7 Quotes & Sayings By Ann Radcliffe

Anne Radcliffe was born in Lancashire, England, on February 17, 1663. She was educated at home until the age of 14, when she was sent to a boarding school. At 16 she became a student of Latin and Greek at Pembroke College, Oxford. While at Oxford, she developed her love of Gothic novels Read more

The first novel of hers to be published was The Romance of the Forest (1694). Although her best-known novels were published in the 1720s and 1730s and include The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian (1748), it was her last novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, that gained her perhaps her greatest fame. In this novel there is a character who is called "the Man of Feeling," an idea that must have been suggested by the author's deep religious convictions.

This character is very strong-willed and independent, and he will not be governed by any authority--including God--and his defiance causes his death sentence to be commuted to banishment for life in the wilderness. Although some critics have called The Italian "an anti-Catholic work," Radcliffe herself spent only a few months in Rome and denied any personal antipathy towards Catholicism. She wrote: "[W]e live not in a time when we love our enemies; but we must read them [the priests] as we read Shakespeare or Milton."

1
I ought not to doubt the steadiness of your affection. Yet such is the inconsistency of real love, that it is always awake to suspicion, however unreasonable; always requiring new assurances from the object of its interest, and thus it is, that i always feel revived, as by a new convinction, when your words tell me I am dear to you; and wanting these, I relapse into doubt and often into despondency. Ann Radcliffe
2
There are certain prejudices attached to the human mind which it requires all our wisdom to keep from interfering with our happiness; certain set notions, acquired in infancy, and cherished involuntarily by age, which grow up and assume a gloss so plausible, that few minds, in what is called a civilized country, can afterwards overcome them. Truth is often perverted by education. While the refined Europeans boast a standard of honour, and a sublimity of virtue, which often leads them from pleasure to misery, and from nature to error, the simple, uninformed American follows the impulse of his heart, and obeys the inspiration of wisdom. Nature, uncontaminated by false refinement, every where acts alike in the great occurrences of life. The Indian discovers his friend to be perfidious, and he kills him; the wild Asiatic does the same; the Turk, when ambition fires, or revenge provokes, gratifies his passion at the expence of life, and does not call it murder. Even the polished Italian, distracted by jealousy, or tempted by a strong circumstance of advantage, draws his stiletto, and accomplishes his purpose. It is the first proof of a superior mind to liberate itself from the prejudices of country, or of education… Self-preservation is the great law of nature; when a reptile hurts us, or an animal of prey threatens us, we think no farther, but endeavour to annihilate it. When my life, or what may be essential to my life, requires the sacrifice of another, or even if some passion, wholly unconquerable, requires it, I should be a madman to hesitate. Ann Radcliffe
3
She was tranquil, but it was with the quietness of exhausted grief, not of resignation; and she looked back upon the past, and awaited the future, with a kind of out-breathed despair. Ann Radcliffe
4
Wisdom or accident, at length, recall us from our error, and offers to us some object capable of producing a pleasing, yet lasting effect, which effect, therefore, we call happiness. Happiness has this essential difference from what is commonly called pleasure, that virtue forms its basis, and virtue being the offspring of reason, may be expected to produce uniformity of effect. Ann Radcliffe
5
As I walked over the loose fragments of stone, which lay scattered and surveyed the sublimity and grandeur of the ruins, I recurred, by a natural association of ideas, to the times when these walls stood proudly in their original splendor, when the halls were the scenes of hospitality and festive magnificence, and when they resounded with the voices of those whom death had long since swept from earth. "Thus, " said I, "shall the present generation - he who now sink in misery - and he who now swim in pleasure, alike pass away and be forgotten. Ann Radcliffe
6
When her mind was discomposed... a book was the opiate that lulled it to repose. Ann Radcliffe