Given that she was later referred to by Sir Walter Scott as “the first poetess of romantic fiction,” it is fitting that many dramatic rumors about Ann Radcliffe (born today in 1764) swirled around her. There were stories that she had died young, gone mad (potentially being locked up in an asylum), or even arrested as a spy.

But whatever the truth of her biography, the impact that Radcliffe’s picaresque Gothic novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) had on the literary world is undeniable, influencing everyone from Coleridge to Wordsworth and Scott. She was the highest-paid writer of the 1790s and one of the most imitated. Jane Austen paid tribute to Radcliffe in her semi-comic Gothic Northanger Abbey, in which a character raves about Udolpho: “I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.”