RADCLIFFE, Mary Ann, n. Clayton, baptised Nottingham 18 June 1746, died Edinburgh, shortly before 6 Aug. 1818. Writer. Daughter of Sarah Bladderwick, and James Clayton, retired merchant. Mary Ann Clayton's father, an Anglican, died when she was four, leaving her his sole heir. Her mother was a Catholic and sent her to the BarConvent school, York, from 1758. Her guardians later fought her mother's favouring of her Catholic suitor, Joseph Radcliffe (c. 1715—1804), but after eloping, Mary Ann Clayton was married to him in early 1761 by an Irish Catholic priest, with a later Anglican ceremony in 1762; she had six surviving children. Her picaresque Memoirs tell the story of her struggle for survival, with her fortune managed by trustees and her husband's businesses failing. Separated from her husband, she ran a coffee house, kept a shop, took in lodgers and sewing, and acted as a chaperone and a governess, moving between London and Edinburgh and continuing to support her children and later grandchildren

From 1781 to 1783, Mary Ann Radcliffe was housekeeper for her former schoolfriend Mary Stewart, Countess of Traquair, at whose Peebles home she met the liberal Catholic priest Alexander Geddes. She afterwards remained in Edinburgh, where she ran a boarding-house, saw her eldest daughter married, and found schools or places for her sons, returning to London in 1789. Her Female Advocate; or An Attempt to recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation (1799), though disavowing ‘the Amazonian spirit of a Wollstonecraft’ (p. xi), discussed the declining job market for women, which might leave unprotected women with little recourse but prostitution. In 1802, she published two issues of Radcliffe's New Novelists’ Pocket Magazine. The authorship of several Gothic novels has been wrongly ascribed to her and she is often confused with the English Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe. From 1803 to her death she lived in Edinburgh, where, after the failure of several business attempts, she published her Memoirs by subscription in 1810, appealing for charitable help in her final, poverty-stricken, years. JR

• Radcliffe, M. A. (1810) The Memoirs of Mary Ann Radcliffe in Familiar Letters to Her Female Friend Blain V., Clements P., Grundy I. (eds) (1990) Feminist Companion to Literature in English; Coleridge, H. J. (1887) St Mary's Convent, Micklegate Bar, York (1686—1887); Orlando: women's writing in the British Isles from the beginnings to the present at http://orlando.cambridge.org; Scottish Post Office Directories at http://digital.nls.uk/directories

RAE, Jane, m. Coates, born Denny 20 Dec. 1872, died Clydebank 12 May 1959.