering along nameless roads and into rooms which turn into one another - it's a very different type of book, but both share that quality of waking nightmare.
There's a sort of nightmare inevitability to the way La Motte discovers that he has sought shelter in the home of his enemy, the Marquis, going right to the place he should have avoided. I think Radcliffe really starts to crank up the tension here, as she leaves us wondering whether the skeleton in the chest has any connection with the Marquis - and why there seems to be such deep suspicion between the Marquis and La Motte. I'm eager to find out what La Motte is running from, and what he did wrong - it seems to be suggested that he is the one who did some evil and is now afraid of vengeance.
All the best,
Judy Geater
How well put, Judy. The space is deliberately blurry, confusing, and indistinct, hard to picture in the reader's mind as a whole. The ruined abbey is a nightmare or at least a dream locale. The whole book feels like this, actually, like it has very little to do with the actual place called France at all. The hurried nighttime departure from unspecified pursuers, that nightmare trip on the maze-like heath, the frightening house in which La Motte is held, where threats lurk beyond the door and appear without warning, travelling through seemingly endless forest in which paths mysteriously disappear and run out.
There's a sort of nightmare inevitability to the way La Motte discovers that he has sought shelter in the home of his enemy, the Marquis, going right to the place he should have avoided. I think Radcliffe really starts to crank up the tension here, as she leaves us wondering whether the skeleton in the chest has any connection with the Marquis - and why there seems to be such deep suspicion between the Marquis and La Motte. I'm eager to find out what La Motte is running from, and what he did wrong - it seems to be suggested that he is the one who did some evil and is now afraid of vengeance.
Yes, and the fact that we haven't been told what exactly La Motte did and why he is in trouble and being pursued adds to the tension you speak of. I've had nightmares like that, in which someone is chasing me, and I don't know who or why, but I'm still desperately afraid and running and hiding wherever I can. Now, La Motte knows who is after him and why, but we don't, so that nightmare quality continues. Radcliffe must have had similar sorts of nightmares!
Leslie Robertson
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB, Canada
Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2004
Subject: [EighteenthCenturyWorlds] Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest, Chs 4-5:
Like a Film
Reply-To: EighteenthCenturyWorlds@yahoogroups.com
I have been looking for Radcliffe films, but not much result. As mentioned Austen is more for the movies.
The BBC Northanger Abbey (1986) http://www.movbuy.com/Anime--Manga-Movies/Northanger-Abbey.aspBut we are still waiting for the new movie http://tackytree.tripod.com/northanger/abbey.html
The only Radcliffe film is french ! Confessional_des_pénitents_noirs,_Le_(1977)_(mini)- Ann Radcliffe http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0220213/ Based on Radcliffe, Ann The Italian, or, The confessional of the Black Penitents : a romance edited with an introduction by Frederick Garber
Regards
Susanne
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004
Subject: [EighteenthCenturyWorlds] Young impressionable girls reading Radcliffe
Reply-To: EighteenthCenturyWorlds@yahoogroups.com
While reading With Zola in England by Ernest A. Vizetelly (translator of French to English, Emile Zola's main translator and also friend), I had to laugh when I read the passage quoted below. We always laugh on a couple of other lists about the "dangers" of reading French novels that the Victorians were always warned of. Vizetelly lived in France for a good number of years. I believe the daughter he is speaking of was born in France. At any rate, they were living in France when she was young and she almost spoke French as her first language.
"Practical enough in matters of everyday life, this girl of mine has literary partialities of a somewhat gruesome kind, and her avowed ambition (I quote her own words) is to write, some day, stories full of witches and wizards, that shall make people's flesh creep. For this reason I keep such of Anne Radcliffe's uncanny novels as I possess carefully locked up."
Dagny
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004
Subject: [EighteenthCenturyWorlds] Young impressionable girls reading Radcliffe or Chastelay
or Fournier?
Reply-To: EighteenthCenturyWorlds@yahoogroups.com
I never thought until Ellen mentioned that Vizetelly's daughter, Violette was her name, might have read Radcliffe in French. Vizetelly himself was English, but lived in France for many years and his wife was French. His wife probably read in French. When Zola stayed in England for about a year, having fled France because the Dreyfus Affair, young Violette, around sixteen at the time, acted as his housekeeper since Zola did not speak English.
I wonder if Vizetelly ever did any English to French translations or if it was only French to English. I know he was translating in the 1890s, other than that I don't know.
