The Mysteries of Udolpho

THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO

ANN RADCLIFFE was born in 1764, the daughter of a London tradesman. In 1787 she married William Radcliffe, later the manager of the English Chronicle. She set her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), in Scotland, and it received little critical or public attention. Using more exotic locations in Europe, notably the ‘sublime’ landscapes of the Alps and the Pyrenees, she wrote four more novels within ten years: A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1796) as well as a volume of descriptions of her travels in Holland, Germany and the Lake District.

The success of The Romance of the Forest established Radcliffe as the leading exponent of the historical Gothic romance. Her later novels met with even greater attention, and produced many imitators (and, famously, Jane Austen’s burlesque of The Mysteries of Udolpho in Northanger Abbey), as well as influencing the work of Sir Walter Scott and Mary Wollstonecraft.

The Italian was the last book Radcliffe published in her lifetime; a novel, Gaston de Blondeville, and St Albans Abbey, a Metrical Tale were published posthumously. Despite the sensational nature of her romances and their enormous success, Radcliffe and her husband lived quietly – she made only one foreign journey and barely glimpsed the Alps that she wrote about so vividly. She died in 1823 from respiratory problems probably caused by pneumonia.

JACQUELINE HOWARD is Coordinator of Studies in English and Languages at St Mary’s College in Adelaide, South Australia. She is the author of Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (1994).

ANN RADCLIFFE

THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO

A Romance

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
JACQUELINE HOWARD

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First published 1794

Published in Penguin Books 2001
1

Introduction and Notes copyright © Jacqueline Howard, 2001
All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 978–0–141–90540–2

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

FURTHER READING

CHRONOLOGY

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the London Library and to the Special Collections of the Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide. I would also like to acknowledge my debt to Bob Davenport for his invaluable advice, generosity and support. My thanks go also to Les Howard at the Barr Smith and to Lindeth Vasey at Penguin for time spent on my behalf while this edition was being prepared.

INTRODUCTION

THE PUBLICATION OF THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO
AND ITS EARLY RECEPTION

One late-eighteenth-century reviewer, thought by some researchers to be Coleridge, had ‘no hesitation in pronouncing’ The Mysteries of Udolpho ‘the most interesting book in the English language’.1 With its unprecedented ability to maintain suspense, teasing its readers with suggestions of the spectral, and its poetic descriptions of picturesque and sublime scenery, Udolpho became the most popular novel of its author’s time. But not only did it secure Ann Radcliffe lasting fame and influence; it also brought the Gothic romance into ascendancy and helped establish novel-writing as an acceptable and profitable occupation for women.

Apart from the intrinsic merits of the work itself, Udolpho’s publication and promotion in May 1794 by an established London publishing house, G. G. and J. Robinson, was a significant event. Up until that time, virtually all attempts in the relatively new genre of Gothic romance – from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) through to Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline (1788) and Radcliffe’s own early works – had been published by circulating-library publishers. Radcliffe’s previous romance, The Romance of the Forest (1791), published by circulating-library publisher Thomas Hookham, had been successful enough to persuade her to drop her anonymity; Udolpho was variously hailed by critics for its literary excellence and earned her the unprecedented copyright payment of £500.2 Given that novels and romances (in which women were now dominant) were still often deemed what Fanny Burney ironically called ‘trifling productions,’3 compared with the more serious (predominantly male) creative sphere of poetry, and that circulating-library publishers frequently paid their novelist authors only £10 or £20, the sum paid for Udolpho gave added status to Radcliffe’s romance. It captured the public imagination to the extent that the amount she received was frequently rumoured to be even higher, while the work itself held readers in thrall. ‘We… will not hesitate to say’, wrote William Enfield in the Monthly Review for November 1794, ‘that… a story so well contrived to hold curiosity in pleasing suspence, and at the same time to agitate the soul with strong emotions of sympathetic terror, has seldom been produced.’

Of course Udolpho still came in for some criticism – that it had ‘too much of the terrific’;4 that ‘it would… have been more perfect, as well as more pleasing if Du Pont, Emily’s unsuccessful admirer, had never appeared’;5 that ‘the endeavour to explain supernatural incidents, by plain and simple facts, [was] not always happy’ and that its natural explanations were ‘improbable in the extreme’;6 and that in the ‘elegant description and picturesque scenery’ there was ‘too much of sameness’.7 But these reservations served mainly to point out minor faults in an otherwise impressive and unique achievement. Because Gothic fiction has also been the target of parody and dismissive comment in the two centuries since Udolpho’s publication, it is important to situate Udolpho in the freshness of its early reception. By 1823 the Gentleman’s Magazine could claim that Radcliffe’s romances had been translated into every ‘European tongue’ to the ‘honour of the country’,8 and Sir Walter Scott in 1824 could still recall the excitement and captivation of whole families as Radcliffe’s volumes ‘flew, and were sometimes torn, from hand to hand’.9

GOTHIC ROMANCE AS A NEW GENRE

The Mysteries of Udolpho announced itself as ‘A ROMANCE; INTERSPERSED WITH SOME PIECES OF POETRY’, with an epigraph composed by the author providing a gloss to the title:

Fate sits on these dark battlements, and frowns,

And, as the portals open to receive me,

Her voice, in sullen echoes through the courts,

Tells of a nameless deed.

The apprehension of threat in these lines anticipates the suspense and sublime terrors of the central Gothic situation in the story itself – the confinement of the young, beautiful and orphaned Emily St Aubert within the castle of Udolpho by her Aunt Cheron’s new husband, the proud and inscrutable Montoni. Having been separated from Valancourt – the man she loves – by the tyranny of her guardians, Emily finds herself frequently alone in the gloomy, mouldering castle, and in the dark, too, about Montoni’s intentions. When her foolish Aunt becomes the victim of his need for money, Emily must summon all her ‘fortitude’ – and not only to cope with her unwanted suitor, Count Morano, and the various frays of Montoni’s carousing mercenaries. Because she is a woman of sensibility, of ‘uncommon delicacy of mind’, she must also quell the wild imaginings and terrors which threaten to overwhelm her.

The ‘mysteries’ of the title, however, affect Emily’s life well beyond Udolpho. As she copes with the loss of her parents and of her idyllic life at La Vallée, combats the ‘sway’ of her aunt and the will of her oppressor, and endures disturbing questions about her own identity and shattering reports of Valancourt’s character, we are drawn close to Emily’s consciousness. The exploration of her exquisite sensibility and extreme states of mind is Radcliffe’s primary strategy in building the dreamlike intensity and suspense of the narrative. Here she takes her cue from Samuel Richardson, whose epistolary novel Clarissa, published in 1747–8, had built a claustrophobic atmosphere of entrapment in its portrayal of his heroine. Clarissa too is virtually forsaken, by despicable parents, and must draw on all her strength and conscious virtue to ward off rape by the villain, Lovelace. Radcliffe, with her third-person omniscient narration, breaks new ground by frequently allowing us to know what Emily sees and feels, and by giving her presentiments which blur the boundaries between illusion and reality, thus keeping readers guessing. In so doing she far surpasses the technique of her predecessors in Gothic romance, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee.

Lee, who was well educated,10 had made use of Gothic elements in The Recess (1785), particularly in its central image of the recess in a ruined medieval abbey in which her twin heroines alternately hide and are imprisoned. Set in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, The Recess is peopled with the famous of the time.