Women, agency, and the public sphere: An investigation of Ann Radcliffe's 'The Romance of the Forest' and 'The Mysteries of Udolpho'

This thesis examines the way Ann Radcliffe positions herself and her female gothic heroines in both public and private spheres, while registering Briton's fears about the threat of patriarchy and politics of transgression stemming from the French Revolution. Late eighteenth-century Britain's cultural revolution and print changed the way Britons produced and consumed literature. This thesis argues that women like Radcliffe contributed to the formation of public opinion through their writing without abandoning the domestic sphere. In separate discussions of The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), this thesis argues that Radcliffe existed both privately as marginal to literature and public debate and publically since she simultaneously entered those same public debates. Without abandoning the domestic sphere, Radcliffe entered the public sphere by appropriating the male-originated female gothic genre and unsettling masculinist hierarchies and assumptions, including those assumptions about gothic fictions and novels as inherently inferior literary genres, just as readers of novels and gothic literature were deemed inferior consumers of print.