I have a secret to share with you: I’m an Ann Radcliffe fan.

Okay, okay, so I’ve only read The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, but I read the former twice and it is officially “my favorite novel,” and anyway, once you pass the 1000 page mark with any author, I think you’re entitled to call yourself a fan. I’ve got The Italian, and I’m looking for copies of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and A Sicilian Romance. For those not in the know, Ann Radcliffe was one of the second generation of English gothic writers; she was all about the stuff of haunted castles, secret passages, damsels in distress, and evil aristocrats.

It’s a lonely world, being an Ann Radcliffe fan. Not that many people have read her work, partly because she was famously dissed by Jane Austen, and partly because her most celebrated work is over 700 pages long and accelerates like a Kia on an incline. As with many books, one of the most exciting things after a read is the opportunity to discuss them with fellow readers. So if you’re a fellow Radcliffean, please come forward.

More to the point of this post, Radcliffe is one of those almost inexplicably compelling writers, and trying to explain to friends why they should check her out is one of the most persistent problems I run across in conversations about books. Many contemporary critics either dismiss Radcliffe entirely, or give her incidental consideration as a minor writer. It would seem that there’s some interest in feminist readings of her work, but in her personal life she was staunchly conservative, so this, itself, is problematic. The most compelling treatments discuss Radcliffe’s works as flawed but compelling. In his Introduction to Udolpho, Terry Castle points out that one character recognizes another by the handwriting of a poem etched in stone: “Perhaps in a Cocteau film (Beauty and the Beast?) one can imagine letters carved in stone that resemble someone’s handwriting, but here one can only commiserate with [the character] over what must have been an agonizing case of writer’s cramp.” He goes on to note, however, that “she is a meticulous stylist.”

From a historical standpoint, Radcliffe was helping to prepare the ground for Jane Austen (on the one hand) and Mary Shelley (on the other). While those two writers may be as different as night and day, one thing they share is that they both far outshine Radcliffe in their conscious control of their work and their ability to mine the English to tell supple, elegant, and multilayered stories. So why should someone read Radcliffe?

I think there’s something powerful and electric about those first flirtations with new forms. The full potential for psychological rumination and gothic stylings may have only come about with later, more “sophisticated” writers, but Radcliffe’s writing has the benefit of truly being on the edge of a movement at its inception. Her vision of the supernatural, which implicitly posits that magic happens not in the external world, but only in the human mind, participates in and predicts the two centuries of neurological advancement that followed. Among the cliches and anachronisms there is a story so rich in insight and possibility that it has a certain wildness to it. Her castles and landscapes are monstrous and otherwordly, not in a Lovecraftian paucity of detail, but with a lush vividness that is delicious to sink your mind into.

Like most writers of depth, length, and intensity (could we go so far as to call her the 18th century Thomas Pynchon?) there’s a sense of exclusivity to an experience of her work, like a reader belongs to a special club. My recommendation? Start with the best of Radcliffe from the start. Read The Mysteries of Udolpho. This club is still small and fairly exclusive.