Abstract
The Romance of the Forest (1791) secured Ann Radcliffe’s reputation as a writer of Gothic literature. The novel continued and expanded, as this chapter will show, the Walpolean tradition of re-evaluating the modern romance by injecting it with the virtues of “respectable” novels such as plausibility, mimetic acuity and Protestantism. After a brief recapitulation of Radcliffe’s theory of the supernatural in poetry and a plot comparison with the first British Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, the chapter analyses the figurative meaning of landscapes and architecture for national as well as gender identity in Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest. In doing so, it examines Radcliffe’s ruined abbey and forest as a chronotope related to the novel’s characterisation. Radcliffe’s scenic configurations made a significant contribution to the development of the British novel as a literary genre by anticipating the characters’ embeddedness in their surroundings in nineteenth-century realist novels such as George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866).