Dagny
Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2004
Subject: [EighteenthCenturyWorlds] Another reference to the influence of Radcliffe's "macabre"
novels
Reply-To: EighteenthCenturyWorlds@yahoogroups.com
So often when something comes to one's attention and is on one's mind, reference after reference to it turns up. So it is with the "danger" of reading Radcliffe. I just came across another reference in George Sand by Curtis Cate.
Musset had told George Sand that everything was over between them. She had returned all the letters he had written to her over the last few months except the last.
From George Sand by Curtis Cate:In a moment of hysteria she cut her long black hair, then went out and bought a skull, in which she lovingly placed both locks and letter. Nature was once again trying to imitate art. The heroine of Indiana had likewise cut her hair in a desperate moment. But the skull added a new, grotesque twist that was missing from the novel. Just what it was supposed to symbolize is not clear. The death she felt in her heart? Her suicidal despair? Or was it that she had read too many novels by Ann Ward Radcliffe, Charles Nordier, and other masters of the macabre?
Dagny
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004
Subject: [EighteenthCenturyWorlds] Young impressionable girls reading Radcliffe or Chastelay
or Fournier?
Reply-To: EighteenthCenturyWorlds@yahoogroups.com
I wanted to respond to Dagny's story about the French girl whose father feared she would become nervous upon reading Radcliffe's uncanny novels. For myself, this was recently the effect on mine of Bram Stoker's Dracula: two summers ago I can vouch for three of my students writing this novel had the same effect on them. They kept looking up afraid they'd see the Count standing there smiling at them. I'm so impressionable a tale by M. R. James can sometimes disquiet me.
My feeling is Radcliffe's books no longer do do this. The interesting question to answer would be, Why not?
Another angle: I read the above in English. It is probable that Vizetelly read Radcliffe in French. A little while ago I was worrying on list about which French translations French people in the 19th and 20th century read: whose book were they reading for real. This allows me to introduce my happy delight to discover that quite by chance I am now the proud owner of the first full translation into French of Mysteries of Udolpho: the editor of the most recent paperback edition of Les Mystères d'Udolphe, Maurice Lévy chose as his copytext the 1797 translation of the book by another writer of the gothic in the period, Victorine de Chastenay. Lévy includes a full-length essay on this translation and others of Udolpho in his book.
It is, however, probably that our little French girl did not read Chastenay. In the middle of the 19th century a man named Fournier translated all three of Radcliffe's novels into French and this became the typical book French people would read. This is said to be unfortunate for it's said that Chastenay's translation of Udolpho and the Abbé André Morellet's translation of The Italian are much superior to Fournier's. It matters whose text you read.
We pretend that we are reading an original book -- we make the text in front of us invisible and create the impression for ourselves we are reading the author whose name is plastered on the cover to get us to buy it.
I mean to come back tonight to talk about Morellet's translations of The Italian. He was a strongly progressive (Voltairian) philosopher and did some very interesting things with Radcliffe's text. The link between the "rational" Enlightenment and these irrational texts is of great interest.
Cheers to all,
Ellen
Re: Morellet's French translation of Radcliffe's Italian
Christopher Cave organizes his essay on the Abbé André Morellet's 1797-8 French transation of Radcliffe's Italian as an examination of an engagement of a Enlightenment philosophe with a gothic novel. In order to do this he has to examine Radcliffe's novel and he comes up with some astute observations.
Morellet (1727-1819) is an important figure in his own right. He translated a manual for inquistors: this remarkably candid book by Nicolas Eymeric attempts to teach his readers how to break someone's will, seduce them through brutality and temptation, and how to use torture effectively. It really is not a satire, just wholly unconscious of its evil, unashamed. Morellet's partly satiric creative translation and successful publication and distribution of this book did a great deal to stop some of the Catholic Church's worst or most flagrant Inquistorial behaviors. Morellet translated two tracts on behalf of inoculation against small pox. This was another battle with the church. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he not only translated but he adapted and that means reordered one of the landmark publications in the history of interrogation and customs leading up the courtroom and courtroom mores itself: Beccaria's Dei delitti e delle pene (in French: Traité des delits et des peines; Englished: Treaty on Crimes and Punishments_). It was probably this treatise which inspired Manzoni's history of torture in interrogation. Morellet was a friend of Voltaire, wrote theological articles for the Encyclopedia, and attended salons on his time off from his writerly proselytizing.
