Ann Radcliffe

Radcliffe was the best-selling novelist in England through the 1790s, commanding unprecedented sums from publishers for The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, and then, near the height of her fame, she simply stopped publishing, retreating into a private life so thorough that rumors circulated she had gone mad from her own imagination.

She hadn't: married to a journalist, she lived on for another quarter-century in quiet comfort, revising old work and touring the English countryside that filled her fiction's landscapes, but she never again matched the readership of Udolpho's crumbling Apennine castle. Austen mocked her formula affectionately in Northanger Abbey while borrowing its architecture wholesale.

She died in London in 1823, largely withdrawn from the literary world she had once dominated.