Ann Radcliffe pioneered Gothic novels

It is the birthday of English writer Ann Radcliffe (1764), who is considered a leading developer of the Gothic novel. Her novels were crammed with vivid landscape descriptions, apparently inexplicable supernatural elements, and a tidy explanation  of the strange events at the end. Her novels included The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1797) and Gaston de Blondeville (1826). She published only six novels but scholars say her work influenced Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, Honoré de Balzac, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Daphne du Mauier, and Henry James.

Happy birthday, Honoré de Balzac

It is the birthday of French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799), whose multi-volume collection of short stories, The Human Comedy (1815-1848), is renowned for his realistic depiction of life in France after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. His influence on literature is considerable. Among later novelists who considered him an inspiration were Proust, Zola, Dickens, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Henry James. Faulkner, Kerouac. Balzac wrote of life in France after the Revolution, money, power and social success, family relationships including motherhood and fatherhood, women in society and sex. His writing included elements of historical novels, popular novels,  fantasy novels, gothic novels, and metaphysical novels.