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The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe

The gothic novel, of which The Mysteries of Udolpho is the definitive example, is possibly the first ever instance of genre fiction. And, like much of the genre fiction that followed it, gothic novels were ridiculed as the stuff of weak minds and female susceptibility, imparting unnatural thrills that could undermine the constitution and rot the intellect, of being sensationalist rubbish only fit for silly women and those unable to find any more worthwhile way of filling their time

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But Gothic fiction, especially the superior sort written by Mrs Radcliffe, also had its admirers – including, according to the introduction to my World’s Classics edition, Keats, Thackeray, Coleridge and, of course, Jane Austen. She famously satirises the format in Northanger Abbey where her heroine Catherine Morland has had her head turned so thoroughly by her choice of reading matter that she starts re-envisioning her own rather tame existence in Gothic terms. Until, increasingly, she finds herself facing real-life difficulties and challenges that cause her re-examine the differences between real life and fiction and to take a more critical and discerning view of the people who surround her.

I decided I wanted to read this book after burning through Northanger Abbey, some years ago now. I was delighted by how modern a sensibility it had, how accessible the humour was and how gripping the story. Udolpho is also famous wherever two or three English Literature students gather together for a particular plot device known as The Veil – drawn aside in a dark and deserted locked room by the ingénue heroine who is stranded in the ruined castle in peril of her life and honour to reveal – what? Nameless terrors which are not defined for a considerable number of pages afterwards. This is undoubtedly a literary phenomenon that deserves to be witnessed at first hand.

The Mysteries of Udolpho, like all the best examples of genre fiction, has endured because it has a really solid plot (disguised as a cracking good story) and excellent characterisation (spoilers may follow from this point). Written in 1794, it appears to be set in a Europe of at least a century earlier when Italy was still composed of warring city-states. We follow the fortunes of the young Frenchwoman Emily St Aubert who, a year or two off coming of age at the outset of the tale, leads a modest, quiet and happy life in the heart of rural Gascony with her doting parents and an eminently suitable lover on the horizon who even manages to garner the parental seal of approval. Having carefully composed her canvas, the author then proceeds to dismantle Emily’s life step by step through the death of her mother, the ruination of her father’s fortunes, the death of said father while off taking the air in the distant Pyrenees, the breaking of her engagement the day before her wedding and her eventual removal to a distant castle in Italy by the villainous Montoni, a wicked schemer and fortune hunter who secretes her far beyond the reach of her lover and everyone who previously knew her.

Emily is held under this man’s tyrannical control at Udolpho, his ruined castle in the Apennines, after the aunt who is her last surviving relative and therefore her guardian, married him unwisely and in haste. As a result Emily and her estates look likely to be sold for marriage to the highest bidder in a desperate plan to restore to Montoni what he has lost four-fold at the gaming tables of Venice and Paris. Having arrived at this point (approximately 250 pages into this 600-odd page novel) it is then the reader’s pleasure to discover how Emily will be restored to her homeland, the arms of the man she loves and to her ancestral seat, with some dark family secrets and a murder mystery to be resolved along the way.

In Northanger Abbey the following exchange takes place:

They determined on walking round Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath.
“I never look at it,” said Catherine, as they walked along the side of the river, “without thinking of the south of France.”
“You have been abroad then?” said Henry, a little surprised.
“Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?”
“Why not?”
“Because they are not clever enough for you — gentlemen read better books.”
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days — my hair standing on end the whole time.”
“Yes,” added Miss Tilney, “and I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it.”
“Thank you, Eleanor — a most honourable testimony. You see, Miss Morland, the injustice of your suspicions. Here was I, in my eagerness to get on, refusing to wait only five minutes for my sister, breaking the promise I had made of reading it aloud, and keeping her in suspense at a most interesting part, by running away with the volume, which, you are to observe, was her own, particularly her own. I am proud when I reflect on it, and I think it must establish me in your good opinion.”
“I am very glad to hear it indeed, and now I shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself. But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly.” Read on here…

This gives us a number of ways into discussion about Udolpho. Firstly Austen very kindly summarises the contemporary attitudes to (Gothic) novels for us and puts the arguments for and against reading them – arguments that she lightheartedly resolves in their favour. Secondly we hear about the graphic descriptions of wild mountain scenery which are so important in Radcliffe’s narrative and which amount almost to interludes of landscape painting within the text – here parodied in “Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object.” Thirdly she points out, quite accurately, that the book is extremely hard to put down when you are involved in one of its lengthy action sequences. There are some things that make it difficult – the rather free-and-easy approach to the history of the early modern period in Europe, an attitude to the comma which can best be described as profligate (you learn to read through them pretty quickly), a tendency in young Miss St Aubert to faint rather more often than is fashionable among young ladies today and a sensibility and a set of moral values that make precious little sense to us now (although it does have a logic and internal consistency that means, when characters such as Emily, her suitor Valancourt and her father Monsieur St Aubert debate the correct course of conduct or talk about moral behaviour it is perfectly possible to intellectually appreciate the points they make). It is not quick or easy reading, but it is gripping and satisfying. Here’s a little taster so you can make your mind up for yourself if it’s likely to be for you:

Towards the close of the day, the road wound into a deep valley. Mountains, whose shaggy steeps appeared to be inaccessible, almost surrounded it. To the east, a vista opened, that exhibited the Appenines in their darkest horrors: and the long perspective of retiring summits, rising over each other, their ridges clothed with pines, exhibited a stronger image of grandeur, than any that Emily had yet seen. The sun had just sunk below the tops of the mountains she was descending, whose long shadow stretched athwart the valley, but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the cliff, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the forest, that hung upon the opposite steeps, and streamed in full splendour upon the towers and battlements of a castle, that spread its extensive ramparts along the brow of a precipice above. The splendour of these illumed objects was heightened by the contrasted shade, which involved the valley below.

“There,” said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, “is Udolpho.”

Read more of Udolpho at Project Gutenberg

Let’s wind up by talking about a modern cultural reference. It is a matter of public record that JK Rowling is a very big fan of Jane Austen. And Jane Austen, as we have seen, definitely tipped her hat towards Ann Radcliffe. While I have never particularly agreed with AS Byatt’s vituperative characterisation of Rowling’s work as “made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs,” is it too much of a stretch to see two clear instances of this veil motif appearing in her work? Both appear in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - one being the painting in the hall of the Grimmauld Place house that shrieks vile abuse at anyone who passes unless it is kept covered. The second is the famous Veil in the basement of the Ministry of Magic through which Sirius Black falls to his death.

Just in case you were wondering what on earth a book published in 1794 has to do with you…

Selected list of Gothic novels:

• The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole
• The Romance of the Forest - Ann Radcliffe
• The Italian - Ann Radcliffe
• The Monk - Matthew Gregory Lewis (available at Project Gutenberg)
• Caleb Williams - William Godwin (available at Project Gutenberg)
• Melmoth the Wanderer - Charles Maturin
• In A Glass Darkly - Sheridan Le Fanu
• Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
• Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
• The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allen Poe
• The Phantom Ship - Frederick Marryat
• Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
• Gothic Tales - Elizabeth Gaskell
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stephenson
• The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
• Dracula – Bram Stoker
• More Gothic novels from Wikipedia

Some links:

• Wikipedia: The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Project Gutenberg: The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Wikipedia: Northanger Abbey
• Great Gothic Horror novels: an Amazon list

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 9:09 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge, Reads I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.