The Mysteries of Udolpho Read online

  Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980)

  Rogers, Deborah D., ed., The Critical Response to Ann Radcliffe (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1994)

  Sage, Victor, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1988)

  Scott, Sir Walter, ‘Prefatory Memoir of the Author’ in Ann Radcliffe, The Novels Complete in One Volume (facsimile edn Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), pp. i–xxxix

  Sedgewick, E. K., The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen, 1986)

  Smith, Nelson, C., ‘Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radcliffe’, Studies in English Literature, Vol. 13 (1973), pp. 577–90

  Tarr, Sister Mary Muriel, Catholicism in Gothic Fiction: A Study of the Nature and Function of Catholic Materials in Gothic Fiction in England (1762–1820) (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1946)

  Tompkins, Joyce Marjorie Sanxter, The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800 (London, Constable, 1932)

  ——, ‘Raymond De Carbonnières, Grosley and Mrs Radcliffe’, Review of English Studies, Vol. 5, No. 19 (July 1929), pp. 294–301

  Ware, Malcolm, Sublimity in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe: A Study of the Influence upon her Craft of Edmund Burke’s ‘Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’ (Uppsala: Lindequist, 1963)

  Warner, William B., ‘The Elevation of the Novel in England: Hegemony and Literary History’, ELH, Vol. 59 (1992), pp. 577–96

  Watt, James, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

  RELEVANT JOURNAL

  Gothic Studies, ed. Robert Miles and William Hughes, Manchester University Press

  CHRONOLOGY

  1764 The future Ann Radcliffe is born in London on Monday 9 July to William Ward, a haberdasher, and Ann Ward (née Oates), and is christened on 5 August in St Andrew’s church, Holborn. She is related to distinguished professional men on both sides, including Dr Samuel Hallifax, Bishop of Gloucester, later of St Asaph, and the Dissenting Unitarian advocate of political reform Dr John Jebb.

  1772–86 The Wards move to Bath. Ann is sent to live for long periods with her relatives, in particular her uncle by marriage Thomas Bentley, Unitarian business partner of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, whose shop in Bath William Ward manages for the next eighteen years. Ann may have attended Blacklands School while staying with Bentley at his Chelsea home in London.

  1787 Ann marries William Radcliffe in the parish church of St Michael in Bath. William, an Oxford graduate and law student, does not take up a legal career but works for the radical Gazetteer, and New Daily Advertiser as a parliamentary reporter. Because he is often absent from home at night until late, Ann occupies herself by writing.

  1789 Her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, in one short volume, is published anonymously, and not widely reviewed. William Radcliffe’s translation from the French of The Natural History of East Tartary is also published.

  1790 Ann’s second novel, A Sicilian Romance, in two volumes, published anonymously in early autumn and reissued in winter, receives favourable reviews. Her husband’s A Journey through Sweden, a translation from the French, is published.

  1791 In late January William becomes editor of the Gazetteer, which continues to view favourably the revolution in France. He arranges for Ann’s poem ‘Song of a Spirit’ to be published in the Gazetteer anonymously. Her third novel, The Romance of the Forest, Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry, in three volumes, is published anonymously towards the end of the year, receiving widespread acclaim from reviewers, and gaining great popularity. Second and third editions in the following year bear Radcliffe’s name on the title page.

  1794 The Mysteries of Udolpho, a Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry, in four volumes, is published on 8 May. The fourth edition of The Romance of the Forest appears on 9 May. The immense success of Udolpho in England and later on the Continent brings Radcliffe literary fame. She and her husband make a journey through Holland and Germany, despite the French invasion of the Netherlands, but a passport incident at Freiburg on the Swiss border causes their early return. In late September they begin a tour of the Lake District. On their return they buy a house at Melina Place, in London.

  1795 Publication of A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, with a Return down the Rhine: To Which are Added Observations during a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland. William Radcliffe buys the English Chronicle or Universal Evening Post.

