'Austen read especially novels by women, including Mary Brunton, Frances and Sarah Harriet Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Lennox, Lady Morgan, Ann Radcliffe, Regina Maria Roche, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins and Hannah More. She also, apparently, read the fiction of the Lady's Magazine, deriving names, Willoughby, Brandon, Knightley, from it, but correcting its "monological" discourse'.
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Jane Austen Print: Book
'Susan Sibbald knew Scottish shepherd Wully Carruthers who was a fellow-subscriber to the circulating library at Melrose, but while she borrowed Ann Radcliffe, he read "Ancient and Modern History", though he did sometimes read a "novel or nonsense buke", like "Sir Charles Grandison". He had also read Alan Ramsay's "The Gentle Shepherd", and contrasted it ironically with the life of a real shepherd.'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Susan Sibbald Print: Book
'And besides she [Mrs Cliffe] wd. lend me the first two vols of the mysteries of Udolpho before she had finished them herself ? a kind of generosity which quite dazzled my weak moral sense. I have read the mysteries; but am anxious to read them again ? being a worshipper of Mrs. Radcliffe.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Went into the library to try to rationalize my mind about the deathwatch, - by reading the Cyclopaedia. Feel very unwell today, & nervous. Read the mysteries of Udolpho ? by way of quieting my imagination? & heard the boys read Homer & Zenophon - & read some of Victor Hugo?s & Lamartine?s poetry ? his last song of Childe Harold. Miss Steers kindly sent a packet of French poetry to Mr. Boyd?s for me yesterday. Le dernier chant wants the Byronic character (- an inevitable want for a French composition ? ) and is not quite equal even to Lamartine.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
"Attacking W[ordsworth]'s 'one-sidedness' in 1840, De Quincey records: 'One of Mrs Radcliffe's romances, viz. 'The Italian,' he had, by some strange accident, read, - read, but only to laugh at it ... '"
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Print: Book
Finished the second volume of Mrs Radcliffe's 'Italian'. She is the best writer in her way of anybody I [have?] heard of. There is one scene in this volume which cannot be easily equalled. I mean the scene [...] in the passage when they are going to murder Helena the heroine of the story.
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Hunter Print: Book
We got the last volume of the Italian, I think it does not equal the former production
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Hunter Print: Book
'On learning that [Hall] Caine was to present twenty-four lectures in Liverpool on "Prose Fiction" ... [D. G. Rossetti] insisted that he read the works [of English novelists] aloud to him; hence "I read Fielding and Smollett, Richardson, Radcliffe, 'Monk' Lewis, Thackeray and Dickens, under a running fire of comment and criticism from Rossetti".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Hall Caine Print: Book
??in Mrs Radcliff?s romances. She was ? an extraordinary female, and her style of writing ? must be allowed to form an era in English romances. Her ignorance was nearly equal to her imagination and that is to say a great deal. Of the modest life on the continent (where scenes of all her romances ? are laid) she knew nothing. With all this, and more, her romances are irresistibly and dangerously delightful? The most extraordinary production of this period was the powerful and wicked romance of The Monk. The spirits raised by the Enchantress of Udolpho, compared to those evoked by Lewis, are like the attendants on Prospero in his enchanted island.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Maturin Print: Book
Frances Burney noted as having been 'an early reader' of Ann Radcliffe, "The Mysteries of Udolpho" (1794).
