Experiments in Travel Writing and Romantic Constructions of Place: Ann Radcliffe’s 1795 Account of Continental Europe and the English Lake District

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.