The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

Madame Cheron breaks up Emily and Valancourt because she wants Emily to marry someone rich. Emily, now completely destitute, takes refuge in a nunnery before being sent to live with her shitty aunt, Madame Cheron. Then Emily’s dad dies and many, many pages are devoted to Emily crying and fainting with grief. Do Emily and Valancourt fall in love? By golly, they do. Over the course of 100 pages, her mom dies, then Emily hangs out with her dad and her picture is stolen, then they get kicked out of their house so they go on a long trip where they meet a helpful guy named Valancourt and, as a “meet cute,” her father accidentally shoots him in the arm (‘tis but a scratch)(he mistook Valancourt for a bandit).

Our story of Udolpho begins in a lovely French chateau (not Udolpho) where we meet the angelic and lovely and very virginal Emily. Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. In her work, she sought to inspire “terror,” saying: They liked to travel but not to mingle with society. The author herself was described as pretty but shy, and led a mostly reclusive life with her husband and her dog. It’s notable for being the ultimate Gothic novel, for having a lot of changes in tone and mood throughout the story, and for the fact that Radcliffe liked to give all her supernatural horrors mundane explanations. The Mysteries of Udolpho was a huge hit for author Ann Radcliffe when it first came out in 1794. My paperback Oxford World’s Classics edition (1998) of The Mysteries of Udolpho is 679 pages long, not counting introduction and notes. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the heroine is mesmerized by the scandalous gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Readers, I read that novel.

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe