The Romance of the Forest

The Romance of the Forest evokes a world drenched in both horror and natural splendor, beset with abductions and imprisonments, and centered upon the frequently terrified but still resourceful and determined heroine Adeline. The Gothic Romance stands perfectly poised between the eighteenth century and the oncoming Age of Romanticism, offering moral lessons, pure thrills, and a new kind of fiction with more prominence given to atmospheric setting and sustained suspense than ever before.

About the Author
Ann Radcliffe became the best-selling English writer of the 1790s when her husband, publisher of the English Chronicle, encouraged her to write for the commercial market. Praised by Walter Scott and favorably compared to Shakespeare, Radcliffe wrote such successes as The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho. At the height of her fame she ceased to publish, though she lived until 1823.

ISBN-13: 9780199539222

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Publication Date: 05-15-2009

Pages: 432

Product Dimensions: 5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.00(d)

Series: Oxford World's Classics

Shelley King is Professor Emerita of English at Queen’s University. John B. Pierce is Professor of English at Queen’s University. They are the editors of the Broadview Editions of Amelia Opie’s The Father and Daughter and The Dangers of Coquetry and of George McDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and Other Fairy Tales.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Ann Radcliffe: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

The Romance of the Forest

Appendix A: Contemporary Reviews

• 1. From The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature (April 1792)
• 2. From Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (May 1792)
• 3. The Town and Country Magazine (June 1792)
• 4. The Scots Magazine (June 1792)
• 5. From English Review (November 1792)

Appendix B: The Romance, the Novel, and the Gothic

• 1. From William Congreve, “The Preface to the Reader,” Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconciled: A Novel (1692)
• 2. From Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 4 (31 March 1750)
• 3. From Horace Walpole, Preface, The Castle of Otranto, 2nd ed. (1765)
• 4. From Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785)
• 5. Anonymous, “Terrorist Novel Writing,” The Spirit of the Public Journals (1797)

Appendix C: The Aesthetics of the Sublime and the Picturesque

• 1. From Longinus, Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime (first century CE)
• 2. From John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704)
• 3. From Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
• 4. From Anna Laetitia Aikin (later Barbauld) and John Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror,” Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773)
• 5. From William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (1792)
• 6. From Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (1826)

Appendix D: Sensibility and the Sentimental

• 1. From Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
• 2. From Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768)
• 3. Helen Maria Williams, “To Sensibility” (1786)
• 4. From Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction (1788)
• 5. From Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Works Cited and Recommended Reading 

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