d graduate and a student of
law, who became editor of a weekly newspaper, _The English
Chronicle_. Her life was so secluded that biographers did not
hesitate to invent what they could not discover. The legend that
she was driven frantic by the horrors that she had conjured up
was refuted after her death.

It may have been the publication of _The Recess_ by Sophia Lee in
1785 that inspired Mrs. Radcliffe to try her fortune with a
historical novel. _The Recess_ is a story of languid interest,
circling round the adventures of the twin daughters of Mary Queen
of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk. Yet as we meander gently
through its mazes we come across an abbey "of Gothic elegance and
magnificence," a swooning heroine who plays the lute,
thunderstorms, banditti and even an escape in a coffin--items
which may well have attracted the notice of Mrs. Radcliffe, whose
first novel, _The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne_,[36] appeared
in 1789. Considered historically, this immature work is full of
interest, for, with the notable exception of the supernatural, it
contains in embryo nearly all the elements of Mrs. Radcliffe's
future novels.

The scene is laid in Scotland, and the period, we are assured, is
that of the "dark ages"; but almost at the outset we are startled
rudely from our dreams of the mediaeval by the statement that

"the wrongfully imprisoned earl, when the sweet
tranquillity of evening threw an air of tender
melancholy over his mind ... composed the following
sonnet, which, having committed it to paper, he, the
next evening dropped upon the terrace."

The sonnet consists of four heroic quatrains somewhat curiously
resembling the manner of Gray. From this episode it may be
gathered that Mrs. Radcliffe did not aim at, or certainly did not
achieve, historical accuracy, but evolved most of her
descriptions, not from original sources in ancient documents, but
from her own inner consciousness. It was only in her last
novel--_Gaston de Blondeville_--that she made use of old
chronicles. Within the Scottish castle we meet a heroine with an
"expression of pensive melancholy" and a "smile softly clouded
with sorrow," a noble lord deprived of his rights by a villain
"whose life is marked with vice and whose death with the
bitterness of remorse." But these grey and ghostly shadows, who
flit faintly through our imagination, are less prophetic of
coming events than the properties with which the castle