He supported himself with great difficulty. One resource was translation of popular books, among these he did a number of gothic novels, two of which are very Radcliffean (feminine gothic rather than the Monk Lewis variety): Regina Maria Roche's Children of the Abbey and Clermont. Probably an important motive for translating The Italian was money. All three of these books were very popular in English and a translation could command a decent fee. French was the lingua franca of later 18th and early 19th century Europe.
What Cave shows is that Morellet turned Radcliffe's book into something far clearer, more logical, and more connected. What is misty, wholly intertwined and thick with many different substantives is turned into a text whose underlying point of view is that of Enlightenment psychologizing (often subtle) and asthetics. Cave sets side by side a couple of descriptions of dungeons, houses, and labyrinths and the reader has the opportunity (in a sense) to watch the poor Abbe turn Radcliffe's texts into something one could visualize in a connected fashion. Of course you still have too many labyrinths, dungeons, locked doors, traps, and the like. In a way Morellet makes Radcliffe easier to read -- but in seeing what he does we see that part of her power lies precisely in this blurriness, this indistinctness. The text is less Kafka like, more really like some of the places Candide suffers through -- terrible but terrible because the threat is a pragmatic one to the body and tortures of the mind by someone or something real. The threat in Radcliffe's text comes from the mind of the text (so to speak) and what it plays upon the mind of the reader.
I don't want to say that Morellet is necessarily a poor translation; indeed it was reprinted and apparently reads very well. Those French readers who loved Pope's poetry (in the original say too) would like Morellet's translations. He brings into the text a subtle analytical French which brings out Radcliffe's tendency not to dramatize a psychological encounter but analzye the mind having it. Towards the end of Cave's essay he shows that one place Morellet really cuts a lot is in the depiction of the servants. Cave suggests that what is operating here is an ancien regime aesthetic which is embarrassed by vulgar humor; what Radcliffe calls wit is not wit to Morellet; it's jocularity of a forced type. I'm not sure this is an enlightenment aesthetic, for even if I sometimes find Peter funny, it is overdone and sometimes embarrassingly snobbish on Radcliffe's part, not anti-hierarchical at all. Morellet is very good at evoking the grand sublime and pleasurable beauty in Radcliffe.
An interesting element in good translation study is the translation often is turned into a critical reading engagement. We are getting inside of the translator's mind from the view of how the translator read and interpreted the original text and then how the translation was read by readers and itself effected other texts (both original and translated). I suppose as we measure or judge an original work by how well we think it somehow dramatizes reality (the nonverbal world in terms of the chosen genre), the analogy is that we are measuring or judging the tanslation by how well it dramatizes its specific verbal text.
I'll conclude with saying that the mid-19th century French translation of the _Italian_ was by Fournier -- which translation did not turn Radcliffe into something neater, more logical, sharply psychological.
So when we read of a French reader reading "Radcliffe," we have not only to look to see if she read Radcliffe or a translation, but then which translation.
As an addendum I'd like to say that I have discovered there is one French translation of a novel by Jane Austen that is much respected: F. Fénélon's late 19th century translation of Northanger Abbey as Catherine. Fénélon's text is actually still sold in France, as was (in the mid 1990s) Isabelle de Montolieu's free adaptation/translation of Austen's Sense and Sensibility. It's interesting to me that Fénélon changed the title of his original. That suggests that Austen was not that respected and that the English language had not achieved the hegemony it has today. The more "powerful" language often commands a keeping of the title -- though titles are sometimes kept because it's felt they really are non-translatable.
Cheers to all,
Ellen
Re: Radcliffe and Sand
In response to Dagny,
When I read Sand's Consuelo I was not all that surprized to find that just as we move into one of the most gothic sequences of the novel (the heroines travels down a huge labyrinthine tunnel to bottom cistern of a deep fountain), Sand writes a long prelude-paragraph in which she imitates, parodies and refers the reader to Radcliffe as a model for what she, Sand, is about to write. She presents herself as criticizing Radcliffe for empty fatuity (that is, Radcliffe does not use her gothic for conscious themes beyond the gothic itself), but then Sand turns around to show she can do it so much better and politicize and historicize too.
I see Northanger Abbey in this light too. Austen mocks in order to replace.
In Harold Bloom's terms, Austen and Sand are battling with their predecessor.
Sheridan Le Fanu is more generous in a way. He simply acknowledges he writes in the tradition of Radcliffe.
Ellen