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Frances Burney Print: Book
'[Frances] Burney had read both "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and "The Italian" when they first came out, preferring the latter ...'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Frances Burney Print: Book
'[Frances] Burney had read both "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and "The Italian" when they first came out, preferring the latter ...'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Frances Burney Print: Book
'Carter read and enjoyed fiction until the end of her life. Pennington reveals her enthusiasm for a number of novelists "of considerable genius, as well as strict morals", who provided "a very pleasing relaxation from her severer studies" (Letters... to Mrs Montagu, vol 1, p. 69). According to him, she disliked realist fiction, though she made an exception for Burney's which she read with "increasing approbation more than once": her favourite was "Evelina" (Memoirs, p. 299). She also enjoyed Jane West (who dedicated "A Tale of the Times" to her) and Ann Radcliffe, who impressed her, according to Pennington, by "the good tendency of all her works, the virtues of her principal characters... and her accurate, as well as vivid delineation of the beauties of nature" (Memoirs, p. 300). She thought "A Sicilian Romance" "elegant" and praised its "good" moral (Letters... to Mrs Montagu, Vol III, p. 323).'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Carter Print: Book
' I would advise you to read Mrs R's "Italian" in your own chamber, not to lose the picturesque images with which it abounds.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Wollstonecraft Print: BookManuscript: Unknown
'To amuse ourselves at the inns on this road we brought with us Jackson's "30 Letters" & Moritz's "Travels in England" (both in our Society) but having finish'd the latter (w'ch John was now reading) & Mrs M being reading the other, I got Mrs Radcliffe's novel of the "Sicilian Romance" from the Library there, which I this day began reading & was much pleased with.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: John Marsh Print: Book
'The next day being wet, we staid [sic] within, when to amuse me I got the 2 last vols of the "Mysteries of Udolpho" (the 2 first of w'ch I had read before we left Chichester) & afterw'ds Keate's "Sketches of Nature", from the library.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: John Marsh Print: Book
'S. reads rights of Man. C. in an ill humour - she read the Italian'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Clara Mary Jane (Claire) Clairmont Print: Book
'Read the Italian & talk all day'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin Print: Book
'I took Radcliffe's "Tour" to the Library; I was not so much entertained with it, as I expected tho her descriptions are very fine.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Hunter Print: Book
'Brought Mrs Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho"; I wish I had not read it before, for upon a second reading it loses half its intrest'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Hunter Print: Book
'I read in the evening the "Mysteries of Udolpho" which Lucy sent me'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Wynne Print: Book
'Finished the "Italian"...'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Green Print: Book
'Read Mrs. Radcliffe's "Tour to the Lakes". Much might be expected from this Lady's well known powers of description, exerted on so congenial a theme...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Green Print: Book
[Mary Shelley's Reading List for 1815. Only those titles not mentioned in journal entries are given separate database entries. xs denote books also read by Percy Shelley]
'Posthumous Works. 3.
Sorrows of Werter
Don Roderick - by Southey
Gibbons Decline & fall.
x Paradise Regained
x Gibbons Life and Letters - 1st edition 2
x Lara
New Arabian Nights 3
Corinna
Fall of the Jesuits
Rinaldo Rinaldini
Fo[n]tenelle's Plurality of the Worlds
Hermsprong
Le diable boiteux
Man as he is.
Rokeby.
Ovid's Meamo[r]phoses in Latin
x Wordsworth's Poems
x Spenser's Fairy Queen
x Life of the Philipps
x Fox's History of James II
The Reflector
Wieland.
Fleetwood
Don Carlos
x Peter Wilkins
Rousseau's Confessions.
x Espriella's Letters from England
Lenora - a poem
Emile
x Milton's Paradise Lost
X Life of Lady Hamilton
De l'Alemagne - by Made de Stael
3 vols. of Barruel
x Caliph Vathek
Nouvelle Heloise
x Kotzebue's account of his banishment to Siberia.
Waverly
Clarissa Harlowe
Robertson's Hist. of america
x Virgil
xTale of Tub.
x Milton's speech on Unlicensed printing
x Curse of Kehama
x Madoc
La Bible Expliquee
Lives of Abelard and Heloise
The New Testament
Coleridge's Poems.
1st vol. Syteme de la Nature
x Castle of Indolence
Chattertons Poems.
x Paradise Regained
Don Carlos.
x Lycidas.
x St Leon
Shakespeare's Play. Part of which Shelley reads aloud
Burkes account of civil society
x Excursion
Pope's Homer's Illiad
x Sallust
Micromegas
x Life of Chauser
Canterbury Tales
Peruvian letters.
