A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe, known to many as the mistress of the gothic novel, died 199 years ago, on February 7, 1823. She was 58 years old, and had lived the last couple of decades of her life in seclusion. Her death, probably from complications of asthma, was as private as most of her life, which remains–like many of her novels–a mystery to this day.
I think of her as the progenitor (progenitress?) of the “tasteful bodice-ripper” books beloved of my adolescence. Well-written, fanciful, stories with strong female characters, with a smattering of very good, and a plethora of really bad, men (sometimes it was hard to tell the difference), and in which our heroine’s journey towards figuring out which was which informed much of the story, and a streak of real morality and principle underlying the often ridiculous plot.
There was nothing vapid or moronic about Radcliffe’s heroines. Each had, or developed through the course of her travails, a healthy “world within” whose milestones and signposts saved her from destruction in the end.
An example, in many cases, of Socrates’ dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Perhaps a salutary lesson for those women whose minds and lives often seem fixated on the external events of the moment and what they’ve just read on Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia.
Is there more to life than a slavish attention to social media? I think so.
What say you?
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