A Gothic Novelist on Tour

Yesterday we attended a Lunchtime Talk at Kendal Museum, which was great fun. The talk was given by Dr Penny Bradshaw and was entitled A Gothic Novelist on Tour in the Lake District: Ann Radcliffe's Momentous 1794 Encounter with the Landscapes of the Lakes.

I've only recently started to appreciate Gothic novelists and am keen to read and listen to anything I can about this fascinating genre. As I also have a passion for the many Tours of the period, as well as the Picturesque way of viewing the landscape, the talk was particularly apposite. 

Penny's talk was really interesting and certainly provided some new thoughts and ideas about Ann Radcliffe's writing, both her wonderful Gothic novels and her 1794 Tour. When Radcliffe made her Tour of the Lakes in 1794 she was hot on the heels of the Picturesque writers and travellers such as Thomas West and William Gilpin. However, Radcliffe deliberately turned her back on this way of looking at the scenery, and instead chose to see the landscape in her own way, through her own eyes She rejected the Viewing Stations of Thomas West and the Claude Glass, the beloved tool of the Picturesque traveller, choosing instead to experience the effects of the external landscape on the emotions, as well as seeking out ruined abbeys, castles and other indicators of the cultural life of the local population.

In much the same way that Radcliffe rejected the Picturesque style and ways of seeing landscape, her Tour is also a forerunner to the Romantic views of landscape. She views landscape in an intense and personal way, eschewing the traditions of the period. In this, we can see the similarities with the later travel and tour writings of Dorothy Wordsworth, John Keats and their fellow romantics.

As the Gothic fell out of fashion, and was heavily satirised, so did Ann Radcliffe's wonderful Tour. Reductively, she was linked to the deeply unfashionable Picturesque. Wordsworth loathed Radcliffe's novels and John Keats satirised her travel writing in his 1818 Tour. It was only with John Ruskin's writing that Radcliffe was somewhat rehabilitated and recognised for her "natural and genuine love of scenery". 

A really interesting and informative talk which has given me much to think about, as well as many books to read!