INTRODUCTION
Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 novel The Mysteries of Udolpho has
been thrilling readers for more than two hundred years with its creepy
castle, menacing villains, and mysterious secrets. This gothic
thriller holds a critically important place in the history of gothic
literature, the rise of romanticism, and the development of the modern
detective novel, and it was also hugely popular, both in its day and
in later years. The novel’s enormous popularity may be due to
the fact that it has something for everyone: Although Radcliffe
subtitled The Mysteries of Udolpho “a romance,”
this gothic thriller is also in part a travelogue (containing
Radcliffe’s celebrated landscapes), a sentimental novel, a novel
of manners, a female Bildungsroman, and a mystery, complete with a
locked-room puzzle -- it even contains a selection of poems. Most
prominently, however, The Mysteries of Udolpho showcases Ann
Radcliffe’s ability to engage her readers’ imaginations
and to create page-turning suspense over the outcome of the love story
and thriller she skillfully intertwines. While readers will enjoy
wondering whether heroine Emily St. Aubert will ever escape the
clutches of her step-uncle Montoni to reunite with her stalwart lover
Valancourt, they will also ponder the eerie music, odd family
resemblances, unexpected corpses, and sinister disappearances that
haunt Emily -- and whose mysteries Emily seeks to solve.
The author of The Mysteries of Udolpho led a much more sedate
life than the long-suffering heroine of her thrilling novel. When she
published The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794, Ann Ward Radcliffe
(1764-1823) was just shy of her thirtieth birthday. She had begun
writing shortly after her marriage to journalist William Radcliffe in
order to pass the time on those evenings when her husband worked late,
according to the Memoir by her early biographer Thomas Noon
Talfourd. Radcliffe’s hobby quickly became a profitable venture.
Already the author of several successful earlier novels when she wrote
Udolpho, Radcliffe was paid the handsome sum of 500 pounds for
its publication, an amount so high that one man bet 10 pounds that the
report of it was false. After her next novel, The Italian,
appeared in 1797, Radcliffe mysteriously stopped publishing her
writing, leading to erroneous reports that she had died or become
insane. Like her life, however, Radcliffe’s death bore little
resemblance to her novels. According to Talfourd, she died peacefully
in her bed of complications from spasmodic asthma at the age of 58.
Radcliffe’s work influenced an impressively broad spectrum of
her contemporaries and of later writers. Montague Summers notes some
of the most famous of the plethora of writers touched by
Radcliffe’s “macabre” influence: Matthew Gregory
Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan
Poe, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Bram
Stoker -- even the Marquis de Sade. On a lighter note, Lynne Epstein
Heller suggests that Radcliffe may have had a great influence on many
of the Romantics, among them Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Emily
Brontë. Birgitta Berglund adds Radcliffe’s contemporary
Mary Wollstonecraft, the Romantics Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary
Shelley, and the Victorians Dickens and Thackeray to the list of those
Radcliffe inspired.
The most famous instance of Radcliffe’s influence may occur when
Jane Austen invokes The Mysteries of Udolpho in her
posthumously published gothic parody Northanger Abbey (1818).
Bad characters, like the boorish John Thorpe, dislike Udolpho,
apparently without having read it. Conversely, the tasteful Henry
Tilney recalls “finishing it in two days, . . .hair standing on
end the whole time.” Likewise, Austen’s heroine Catherine
Morland enthuses, “Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should
like to spend my whole life in reading it. . .” Catherine almost
succeeds too well in “spending her whole life in reading”
Udolpho: As Heller notes, she spends much of the novel
unraveling the troubled web she has spun by reading all events through
the lens of Udolpho, no matter how inapposite that reading
might be. Yet while Udolpho may threaten Catherine’s
peace, it is also her shield. “[W]hile I have Udolpho to
read,” she exclaims, “I feel as if nobody could make me
miserable.”
Radcliffe’s influence also extends to modern popular fiction.
Devendra P. Varma, for example, views her as a progenitor of the
modern detective story, while Mark S. Madoff sees her more
specifically as a progenitor of the locked-room mystery. While modern
mysteries -- and gothic novels -- may not be exactly like
Udolpho, Emily is indeed a type of proto-detective. Just like a
modern detective, she identifies mysteries, gathers information, and
explores leads. Emily is barred, however, from solving these mysteries
on her own. All is eventually revealed, but not as the result of
Emily’s inquiries, and so it is perhaps best to regard her as an
“almost detective.”
Modern readers may be struck by the amount of description in The
Mysteries of Udolpho, especially as it is not the fashion in the
novels of today, which tend more towards action than description. The
first edition of Udolpho had no illustrations, and it is
certainly difficult to conceive of illustrations that could do justice
to the spectacular landscapes that adorn Radcliffe’s novel.
Oddly, according to Varma, Radcliffe hadn’t actually seen the
beautiful landscapes she describes in Udolpho. Ironically,
“royalties for The Mysteries of Udolpho enabled. .
.Radcliffe to explore that scenery which she had heretofore only
imagined.”
So, how did Radcliffe invent those celebrated landscapes? Varma
notes that “descriptions of foreign scenery in the journals of
travellers furnished raw material for her. . .genius.” Besides
contemporary travel writings, other sources for Radcliffe’s
landscapes may have included poetry and landscape paintings,
particularly the paintings of Salvator Rosa, Gaspar Poussin, and
Claude Lorrain.
