Ann Ward was born in London in 1764, and in 1787 married William Radcliffe, a parliamentary journalist, and also proprietor and editor of the English Chronicle, a radical newspaper. The Radcliffes made only one trip abroad during their married life, the details of which Ann published in A JourneyMade in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795); the lush descriptions of southern European scenery that appear in her novels were created from a combination of reading travel books written by others, studying the then fashionable landscape paintings and using her own vivid imagination. In later life she suffered severely from asthma and died from this, or from pneumonia, in February 1823.

Her first novel, published anonymously in two volumes, was The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, an Highland Story (1789), which was reprinted several times up to the middle of the nineteenth century, despite the comments by its original reviewers that the author evidently knew nothing about ‘the manners and costume of the Highlands’, and that ‘This kind of entertainment … can be little relished but by the young and unformed mind.’ Her second novel, also in two volumes, was A Sicilian Romance (1790), which was more favourably received. It was, however, The Romance of theForest: Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry … In three volumes (1791) which established Radcliffe as the leading practitioner of the gothic romance school. She acknowledged her authorship in the 1792 second edition, and some critics thought this the best of her works. On the strength of this success, her publishers paid £500 for The Mysteries ofUdolpho, a Romance Interspersed with Some Pieces ofPoetry (1794), and £800 for The Italian, or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents, A Romance (1797). Her last novel, Gaston de Blondeville, was written about 1802, but appeared only posthumously, in 1826.

A Sicilian Romance

2 vols., T. Hookham, London, 1790

Volume 1: The setting is sixteenth-century Sicily. Ferdinand, 5th Marquis Mazzini, and the owner of Castle Mazzini in the Sicilian mountains, was previously married to Louisa Bernini, by whom he had two daughters and one son – Emilia (twenty), Julia (eighteen) and Ferdinand junior (twenty-one).