Voyages round the World
Pluarch's lives.
x 2 vols of Gibbon
Ormond
Hugh Trevor
x Labaume's Hist. of the Russian War
Lewis's tales
Castle of Udolpho
Guy Mannering
Charles XII by Voltaire
Tales of the East'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin
'Friday Nov. 4th. Rise at nine. Finish a novel called Manfrone or the one handed monk by
Mrs. Radcliffe.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 8 December 1841:
'I have not read Self formation, -- & [italics]have[end italics] read "Gaston de Blondeville".
perhaps you don't know it, but I am, have been .. in all sorts of tenses -- a profound reader of
romances. I have read Gaston [...] The fault of Mrs Radcliffe's preceeding works was her want
of courage in not following back the instincts of our nature to their possible causes. She made
the instinct toward the supernatural too prominent, to deny & belie the thing [...] Can anything
be more irritating than the Key to her mysteries [...]?
'Just in proportion to the degree of this disagreeableness, is Gaston better & nobler in
[italics]design[end italics]. Inasmuch as the ghost is real, it is excellent, but inasmuch as the
book hath three volumes (or two) -- it is naught. It did hang upon me (with all its advantages
as a ghost story) with a weight from which her preceeding works are sacred. It quite
disappointed me! [...] the whole appeared to me heavy & not impressive -- &, what is strange,
not so terrible with its actual marvels, as were the waxen mimicries of the Castle of Otranto.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
'Your mention of Hawthorne puts me in mind to tell you what rabid [underlined] admirers we
are of his [...] There is no prose write of the present day I have half the interest in I have in
him, his style, in my mind is so beautifully refined and there is such exquisite pathos and
quaint humour, and such an awfully [underlined] deep knowledge of human nature, not that
hard unloving detestable, and, as it is purely one sided (or wrong [underlined] sided) false
reading of it that one finds in Thackeray. He reminds me in many things of Charles Lamb, and
of heaps of our rare old English humourists, with their deep pathetic nature--and one faculty
he possesses beyond any writer I remember (not dramatic, for then I would certainly
remember Shakespeare, and others on further though perhaps) viz. that of exciting you to the
highest pitch without on any [underlined] occasion that I am aware of making you feel by his
catastrophe ashamed of having been excited. What I mean is, if you have ever read it, such a
case as occurs in the "Mysteries of Udolpho" where your disgust is beyond all expression on
finding that all your fright about the ghostly creature that has haunted you throughout the
volumes has been caused by a pitiful wax image! [...] And no Author I know does [underlined]
try to work upon them [i.e. the passions] more, apparently with no [underlined] effort to
himself. I cannot satisfy myself as to whether I like his sort of Essays contained in the twice
told tales best, or his more finished works such as Blithedale romance. Every touch he adds to
any character gives a higher interest to it, so that I should like the longer ones best, but there
is a concentration of excellence in the shorter things and passages that strike, in force like
daggers, in their beauty and truth, so that I generally end in liking that best which I have read
last [...] There are beautiful passages in Longfellow, above all, as far as my knowledge goes
in the Golden Legend, some of which in a single reading impressed themselves on my
memory.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret De Quincey Print: Book
'We must not judge [Ann Radcliffe's novels], now that the taste in which they were written is
exhausted and palled, by our modern feelings. The best test of their worth is contemporary
opinion, and tales which delighted Burke, Fox, and Sheridan, must, when compared with the
novels then published, have possessed a singular amount of merit.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Burke Print: Book
'We must not judge [Ann Radcliffe's novels], now that the taste in which they were written is
exhausted and palled, by our modern feelings. The best test of their worth is contemporary
opinion, and tales which delighted Burke, Fox, and Sheridan, must, when compared with the
novels then published, have possessed a singular amount of merit.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles James Fox Print: Book
'We must not judge [Ann Radcliffe's novels], now that the taste in which they were written is
exhausted and palled, by our modern feelings. The best test of their worth is contemporary
opinion, and tales which delighted Burke, Fox, and Sheridan, must, when compared with the
novels then published, have possessed a singular amount of merit.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Brinsley Sheridan Print: Book
'Miss Owen began the 'Mysteries of Udolpho'... but Mrs Owen thought it would take her up so much that...she gave her a shilling to put off reading it till she went home, and gave her 'Guy Mannering' and the 'Romance of the Forest' to read meanwhile.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Owen Print: Book
'Miss Owen began the 'Mysteries of Udolpho'... but Mrs Owen thought it would take her up so much that...she gave her a shilling to put off reading it till she went home, and gave her 'Guy Mannering' and the 'Romance of the Forest' to read meanwhile.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Owen Print: Book
