The Mysteries of Udolpho was written by Ann Radcliffe. Radcliffe (1764-1823) was one of the most popular novelists of her time, winning praise from critics and her fellow writers as well as the public. But her output was limited–five novels–and her personal life was and remains mostly a mystery. Like many another popular author from a bygone age she is rarely read today, although her name retained enough cachet fifty years after her death for Paul Féval to make her the heroine of his Vampire City. She will always be remembered, however, for The Mysteries of Udolpho.

The Mysteries of Udolpho is about Emily St. Aubert, the daughter of Monsieur St. Aubert, a French aristocrat who retired in disgust from Parisian society to enjoy the pure life of the countryside. They are happy for a while, but then Emily’s mother, St. Aubert’s wife, dies, and the family is left in financially difficult times. The St. Auberts are forced to go on a trip south, to the Pyrenees, for reasons which Emily is not told. On the trip they meet Valancourt, a handsome young man whose family Monsieur St. Aubert knows. Valancourt joins the St. Auberts on their trip, and an attraction quickly grows between Valancourt and Emily. But Valancourt, on a trip of his own, is forced to part from the St. Auberts. Monsieur St. Aubert falls ill and after staying in a cottage with some well-inclined peasants he dies. Emily returns home and obeys her father’s dying wish: burn a group of his letters without reading them. But among the letters she finds a miniature of a beautiful woman. Emily does not know who the woman is, but Emily had once seen her father kissing the portrait, and then crying. Since he didn’t tell her to destroy the portrait, she takes it with her and goes to stay with her aunt in Toulouse. Emily’s aunt is not a nice person, and Emily does not like her, but she is the only relative Emily has left.

Valancourt follows Emily, and when he catches up to her he asks her to marry him. She agrees, and eventually Emily’s aunt gives her consent. But only a few days before the ceremony Emily’s aunt marries the sinister Italian Signor Montoni, who immediately forbids Emily’s wedding and promptly takes Emily and Emily’s aunt, now Madame Montoni, off to Venice. Once there both Emily and Madame Montoni realize that now Count Montoni only married Madame Montoni to gain both her estate and Emily’s. Matters worsen when Count Montoni arranges a marriage between Emily and Count Morano, a Venetian nobleman, something Emily is dead set against but which she has no power to prevent. But the night before the wedding Count Montoni orders the household to pack and leave for his castle at Udolpho. When the group gets there, Montoni begins repairing the castle. Emily does not like the castle. It is dark, cold, sprawling, creepy, and the servants claim that it is haunted. The previous owner, Lady Laurentini, had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and her ghost is supposed to be one of those who haunt the castle.

Not long after they arrive at the castle Count Morano breaks into the castle and tries to kidnap Emily. Montoni foils this and wounds Morano in a duel. Then Montoni tries to get his wife to sign over her estates to him. When she refuses, he has her locked in a tower. Emily, who is getting along better with her aunt by this point, tries to visit her, only to find blood on the tower stairs, which makes Emily think that her aunt has been murdered. Then strange sounds and shadows are heard and seen around the castle, and everyone is put on edge. The Count himself begins to believe that the castle is haunted. Emily hears that hostages have been taken and becomes convinced that Valancourt is one of them, and between that and the Count’s threat that she sign over all of her estates to him or suffer the same fate as Madame Montoni, Emily’s life is one long unpleasantness. Emily discovers that her aunt wasn’t murdered, but instead died through harsh treatment and was buried in the castle’s chapel.

