The Mysteries of Udolpho Read online

  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

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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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. The unhistorical Matilda and Ellinor, who discover they are the daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots, by her secret marriage to the Duke of Norfolk, are the narrators, and each gives her version of their story. But Lee’s story of romantic love, aristocratic intrigue, treachery and madness was really a well-researched historical romance. Purportedly derived from an ‘obsolete manuscript’ and claiming to be historical truth about the love entanglements revealed, it contained a wealth of historical detail, some of it fabricated or distorted to serve the plot, but with a ring of authenticity which disturbed readers. In contrast, both Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve had represented the ancestral past more vaguely as they sought to describe and justify what they called ‘Gothic’ stories, and to intervene in existing debates about the relative worth of novels and romances and the use of the supernatural in fiction. Nevertheless, in Walpole’s case, this was not before he had initially offered The Castle of Otranto, his first venture into fiction, as a medieval relic. He attributed it to ‘Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church at St Nicholas at Otranto’, whose work was ‘printed at Naples, in the black letter, in 1529’ and had been translated from the Italian by a certain William Marshall, Gent. That mid-to-late-eighteenth-century authors should have felt the need to perpetrate such hoaxes is testimony both to an intense cultural interest in the medieval or Gothic past and to a fear of presenting and reading about supernatural or marvellous events except through authentic products of their own unenlightened time.

  In the preface to the second edition of what he now acknowledged as his own pioneering ‘Gothic story’ (1765), Walpole explained his generic purpose and achievement: the creation of ‘a new species of romance’ by blending the best features of the ancient romance and the modern novel. In his view, the former had gone too far in its imaginative excess, while the latter had, by its ‘strict adherence to common life’, restricted the inventive faculty. Walpole’s statement appears to have been a response to novelists like Richardson, who, in his preface to Clarissa, had denigrated the (Catholic) ‘pomp and parade’, ‘improbable and marvellous’, of romance-writing in order to advance his own ‘new species of writing’, which would promote (Protestant) religion and virtue.

  In pursuit of his new Gothic ‘blend’, the antiquarian Walpole made use of an ancestral setting – a Gothic castle with subterranean dungeons and labyrinthine passages – supernatural events, and the pursuit of a lonely heroine (Isabella) by her tyrannical guardian (Manfred), spicing this dramatic mix with a pinch of adultery and incest. Such ingredients, with variations, were to become the staple of the Gothic romances which proliferated in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Radcliffe’s colourful Montoni, with his threats of vengeance and lack of any sense of justice, is certainly a descendant of Walpole’s outrageous Manfred. However, Walpole’s five-chapter plot lacked verisimilitude, and his use of the frankly marvellous to provide portents of Manfred’s downfall and to redress his usurpation of Alfonso’s property and titular rights was stagy, disjunctive and melodramatic. Although readers liked The Castle of Otranto’s spirited pace and dramatic qualities, its effect was one of momentary shocks rather than sustained terror.

  Clara Reeve, building on Walpole’s theory of a new kind of romance, had argued in The Progress of Romance (1785) that modern Gothic romance could avoid the improbability of the old by portraying closely a Gothic society remote in time in which chivalrous manners, superstition and belief in ghosts were part of the lived fabric of the characters’ everyday life. Thus the manners of real life could be combined with a degree of the marvellous in a way which would not compromise modern readers, as they could readily dismiss superstitious belief as an ancient, aberrant, custom. However, the Gothic past of Reeve’s own romance The Old English Baron (1778), with its mid-fifteenth-century domestic routines of Henry VI’s merry England, was not a successful source of the hauntingly strange. Anxious both to direct her story to a morally ‘useful’ end, and to avoid what Fielding in Tom Jones (1749) had termed ‘a horse-laugh in the reader’ by the introduction of any ‘supernatural agents’ other than those ‘which can be allowed to us moderns’,11 Reeve restricted her supernatural manifestations to the appearance, in dream form, of the ‘respectable’ ghosts of her hero’s true parents. Compared to the sudden, violent depictions of the marvellous in Otranto, with its animated portrait, bleeding statue, walking skeleton and dramatic appearances of gigantic Piranesi-like fragments of the murdered Alfonso, the result seemed dull and was treated with derision by Walpole. It took Ann Radcliffe’s fluid narrative style, her more realistic fictional world, and Emily’s interiority to establish a Gothic mood of pervasive fear into which readers were drawn – a mood in which, as Thomas Noon Talfourd was to put it, ‘the world seems shut out, and we breathe only in an enchanted region where… the sad voices of the past echo through deep vaults and lonely galleries’. Like Sir Walter Scott before him, Talfourd considered Radcliffe ‘the inventor of a new style of romance’. It was, he claimed, ‘equally distinct from the old tales of chivalry and magic, and from modern representations of credible incidents and living manners. Her works partially exhibit the charms of each species of composition; interweaving the miraculous with the probable, and breathing of tenderness and beauty peculiarly her own.’12

  RADCLIFFE’S USE OF HISTORY AND

  THE SUPERNATURAL

  Unlike Walpole, Radcliffe in Udolpho does not admit the frankly supernatural or marvellous. Nor does she take up the possibility, suggested by Reeve, of situating her fiction in a Gothic world of folk superstition in which belief in the supernatural is universally accepted. She chooses instead the late sixteenth century, which, in popular historical understanding, was considered the transitional period between the Gothic era and the modern – the ‘Gothic cusp’ as Robert Miles has aptly termed it.13 Consequently Radcliffe can people her romance with two sorts of
characters: those whose attitudes and practices are those of the old feudal order of tyranny, Machiavellian intrigue and popish superstition (Montoni, Madame Montoni, Laurentini di Udolpho), and those who embody the new order of liberty and enlightenment, anachronistically having the fashionable sensibility, manners, and tastes of eighteenth-century England (Monsieur St Aubert, Count de Villefort, Valancourt, Emily, Blanche, Henri). So, while the convent of St Clair with its gloomy cloisters and the castle of Udolpho with its cruel torments and macabre relic are both Gothic or medieval to the core, elsewhere in the novel anachronism is frequently in evidence. St Aubert’s ‘botanizing’ at his chateau and his taste for the sublime and picturesque, his dispute with his brother-in-law, Monsieur Quesnel, about the re-landscaping of his boyhood home, Emily’s creative sensibility and accomplishments, Montoni’s conversing with ladies about ‘the French opera’, and Emily’s being offered coffee by La Voisin at his cottage and ‘coffee and ice’ and ‘collations of fruits and ice’ in glittering Venice – these are all obviously characteristic of Radcliffe’s own century. What is more, such anachronism is not to be disparaged. This is anachronism with a purpose.

  Robert Mighall, discussing the motivations and development of Gothic fiction, has argued convincingly that, from its inception, ‘the idea of Gothic carries a (pseudo-) historical inflection, and testifies to one culture’s view about its perceived cultural antithesis’. He takes up Chris Baldick’s important reminder that Radcliffe’s romances derive their ‘Gothicity’ primarily from the fact that the main events occur in Catholic countries.14 Although the word ‘Gothic’ was originally associated with the barbarism with which the ancient northern Germanic tribes, the Goths, had sacked Rome, in the hands of Radcliffe it becomes synonymous with the Latin South, a region still considered to harbour despotic power and Catholic superstition even in 1824, when Sir Walter Scott remarked on it.15 Only from an enlightened, modern perspective could such despotism and irrationality take on their full meaning and significance as barbarous cultural adversary. As Mighall puts it,