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MILES, ROBERT. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). vi + 201 pp. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. The resurgence of interest in gothic novels and romances over the last ten years has created a body of criticism that tends to be a great deal more provocative and interesting than the novels themselves. Jacqueline Howard's Reading Gothic Fiction, for instance, manages to give a fairly coherent Bakhtinian reading of the gothic novel, while Kate Ellis and several of the scholars gathered in Julian Fleenor's The Female Gothic have pursued a productive rethinking of family relations and the role of the heroine in the gothic. But in the face of how bad gothic writers such as Horace Walpole or Clara Reeve can be, it becomes difficult to keep aflame the enthusiasm that such critical studies kindle.
Ann Radcliffe, however, being one of the most readable and most able of such authors, is a different case. She is not one who needs a complex critical apparatus to make her accessible. Her approach to the gothic is controlled rather than gratuitous. Readers are likely to have more difficulty with her politics than with her aesthetics. On the surface, her ideology seems quite conservative-or at the very least less subject to vacillation and undercutting than other gothic writers-and she is willing to offer the sort of closure that transforms supernatural events into rational explanations. She is, one is tempted to say, a safe gothic writer.
At least that is one traditionally held opinion, an opinion that Robert Miles sets out to disrupt. Miles goes to great lengths to present Radcliffe as a more complex writer of...