I am now privy to all the secrets that Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho have to offer. And Castle Udolpho and the characters who populate it have secrets galore. I chose this book to read for Carl's RIP II challenge (I can now say I completed a challenge) in part because I plan on reading Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey soon, which parodies the Radcliffe novel. This book has a reputation for having suspense, spine tingling chills, descriptions of a sublime landscape, romance, a vile villain, and maybe even a ghost or two. It does have these elements, but in varying degrees. Many times I skip reading the introduction altogether, or I wait until I finish reading the book. In this case I relished reading the introduction, which was filled with all sorts of wonderful information and criticism on the novel. Any quotes that appear in this post are from the introduction, which is written by Bonamy Dobree.
Emily St. Aubert is a young woman, very proper, orphaned and alone in the world--or nearly so. Set in Medieval Languedoc, France the story is filled with perils as Emily tries to navigate a life filled with obstacles to happiness and freedom. After the death of her parents she goes to live with her aunt, a self absorbed woman caring only for money and titles. Emily wants nothing more than to lead a simple life of respectability, and marry her beloved Valancourt, a young chevalier that her father approved of. After Madame Cheron, Emily's aunt is lured into marrying the nasty Count Montoni, who we will discover must be one of literature's great villains, Emily's life will basically go into a free fall as she descends into the hell known only as Castle Udolpho. A carriage will take her away from all she knows and loves, first to Venice and then to the Italian Apennines where the crumbling castle perches high and lonely in the mountains.
Too much happens in this book to detail here in my post. Dobree writes "Udolpho has a way of escaping critical formulas: it is always bigger and baggier and more uncanny than one thought it was. No trite summing-up can capture the novel's dreamy surreal flow of incident, the odd, mediumistic shifts through space, and time, the often bewildering vagaries in Radcliffe's handling of plot, character, and scene. To say what Udolpho 'is' is inevitably to reduce it." There will, however, be mysterious papers that need to be destroyed, miniature portraits of unknown women, banditti, sword fights, veils covering unknown and horrifying objects, secret passages, underground crypts, ghosts, strange noises, copious tears, and well, lots of fainting spells. It is a long story filled with vivid descriptions and much excitement. I alternately found myself thrilled by the story, and wishing Emily carried smelling salts with her. Eighteenth century readers must have gotten quite a kick out of Radcliffe's work.
"Along with Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise (1761) and Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Radcliffe's book was one of the most celebrated and influential European fictions of its epoch. The novel brought its author 500 pounds (an unheard-of sum at the time) and went through countless editions well into the later nineteenth century. Naysayers like Austen notwithstanding, the majority of contemporary readers found The Mysteries of Udolpho an absorbing, even mind-altering experience, and its author an 'enchantress' of the highest order."
I was interested in Radcliffe's place along other writers of the time. Although I don't know who her inspirations were (Dobree mentions Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, whose abused heroine is quite similar to Radcliffe's poorly treated Emily), I have read that she made quite an impact on Walter Scott and John Keats. "In the unsentimental handling of Emily's powerlessness within the 'family' unit in which she finds herself, Radcliffe shows a paradoxical affinity with more engaged female novelists of the later eighteenth century: Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, even the fiercely unromantic Mary Wollstonecraft."
I admit that to someone with 21st century sensibilities, I did wish that just once Emily would bash someone over the head with a vase or actually look at the secret papers instead of burning them (as she promised to do--she's a good girl remember) rather than weep or faint, but I tried to keep in mind that this novel was written in the late 18th century and literary heroines simply behaved this way (thanks to Dorothy for her excellent posts on 18th C. literature that helped put me in the right mindset for this novel). So, placing this story in the appropriate time and place, I have to say that this is truly a thumping good read. I plan on reading more of Radcliffe's novels (which I believe are shorter...) as well as other eighteenth century novelists like Burney, Edgeworth and Wollstonecraft--all now high on my list of authors to read. And I plan on reading more Gothic Literature as well (not sure all these titles are considered Gothic, but they seem to have that same feel to them): The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Monk by Matthew Lewis, Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu, and Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. I may just have to come up with a Gothic reading list sometime. I'm quite pleased to have tackled this book--it has long been on my list of titles that I 'really must get to'. One down, too many more to mention. Now I look forward to reading Jane Austen's satire of the novel.