Ann Radcliffe’s Post-1797 Imagination: Edwy: A Poem, in Three Parts and the Topographical Gothic

Abstract

This essay considers how Ann Radcliffe’s post-1797 texts, posthumously published in 1826 almost thirty years after The Italian (1797), marks a new and significant shift in Radcliffe’s later imagination. Through this collection of prose, narrative poetry, and lyric verse, Radcliffe re-examines the Gothic as a genre which is fascinated with Britain’s national past, both in terms of the architectural remains of the nation’s history, and the texts which commemorate or interrogate such pasts. In investigating how Radcliffe responds to a contemporary revival in interest in Britain’s early heritage, this essay focuses on Radcliffe’s little-known fairy poem, entitled Edwy: A Poem, in Three Parts, set on the grounds of Windsor Castle. Edwy represents Radcliffe’s movement towards a self-conscious examination of her own Gothic topographies, in which she shifts to a specific representation of the sites of Britain’s national past, complicated by the inherent violence of their Gothic legacies.