Morano again attempts to kidnap Emily, and she tries to help this time, because she is afraid for her life. But Montoni discovers their plan and captures Morano. Montoni then forces Emily to sign over her estates to him. She is then sent away to a cottage in Tuscany by Montoni. He sends her away because he is in trouble. Montoni had organized a group of thieves to frighten and plunder the neighborhood around his castle including the villas of several rich Venetians, and in response Montoni’s enemies have banded together and are leading an army to Montoni’s castle. Emily eventually returns to the castle and finds that there has been a battle. In the dungeons she finds a living prisoner, an old friend of her father, and she helps him escape from the dungeons. Together they sail for France. But on the way a storm wrecks their ship and they are forced ashore near the castle where Emily’s father was buried. They are rescued by the Villeforts, the inheritors of the chateau. While there Emily visits the convent at which her father was buried, and sees a nun who resembles Lady Laurentini. Back at the chateau, strange noises are heard, and one of Emily’s servants disappears. When one of the Villeforts’ servants tells Emily this, she notices that the miniature which Emily’s father had owned is similar to one in the Villeforts’ chateau. The servant tells Emily that the miniature is a portrait of the former mistress of the chateau, the Marquise de Villeroi, and that Emily resembles the portrait.

Valancourt reappears and again proposes marriage to Emily, but she finds out that he incurred huge gambling debts while she was imprisoned in Italy, causing her to break off the engagement. She returns home only to hear that Montoni has been captured in Venice, and that since he illegally gained control of her estates, the Venetian courts have restored them to her, and she is now wealthy. From that point forward, things improve. Emily discovers that the nun who resembled Lady Laurentini actually was Lady Laurentini and that she had been a former lover of the Marquis de Villeroi, whose wife was the sister of Emily’s father. Lady Laurentini had left Udolpho to be with the Marquis. When she discovered that the Marquis was married to Emily’s aunt, Laurentini tried to persuade the Marquis to poison his wife. The Marquis fled to a far country and died of remorse, and Laurentin went to the convent to expiate her sins. And then Emily discovers that Valancourt gambled only in an attempt to raise money to help some friends. That’s a good reason to gamble, clearly, and she marries him and they live happily ever after.

The Mysteries of Udolpho is considered by critics to be the second most important Gothic novel in the genre’s history. Many of the genre’s tropes and motifs first appeared in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. But it was Udolpho which popularized those motifs and had the most direct influence on other writers, so that the formula of the threatened maiden, the mysterious castle, and the hidden family secrets became known as the Radcliffean Gothic. Radcliffe is also seen as the most important early writers of the “female Gothic.” The “female Gothic” is female-centered, featuring a female protagonist, and is usually a Bildungsroman about the heroine’s coming-of-age. In Udolpho’s case Emily develops from a girl of excessive sensitivity and Sensibility (see below) to a woman of both (common) sense and (reasonable) sensitivity. The “female Gothic” is usually compared by critics to the “male Gothic,” which is usually more supernatural, more open-ended, and more overtly sexual and violent. Critics have traditionally valued the male Gothic over the female Gothic, seeing the former as more “transgressive” and “experimental,” but that is a subjective judgment rather than an objective one.

One of the major elements of Udolpho is Sensibility. During the eighteenth century Sensibility was a cultural reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Sensibility stressed feeling over logic and emotional experience over thought. The man of Sensibility was supposed to be particularly receptive to the beauties of nature and to what the English philosopher Edmund Burke called the “sublime,” an awe-inspiring grandeur which overwhelms the senses. The man of Sensibility was supposed to be naturally benevolent; his own great feelings would automatically him to sympathy for others. True Sensibility would lead men and women to weep and faint and to languish in melancholia as an indication of how sensitive they are. This trait appears in Udolpho. Emily is supremely sensitive, as is Valancourt, while Montoni is manifestly not. This motif became common in other early Gothics.

Udolpho was also the first major rationalized supernatural Gothic—that is, a Gothic in which seemingly supernatural events are explained away by the end of the novel as the work of men. Radcliffe disliked the inclusion of supernatural elements, what she thought of as “superstition,” in the Gothic, and was at pains to explain everything which occurs in Udolpho in realistic terms. For most of the novel what happens seems to be supernatural, and Udolpho castle seems, to the too-imaginative Emily, to be an archetypal Bad Place, full of eerily long passages, claustrophobically dark rooms, twisting corridors, and locked rooms from which servants disappear. Otranto’s castle was the first in Gothic novels to have an almost sentient personality, but the castle in Udolpho is much more of a central actor in the novel, and this as much as anything else was responsible for the novel’s popularity. Other Gothic writers took note of this and copied it.

