Stirling University Presents

Biography:

 

Fanny has completed a B.A. and an M.A. in French Literature and Language at the Université de Lorraine in France. She is currently working toward a PhD in Literature and Languages at the University of Stirling and at the Université de Lorraine under the supervision of Dr Dale Townshend and Prof. Catriona Seth. Her thesis focuses on the reception of the English Gothic novel in France and the French “roman noir” at the turn of the 18th and 20th centuries.

 

 

English Gothic served “à la française”:

French forgeries of Ann Radcliffe

Fanny Lacôte – PhD candidate – Université de Lorraine / University of Stirling

 

Almost thirty years separate the French translations of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) and Gaston de Blondeville (1826); for readers in France, this constituted a gap that had to be filled through the powers of imitation and forgery.  Though political relations between the two nations were troubled, literary exchanges between France and England, as Angela Wright has pointed out, never ceased; in France, the roman noir was set for a certain flourishing as libraries advertised, among reprints and new translations of Radcliffe’s works, self-professed French imitations of the “Mistress of Udolpho,” such as Barbarinski, ou les Brigands du château de Wissegrade (1818) by the countess du Nardouet. Similarly, several texts claimed to be translations of unpublished worksfrom Radcliffe’s oeuvre, such as L’Hermite de la Tombe mystérieuse (1816) by the baron de Lamothe-Langon, and Le Couvent de Sainte Catherine (1810) by the baroness Auffdiener, both of whom claimed to have been acquainted with the “Great Enchantress”.  As this paper will argue, Ann Radcliffe’s name, in itself enough to guarantee good sales, became the means by which a number of aristocrats earned their living after the French Revolution, turning to translations, imitations and forgeries of the writer’s characteristic Gothic mode. Publishing under the name of Ann Radcliffe in France not only served as a means of concealment for writers who did not wish their own names to be directly associated with the Gothic, but also as a way of addressing topical French political concerns behind a façade of Englishness. By focusing on these imitations and forgeries, this paper will seek to explain how and why Ann Radcliffe’s name and publishing ‘trademark’ were exploited by her fellow novelists across the Channel. In the process, it will demonstrate the ‘migration’ of a national literary genre into the imagination of another national tradition, a movement that reveals some of the reasons for the Gothic’s success in early nineteenth-century France.