"Her Ideas Arranged Themselves": Re-Membering Poetry in Radcliffe (Ann Radcliffe) (Critical Essay‪)‬

IN 1810 ANNA LAETITIA BARBAULD WROTE SOMEWHAT ANXIOUSLY ABOUT the tendency of readers to skip over the poems in Ann Radcliffe's novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Radcliffe's immediately preceding novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), carry the subtitle, Interspersed with some pieces of Poetry. These subtitles are dropped from modern editions and bibliographies, but they ask us to pay attention to "interspersed" poetry as a distinctive aspect of these novels' forms. (2) The phenomenon of the blended novel--the novel that incorporates actual verses and lyric moments in prose into the novel--is a distinctively 1790s form of heteroglossia which has attracted increasing critical attention in recent years. Other writers of the period, including Charlotte Smith, Thomas Holcroft and Matthew (Monk) Lewis, also interpolated poetry into their novels; Mary Robinson, in Walsingham, or, the Pupil of Nature (1797), would go so far as to provide an "Index to the Poetry," inviting her readers to approach her text as a poetry collection as much as a novel.