The Romance of the Forest Book

Ann Radcliffe takes the bump-in-the-night, crepuscular Catholicism of Horace Walpole, and adds a load of 'sequestered virgin' stuff straight out of Richardson. The result is rather a load of old tosh, to be honest, although there are some enjoyable thrills. The plot never makes much sense at the best of times, and by the end it has completely dissolved into dei ex machina, hidden relationships, interminable poetry, and so much swooning from the heroine Adeline that she spends most of the dénouement unconscious. Never mind getting married, she should be getting her blood pressure checked.

Perhaps the most successful part is the first section, where our syncopic heroine and her friends take refuge in an old ruined abbey deep in the forests of the French countryside, where they lounge around being 'devoted to melancholy and secret grief'. These chapters are full of secret passageways, skeletons, ancient manuscripts and the like, while Adeline fends off the advances of a villain so free from nuance that he might as well be twirling a moustache. After that, rather abruptly, the novel become a weird kind of travelogue, taking in Languedoc, Provence and the Alps as Radcliffe quotes liberally from contemporary travel literature.

As always, the Gothic is linked to a bygone (for England), and hence 'foreign', Catholicism. Radcliffe's heroes in this case are seventeenth-century Frenchmen, although for the purposes of expounding her own moral precepts, they generally partake of the values of eighteenth-century Anglicanism: so, when one character discovers the crumbled tomb of a monk in the woods, he launches into an anachronistic diatribe:

'Peace be to his soul! but did he think a life of mere negative virtue deserved an eternal reward? Mistaken man! reason, had you trusted to its dictates, would have informed you, that its active virtues, the adherence to the golden rule, "Do as you would be done unto," could alone deserve the favour of a Deity, whose glory is benevolence.'

Similarly, in the heart of Catholic Savoy, our heroes somehow end up staying with a pastor who reels off pages of sensible Calvinist doctrine (ripped mostly out of Rousseau). Though the plot twists and character developments are decidedly hit and miss, there is some interest in seeing how the form of the novel was still coming into focus here, and occasionally Radcliffe's set-pieces work quite effectively. In her brief intervals of consciousness, Adeline can be quite a plucky heroine, and certain of the supporting characters are genuinely compelling - particularly La Motte, who is an unusual combination of hero and villain.

What is most intriguing, perhaps, is to see how Radcliffe's adumbrated Gothic themes - murder, rape and crypto-incest - would be developed with thunderous explicitness by people like Matthew Lewis and the Marquis de Sade. Sade was a great admirer of hers, and it's curious to imagine him leafing through her books in his cell at the Bicêtre. But in this, as in so many things, the marquis and I do not quite see eye-to-eye.