Experiments in travel writing and romantic constructions of place: Ann Radcliffe’s 1795 account of Continental Europe and the English Lake District

Bradshaw, Penelope ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7240-9206 (2025) Experiments in travel writing and romantic constructions of place: Ann Radcliffe’s 1795 account of Continental Europe and the English Lake District. European Romantic Review, 36 (4). pp. 523-537.

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Abstract

In 1794 Ann Radcliffe made a trip to Continental Europe with her husband in order to visit the Swiss Alps and other landscapes which had featured in her popular Gothic novels, but which she had not yet seen in person. However, the couple found themselves turned back at the Swiss border due to a bureaucratic error. This frustration in achieving their main purpose, combined with anxieties relating to the war in Europe, resulted in husband and wife returning to England and setting out on an alternative tour of the English Lake District – a region which had been described as a “miniature” version of the Alps. Radcliffe kept a journal during her travels and published an account of this two-part touring experience the following year. This paper explores the innovative and experimental nature of Radcliffe’s travel writing within this text, and considers how the experiences in Continental Europe inform and shape her subsequent reading of the English Lake District. It argues that her Rousseauian vision of an imagined but never experienced Switzerland, comes to be displaced onto the Lake District and that in this, as well as in other respects, Radcliffe offers an innovative and influential textual construction of that landscape.

Item Type:	Article
Journal / Publication Title:	European Romantic Review
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	1740-4657
Departments:	Institute of Arts > Humanities
Additional Information:	Dr Penny Bradshaw, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Cumbria, UK. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Depositing User:	Anna Lupton
Date Deposited:	06 Feb 2025 10:07
Last Modified:	02 Dec 2025 08:00
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/8633

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