Interestingly, for a work so important in the development of the genre, Udolpho is essentially a conservative book, portraying the supernatural frights which the heroine suffers as existing entirely in her own mind and giving a rationalist explanation for every seemingly unnatural event. Evil, in Udolpho, comes from men, not Satan, and is psychological, not spiritual. This is because Radcliffe was writing what she thought of as Terror, rather than Horror. Terror arises from the Burkean sublime and “expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,”¹ while Horror “contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.”² Terror is a rational reaction to an overwhelming and frightening reality, while Horror is a loathing, repugnance, and fear of something else, something Other.

Radcliffe’s adherence to realism and shunning of the supernatural was responsible for the Gothic novel becoming something which respectable women could read and write. While the Gothic was in large part a backlash against the excessive stress placed upon rationality and realism in the work of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and other writers of the eighteenth century, women were still constrained in their reading and writing by social judgment. Novels like Udolpho, which did not violate social norms, not only influenced what women wrote but also what women could read.

Radcliffe’s style has not aged well. She writes thick, heavy, stilted prose, like a bad-tasting, week-old Guinness, dense with quotations from poetry and descriptions from scenery which, though much-lauded by critics, are only occasionally well-written or even interesting. The story is long and slow-moving, taking its own sweet time getting the main plot—Emily’s imprisonment in Udolpho castle—in gear. Once in Udolpho the machinery of the classic Gothic is put in motion and matters become more involving, but that’s over two hundred and forty pages in. Even there, though, the sluggish pace and torpid prose detracts from the reader’s enjoyment of the novel. Characterization is shown through narrative description rather than action and dialogue–in telling rather than showing, to use the clichéd formula. Radcliffe occasionally uses her characters as mouthpieces for lectures, and the matters she speaks to are far from our own concerns:

Do not indulge in the pride of fine feeling, the romantic error of amiable minds. Those who really possess sensibility ought early to be taught that it is a dangerous quality, which is continually extracting the excess of misery, or delight from every surrounding circumstance.³

The emotional tone of the novel is pitched quite high; matters are always in a greatly heightened emotional state, so that dialogue is often shrill and feelings brittle. Emily is virtuous and sweet, but not tough and not wily, certainly not in the way that later Gothic heroines were. She faints a lot and weeps more often than that, and her role in the plot is as object, to be acted upon rather than to be an active agent.

But Radcliffe is not a completely woeful writer. Although both her heroes and villains are for the most part one-dimensional, they are one-dimensional in different ways. Count Montoni’s cold ambition and villainy are different from the vanity and callousness of Madame Montoni. Radcliffe also shows the occasional, albeit rare, insight to human behavior or moment of subtle characterization. And although much of the story is slow-moving and boring there are sections–sometimes long sections–of Emily’s story, and Valancourt’s, and St. Aubert’s, which hold the reader’s interest, so that the reader will want to know what happens next and how things will turn out.

Count Montoni is not a Hero-Villain. He is not a person of great capability and passions who cannot resist temptation and his darker impulses. Montoni is simply a villain, haughty, cold, cruel, and ambitious. He despises the kinder passions, and sees those who give into them as weak. (This sets him in opposition to Emily, who values Sensibility). He broods, has a “severity of temper and gloominess of his pride,” and is extremely ambitious. Montoni has few friends, and he disdains those he has, for his “decisive and haughty air, which, while it imposed submission on weak and timid minds, roused the fierce hatred of strong one.” He glories in the

energies of the passions; the difficulties and tempests of life, which wreck the happiness of others, roused and strengthened all the powers of his mind, and afforded him the highest enjoyments of which his nature was capable. Without some object of strong interest, life was to him little more than a sleep; and, when pursuits of real interest failed, he substituted artificial ones, till habit changed their nature, and they ceased to be unreal.⁴

Print: Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.

¹ Ann Radcliffe, New Monthly Magazine (1826), qtd. in Jean-Charles Seigneuret, Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs, volume 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 622.

² Radcliffe, New Monthly Magazine (1826), qtd. in Seigneuret, Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs, 622.

³ Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859), 64.

⁴ Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 144.