At these recollections she wept again, and continued musing, when suddenly the notes of sweet music passed on the air. A superstitious dread stole over her; she stood listening for some moments, in trembling expectation, and then endeavoured to recollect her thoughts, and to reason herself into composure. (Vol. II, Ch. XI)

While such fantastic events are hedged with the narrator’s or Emily’s own enlightened reminders about superstition and the dangers of a ‘distempered’ imagination, the physical details offered in Udolpho give Radcliffe’s remote past a type of Gothic suggestiveness which, for her contemporary readers, was entirely new and which kept them in a ‘sublime’ state of uncertainty. In this respect her ‘mysteries’ anticipate nineteenth-century writers’ development of the literary fantastic, such as we find in Edgar Allan Poe’s tale ‘The Black Cat’ (1845) and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). In this first-person narrative mode, contrary to Radcliffe, the reader’s hesitation or uncertainty regarding the fictional reality of preternatural phenomena remains unresolved.

Radcliffe’s method of eventually giving rational explanations for apparently supernatural occurrences has been the subject of much adverse comment by modern critics and readers. The tide began to turn in this direction with Sir Walter Scott’s criticisms in book reviews and his introduction to the Ballantyne reprint of Radcliffe’s works.26 While he is right about the clumsiness and, at times, downright bad faith of her explanations, Scott missed the point. As Robert Miles has pointed out, Radcliffe had more in mind than avoiding the impropriety of allowing a supernatural order when she caused all of Emily’s terrifying experiences eventually to be explained. Her thematic purpose was also at stake.

We are told from the outset that with Emily’s ‘uncommon delicacy of mind, warm affections, and ready benevolence’ goes ‘a degree of susceptibility too exquisite to admit of lasting peace’. That her romantic sensibility can render her more vulnerable in adversity is also the tenor of St Aubert’s deathbed warning:

do not indulge in the pride of fine feeling, the romantic error of amiable minds. Those, who really possess sensibility, ought early to be taught, that it is a dangerous quality, which is continually extracting the excess of misery, or delight, from every surrounding circumstance. And, since, in our passage through this world, painful circumstances occur more frequently than pleasing ones, and since our sense of evil is, I fear, more acute than our sense of good, we become the victims of our feelings, unless we can in some degree command them. (Vol. I, Ch. VII)

St Aubert here could be echoing Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which had dwelt forcibly on the grim outcomes for women of nurturing ‘a romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling’, ‘an overstretched sensibility’ which ‘relaxes the other powers of the mind’.27 Indeed, throughout Udolpho frequent emphasis is given to Emily’s need to acquire and maintain ‘fortitude’ – a quality which Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) had listed as a virtue ‘of the sublimer kind’.28 As mentioned earlier, Emily must not allow her imagination to become ‘distempered’ by giving in to baseless fears, illusions, superstition. However, in spite of her best efforts at restraint, we find the wild imaginings engendered by the uncertainty of her situation still causing her to lose control. And this is Robert Miles’s point. ‘It was important for [Radcliffe’s] characters to return to the “daylight” rational world of the dawning Enlightenment, but only after an irrational interregnum, when the mind was allowed to wander, to believe, and conjecture, as it would.’ Radcliffe’s explained supernatural could provide this contrast between the rational and irrational. Bold supernatural machinery could not.29

In any case, for many readers, Radcliffe’s hints of the supernatural could not be entirely subordinated to her apparent didactic framework. This is evident in Talfourd’s comment that ‘even when she has dissolved mystery after mystery, and abjured spell after spell, the impression survives’.30 After all the rational explanations (of which he, too, was critical), we are still left with the uncanny, the supposed workings of Providence. For example, we can point to the respective presentiments of St Aubert and Emily early in the novel which are in some way confirmed by subsequent happenings, or the strange conjunctions of events such as the conveying of the dying St Aubert to the woods near Chateau-le-Blanc, the residence of the deceased Marchioness, and later, of the return of the shipwrecked Emily to that same place after her escape from Udolpho. We may even feel that Emily’s illusory fears have not been altogether disproportionate to the chaotic violence and vestigial practices of tyranny and ‘monkish superstition’ which she has suffered at Udolpho.

But there is more than this. Despite the repeated warnings about the excesses of sensibility, our confidence in Emily’s powers of perception and intensities of imagination is continually wooed. From early in the first chapter, a ‘good’ expansion or continuation of the finite world is seen in Emily’s poetic responses to the landscape. Consider the following passage which occurs in the first chapter of Volume I:

she loved more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more the mountain’s tremendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. In scenes like these she would often linger alone, wrapt in a melancholy charm, till the last gleam of day faded from the west; till the lonely sound of a sheep-bell, or the distant bark of a watch-dog, were all that broke on the stillness of the evening. Then the gloom of the woods…

On the one hand, as we have seen, it is but a small step from such suggestive images to hidden presences and hauntings, the human source of which is eventually explained. On the other, such scenes themselves romantically endure, peopled not by spirits but by phantasms of memory, projections of the mind set in motion by nostalgia and yearning for those who are loved but now absent:

Drying her tears, she looked, once more, upon the landscape, which had excited them, and perceived, that she was passing the very bank where she had taken leave of Valancourt, on the morning of her departure from Tholouse, and she now saw him, through her returning tears, such as he had appeared, when she looked from the carriage to give him a last adieu – saw him leaning mournfully against the high trees, and remembered the fixed look of mingled tenderness and anguish, with which he had then regarded her. (Vol.