Anne Ward (she married a barrister named Radcliffe, of whom we do not hear much except that his engagements in journalism threw time on his wife's hands for writing) appears to have started on her career of terror-novelist, in which she preceded Lewis, with two fixed resolves of principle very contrary to his practice. The first was to observe strict "propriety" in her books--a point in which the novel had always been a little peccant. The second and more questionable, but also more original, was a curious determination to lavish the appearance of the supernatural, in accordance with the Walpolian tradition and the German adoption of it, but never to allow anything _really_ supernatural in ultimate explanation or want of explanation. She applied these two principles to the working out, over and over again, of practically the same story--the persecutions of a beautiful and virtuous heroine, and her final deliverance from them. Her first attempt, _The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne_, appeared as early as 1789: and she left a posthumous romance, _Gaston de Blondeville_, which did not come out till 1826, four years after her death. She also wrote some poems and a volume of _Travels_ (1794) which is important for a reason to be noticed presently. But her fame rests upon four books, which she published in seven years, between her own twenty-sixth and thirty-third, _A Sicilian Romance_ (1790), _The Romance of the Forest_ (1791), the world-renowned _Mysteries of Udolpho_ in 1794-1795, and _The Italian_ two years later.