The Mysteries of Udolpho: Classic Illustrated Gothic Novel by Ann Radcliffe

WhenThe Mysteries of Udolpho was published in 1794, Ann Radcliffe was paid £500 for it — an extraordinary sum for a novel at the time, more than any other living English novelist had been paid for a single book. The publishers were right to bet on it. The novel became one of the great popular sensations of the late eighteenth century, read aloud in drawing rooms across Britain, devoured by young women and disapproved of by their parents, and quoted in everything from sermons to satirical magazines for the next thirty years. It is the book that taught the English-speaking world what a Gothic novel was.The story is that of Emily St. Aubert, a young Frenchwoman of gentle birth and unusual sensibility who loses first her mother, then her father, and finds herself the ward of a frivolous aunt who promptly marries an Italian nobleman called Montoni. Montoni is one of the great villains of English literature — charming, calculating, and entirely without scruple — and when he carries his new wife and Emily off to his castle in the Apennines, the novel finds the territory it has been building toward all along. Udolpho is everything a Gothic castle should be: vast, half-ruined, full of unlit corridors and locked rooms, perched on a crag above a wild Italian landscape. Strange noises sound in the night. Servants whisper of things they have seen. A black veil in a distant chamber hides something Emily cannot bring herself to describe. Montoni's intentions toward her aunt's inheritance, and toward Emily herself, grow darker by the day.Radcliffe's particular gift, and the one her many imitators never quite matched, was her command of atmosphere. She had never been to Italy or the Alps when she wrote Udolpho. She built her landscapes out of paintings, travel books, and her own imagination, and the result is one of the most influential acts of literary world-building in English fiction. Half the novel is plot; the other half is weather, ruin, and the particular kind of fear that rises out of a beautiful place at dusk.Jane Austen loved this book and gently mocked it in Northanger Abbey. The Brontë sisters grew up on it. Edgar Allan Poe absorbed its lessons and turned them toward something darker. Without Udolpho, the entire Gothic tradition — and a great deal of what became horror, sensation fiction, and the mystery novel — looks very different.A long, atmospheric, deeply strange book. The novel that built the Gothic.Available in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover. Read more