Poetry, Paratext, and History in Radcliffe’s Gothic
This chapter argues that attention to Ann Radcliffe’s use of Scots poetry in the epigraphs of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) transforms the female gothic into an historical instead of a psychological analytic. In the tension between Udolpho’s representations of female sensibility and its paratext—what Gerard Genette calls the “border” or “threshold” of the text—this chapter finds an uneven and non-linear feminist historiography capable of producing unconventional accounts of women’s experiences of British imperial and commercial growth. Specifically, Radcliffe uses James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748) and James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1771) as signposts for her heroine’s journey, grafting Emily St. Aubert’s “progress” onto debates about history, the relationship between manners and economic structures, and the place of women in historical narrative.