Les Mystères D'udolphe
1794
Ann Radcliffe's 1794 masterpiece invented the Gothic novel as we know it. When gentle Emily St. Aubert loses her father, she is thrust into the clutches of her sinister uncle Montoni, who imprisons her in the crumbling castle Udolpho among the remote Italian Apennines. There, behind crumbling walls and under threatening skies, Emily must navigate a world of concealed secrets, forbidden love, and dangers to her virtue and inheritance. The novel pulses with atmosphere: mist-shrouded mountains, ruined monasteries, moonlight on medieval towers, and the constant hum of approaching doom. Radcliffe gives us a heroine whose interior life, whose sensibility and imagination, becomes a landscape as vivid as the Italian wilderness around her. This is Gothic fiction at its most influential, the template for every haunted house and imperiled heroine that followed. It is also a radical exploration of what it meant to be a woman trapped by inheritance law and patriarchal power, fighting for autonomy with only her mind and moral fortitude as weapons.
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“A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within.””
— Ann Ward Radcliffe
“I ought not to doubt the steadiness of your affection, yet such is the inconsistency of real love, that it is always awake to suspicion, however unreasonable; always requiring new assurances from the object of its interest, and thus it is, that I always feel revived, as by a new conviction, when your words tell me I am dear to you; and, wanting these, I relapse into doubt, and too often into despondency.””
— Ann Ward Radcliffe
“Such is the inconsistency of real love, that it is always awake to suspicion, however unreasonable; always requiring new assurances from the object of its interest.””
— Ann Ward Radcliffe
“He loved the soothing hour, when the last tints of light die away; when the stars, one by one, tremble through æther, and are reflected on the dark mirror of the waters; that hour, which, of all others, inspires the mind with pensive tenderness, and often elevates it to sublime contemplation.””
— Ann Ward Radcliffe
“Do you believe your heart to be, indeed, so hardened, that you can look without emotion on the suffering, to which you would condemn me?””
— Ann Ward Radcliffe
“How strange it is, that a fool or a knave, with riches, should be treated with more respect by the world, than a good man, or a wise man in poverty!””
— Ann Ward Radcliffe
“Towards evening, they wound down precipices, black with forest of cypress, pine and cedar, into a glen so savage and secluded, that, if Solicitude ever had local habitation, this might have been "her place of dearest residence””
— Ann Ward Radcliffe
“...he brought music of his own, and awakened every fairy echo with the tender accents of his oboe...””
— Ann Ward Radcliffe
“Why all this terror?' said he, in a tremulous voice. 'Hear me, Emily: I come not to alarm you; no, by Heaven! I love you too well- too well for my own peace.””
— Ann Ward Radcliffe
