Claude Gellée, dit le Lorrain (1600-82), Landscape with Psyche, better known as The Enchanted Castle (1664) — it’s not really enchanted but forbidding
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve been back from the South Central ASECS at Asheville, North Carolina for two weeks now and not yet begun posting on the good time I had there. It was a holiday. The South Central 18th century people run their conference as partly a mild kind of party. One night there was a wonderful lecture on Irish music across the 18th century; another a celtic band and drinking and dancing to it; a banquet on yet a third; a fourth we watched an opera on DVD (a Rameau from the Paris opera-house). During the day one afternoon we went to the Biltmore Mansion built by the super-rich Vanderbilts, a US equivalent of Downton Abbey and the popularity of this enormous mansion with its rooms for display, servants quarters in the attics and servants’ workrooms and gyms for the rich in the basement told us it mirrored the values of US society today as much as it did then. I have much to report about the papers too.
But this evening as a preliminary I thought I’d put my paper online to make it available generally with its scholarly notes. As presently written it’s too sketchy for publication in an academic journal but I hope to work further on this topic where my ultimte aim is to change the views people have of Ann Radcliffe. Yes I see her as a Girondist, and think we should see the 1794 A Journey Made in the Summer and Mysteries of Udolpho as part of the English Jacobin movement. These ought to be read alongside other 1794 books: Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art, Wm Godwin’s Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, not to omit the 1792 Thomas Holcroft’s Anne St Ives, Charlotte Smith’s Desmond. I could keep citing books but this will do.
The topic of the conference was “Panoramas and Vistas” in the 18th century and here is my contribution:
The Nightmare of History in Ann Radcliffe’s Landscapes.
John Crome (1768-1821), Yarmouth Harbour, Evening (circa 1817)
For the two blogs about the papers I heard at the conference and more details about Asheville, North Carolina and some of the really pleasurable events and socializing we did:
South Central ASECS Asheville: Panoramas (gothic, animals in, the Biltmore), Scottish fiddling, Rameau and Jane
South Central ASECS Asheville: Women writers, actresses, and landscapes.
See also Ann Radcliffe’s Landscapes: Christa Wolf (No Place on Earth) and the Seige of Mainz
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Ellen, I am not familiar with the term English Jacobin movement. On the basis of info on the internet, Jacobins seem to have been radical people in France who conducted terror in the name of patriotism. Can you help me understand who formed the English Jacobin movement and what their aims were? Thanks in advance, Cathy L.
Ah. No. The English Jacobin movement is a term used for a kind of English novel written in the 1790s; it would be the equivalent of Girondists in France. Gary Kelly has a book on this http://books.google.com/books/about/The_English_Jacobin_novel_1780_1805.html?id=hrYIAQAAIAAJ You also mis-characterize the Jacobins and very hostilely (and use inappropriate terms like patriotism). Yes by the 1792 state terror was in full swing; but it was against invasion, counter-wars and aristocrat terror groups. The Jacobins wanted rights like the Chartists did in the 1840s, very equivalent. I recommend reading Stella Tillyard’s biography of Edward Fitzgerald to get a full sense of how Jacobinism connects directly to our own Occupy movements. Condorcet was a Jacobin, an important early voice for women’s rights (including divorce and the right not to be beaten). But Radcliffe was that that; she is more like Robert Bage who wrote Hermsprong and Helen Maria Williams who wrote Letters from France.
Dear Ellen, It is actually Claude Lorrain and not Lorraine, and to be precise it is even Claude Gellée, dit le Lorrain. I’d love to read this post as a full article!
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