It’s taken me at least a year to re-read ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’. Of course I’ve read a lot of other things in the meantime, but Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 gothic whopper is an easy book to put down, and I don’t mean that as an insult.
It was hugely popular and influential in its day, and later writers paid it the tribute of parody: Byron, writing from Venice to his half-sister Augusta in 1816, announced: ‘I am going out this evening in my cloak and Gondola – there are two nice Mrs Radcliffe words for you.’ Jane Austen poked fun at the novel in ‘Northanger Abbey’ (1818) while Keats wrote mischievously of ‘Damosel Radcliffe’ and her gloomy trappings. As late as 1840, Thackeray referenced its unlucky lovers, Emily and Valancourt, in the assumption that his readers would know who they were.
I first read the novel as an undergraduate. That I found it so entertaining and involving probably says a lot about the coursework I was reading at the time, both more challenging and less fun. Because tackling it in 2018, Udolpho is a very heavy read, its three volumes coming in at 672 close-set pages in my edition.
The reason that the book can be laid aside so easily, and picked up again months later with no confusion, is that very little happens to Emily St Aubert, its heroine. Rather it’s a book of intense moods and atmospheres, so leaving Emily to moulder for months in an Italian stronghold while you read a few contemporary novels seems to be doing her, and her author, no injustice.
Vague references date the novel as taking place towards the end of the 16th century, though the tender sensibility of the novel’s heroine better fits the time of composition. When Emily, a young noblewoman of Gascony, loses her mother, travel is recommended for her grieving father to distract him from his loss, and the pair set out on a meticulously and romantically described journey to Provence. On the way, they encounter a seemingly rootless young man, Valancourt, who dogs Emily’s footsteps. When the elderly St Aubert dies on the journey, Emily has to throw herself on her sole remaining relative, her disagreeable aunt, Madame Cheron. Upon marrying the severe Count Montoni, Madame banishes Valancourt and sweeps her niece along, first to Venice, where a rich, annoying suitor is proposed, then to Udolpho, Montoni’s formidable perch in the Apennines. It swiftly becomes clear to both women that they are prisoners, and that something very sinister has happened to a previous countess within the castle walls.
All the ingredients are now in place: a terrifically saturnine villain, a helpless heroine, secret passages, ghostly phenomena, murderous plots, vertiginous ramparts, damp dungeons and, wafting over the castle at intervals, spectral music. Outside is little better with troops of soldiers and packs of wandering banditti thronging the forests.
There are two obstacles to a modern appreciation of Emily. One: she is deeply religious, earnestly praying and seeking guidance from the Almighty, while trusting in some deeper divine purpose behind her losses and trials. This you just have to go with. Two: she’s an amateur poet, apt to stop at intervals and pen lengthy, derivative screeds of verse about the sea, the mountains, love, death, even what she’s been reading. A perusal of The Iliad, for example, brings forth 18 quatrains beginning thus: ‘O’er Ilion’s plains, where once the warrior bled, / And once the poet rais’d his deathless strains…’ These you can SKIP!
Stuck in the castle for hundreds of pages, Emily has even less to do, but fortunately possesses some very positive traits to keep the reader going. Though always mindful of the dignity her social position entails, when roused by the malevolent Montoni or his ignorant wife, she can deliver a stinging moral rebuke or defiant riposte worthy of Austen. This spikiness saves her innocent charm and conventionality from being merely bland. Emily’s dialogue with her maid, the babbling Annette, is also a shaft of light in the narrative. The maid is Emily’s chief line of communication with the wider world of the servant hall and beyond, but Annette is incapable of clearly delivering a vital message without a tumble of irrelevant information. It’s not hard to see that, too, influencing Austen.
But the chief glory of the novel is the lengthy descriptive passages providing, for readers deprived of European travel due to the Napoleonic wars, ravishing glimpses of unimaginable sublimity, grandeur and glamour. To skip these would be to miss the point of the novel, which aims to slow us down to an almost breathless, meditative state of rich receptivity. Emily is a heroine who has almost nothing to do apart from think and feel. In today’s fast-moving world, she feels like an antidote.