Radcliffe’s frequent repetition of landscape scenes may serve a
hidden purpose: Varma suggests that these scenes are actually used to
create a contrast to “the enactment of. . .awe-inspiring horrors
that follow in quick succession at Udolpho.”
This potential purpose behind her landscapes appears to have been lost
on Radcliffe’s contemporary reviewers. When the first edition of
Udolpho appeared in 1794, several journals reviewed it, mainly
positively. Reviewers were ambivalent about Radcliffe’s
landscapes, however: They acknowledged that the landscapes were
lovely, but they found the descriptions too frequent and a bit
repetitive. The British Critic notes Radcliffe’s
“lively and interesting descriptions of scenes and
places,” but suggests that Radcliffe’s “talent for
description leads her to excess.” The review continues:
We have somewhat too much of evening and morning; of woods, and hills,
and vales, and streams. We are sometimes so fatigued at the conclusion
of one representation of this kind, that the languor is not altogether
removed at the commencement of that which follows.
Likewise, The London Review complains of Radcliffe’s
“tedious prolixity in her local descriptions,” and The
Critical Review grouses that “in the descriptions there is
too much. . .sameness: the pine and the larch tree wave, and the full
moon pours its lustre through almost every chapter.”
Reviewers responded similarly to the poems that Radcliffe sprinkles
throughout Udolpho, often presented as the heroine
Emily’s compositions. The reviewers generally praised
Radcliffe’s poetry, and The Critical Review and The
Monthly Review each reprinted a sample poem for their readers, but
they thought that the poems unduly interrupted the action of the
novel. One reviewer suggested that the poems be published in a
separate volume so that they could be properly appreciated. Modern
readers might achieve this effect simply by skimming the poems on the
first read and perusing them at leisure once the mysteries have
finally been revealed.
Another phenomenon that may attract modern readers’ attention is
the extreme frequency of the fainting spells suffered by Emily St.
Aubert. Indeed, David S. Miall has calculated that someone [usually
Emily] faints approximately once “every 48 pages” in
Udolpho. These fainting spells may be related to Emily St.
Aubert’s status as an “almost detective,” for Emily
tends to faint just as things are getting interesting, as when she
sees a forbidden scrap of writing or an awful sight behind a tapestry.
Besides keeping Emily from discovering the truth she so desperately
seeks to learn, these fainting spells also raise the level of suspense
for readers, the gratification of whose curiosity is similarly
delayed.
Another motif readers may notice is that of books and reading. As
Ellen Moers aptly notes, Emily “always manages to pack up her
books” when she departs on a journey -- even though she may be
traveling on a moment’s notice. While Emily hauls her books over
the Pyrenées, the Alps, and the Apennines, she seldom gets to
read them. Instead, her books are curiously used as a foil for the
drama that surrounds her. Emily often will take up a book simply to
throw it down again in contemplation of some new distress. Emily is
not the only reader in the novel. Her love Valancourt woos her by
comparing notes on authors with her and swapping one of his books for
one of hers. The stoic Count de Villefort reads the Roman historian
Tacitus. Even servants read in Udolpho -- the noble Ludovico
reads a story about a noble ghost from a book lent to him by the
faithful housekeeper Dorothée. They too all tend to read when
something distressing may happen, reinforcing a view of books as
bulwarks against misfortune.
Despite her immense influence and popularity, Radcliffe’s works
fell out of fashion for a time in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Thackeray lamented the neglect of Radcliffe
during the 1860s thus: “Inquire at Mudie’s, or the London
Library, who asks for the Mysteries of Udolpho now?”
Similarly, one lonely fan in 1900 wondered, “Does anyone now
read Mrs. Radcliffe, or am I the only wanderer in her windy corridors.
. . ?” Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, however, critical interest in Udolpho and
Radcliffe’s other works has burgeoned, and her novels have now
assumed their place in the English literary canon.
Many readers have felt the same way that Austen’s heroine
Catherine Morland does about The Mysteries of Udolpho’s
cheering powers -- while one is reading it, the rest of the world
seems to slip away. Perhaps because of this seemingly magical ability
to draw readers into its compelling story, Udolpho is
particularly enjoyed by readers seeking a respite from life’s
vicissitudes. At the end of the novel, Radcliffe expresses her hope
that reading it has eased the pain of mourners, and Sir Walter Scott
likewise compares the reading of Udolpho and similar novels to
“the use of opiates,” noting their “most blessed
power” to aid the sick and the solitary. These assessments of
the novel’s compelling power to take readers out of themselves
are well founded, but one needn’t be grieving, ill, or lonely to
enjoy Udolpho. In reading The Mysteries of Udolpho,
everyone can savor a refreshing escape from the everyday.
Lisa M. Dresner has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the
University of California at Berkeley and a J.D. from the University of
Michigan Law School. Part of her dissertation, Woman, Detective,
Other: Theorizing the Female Detective in Literature, Film, and
Popular Culture, explores representations of female “almost
detectives” in the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen,
Wilkie Collins, and Charlotte Brontë.