  1796 Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk is published anonymously in March. A second edition, giving the author’s name and his status as a Member of Parliament, appears in mid-September, and is denounced as indecent, blasphemous and subversive in the following year. Late in the year Radcliffe’s The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents, in three volumes, is published by T. Cadell and W. Davies and well received.

  1797 In August Radcliffe is attacked by implication in an anonymous satirical letter, ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’, written to the editor of the Monthly Magazine. Radcliffe’s romances are also linked with The Monk and the work of her less decorous imitators. She makes a trip to the coast of Kent. Radcliffe now avoids public life and ceases to publish.

  1798 Her father dies on 24 July. Trip to Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight in September.

  1800 In early January the Radcliffes take up residence in China Terrace, Lambeth. Her mother dies on 14 March. Tour of the south coast in July.

  1801 Tour of Southhampton, Lyndhurst, Lymington and the Isle of Wight.

  1802 Visits Kenilworth Castle, Warwick Castle and Blenheim Palace. Radcliffe writes much of Gaston de Blondeville in the winter of 1802–3, but puts it aside, ‘so disinclined had she become to publication’ (Talfourd’s ‘Memoir’ – see 1826).

  1810 Publication of the Revd Charles Apthorp Wheelwright’s unauthorized Poems, which include an ‘Ode to Terror’ and a footnote claiming that ‘Mrs Ann Radcliffe… is reported to have died under that species of mental derangement, known by the name of the horrors.’*

  1812–15 Radcliffe retires to a small cottage in Windsor. In August 1815 she moves with her husband to a new home in Pimlico. Publication (editor anonymous) of The Poems of Mrs Radcliffe, a collection of the poems from The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho.

  1823 Radcliffe dies on 7 February from bronchial asthma and possibly pneumonia, after a high fever accompanied by delirium. Buried on 15 February in a vault in the burying ground at St George’s church, Hanover Square.

  1825 In November a claim is made in the Monthly Review that Radcliffe died ‘in a state of mental desolation not to be described’. The reviewer also questions ‘whether, for several of the last years of her life, her mind was in a situation to produce a work comparable in any degree to the Mysteries of Udolpho’.

  1826 Posthumous publication in May of Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance and St Alban’s Abbey, a Metrical Tale in four volumes, prefaced with ‘Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs Radcliffe’, by Thomas Noon Talfourd, a Unitarian barrister engaged by the publisher, Henry Colburn. Radcliffe’s essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, written as an introduction to Gaston de Blondeville, is published in Colborn’s New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, No. 16, pp. 145–52.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The Mysteries of Udolpho has been continuously in print since its initial publication in London by G. G. and J. Robinson in May 1794, being printed twice in that year, with further editions in 1795, 1799, 1803, 1806 and 1809. It appeared again in Mrs (Aikin) Barbauld’s collection The British Novelists in 1810, in a four-volume edition printed by Mason in 1823, and in another two-volume edition by C. S. Arnold in 1823 and yet another by S. Fisher in 182
4. In that year a more expensive edition, ‘With Critical Remarks, and a Memoir of the Author, Embellished with Numerous Engravings on Wood’, was also published by J. Limbird, this being reprinted with its many unfortunate typographical errors and emendations as Volume I of Limbird’s The British Novelist collection in 1832 and 1833. Again in 1824, an edition supposedly edited by Sir Walter Scott, who also supplied a substantial ‘Prefatory Memoir of the Author’, was published as Volume X of Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library, by Ballantyne in Edinburgh and Hurst, Robinson & Co. in London.

  During the rest of the nineteenth century Udolpho remained in steady demand, appearing in a variety of editions, some of them undated. Following translations into German in 1795, French in 1797 and Italian in 1816, it circulated widely on the Continent throughout the nineteenth century. Irish and American editions had dated from 1794 and 1795 respectively. In the twentieth century the work continued to maintain interest, with at least five editions appearing. In 1931 J. M. Dent published Udolpho in Everyman’s Library, for which Ernest Rhys modernized to some extent Radcliffe’s spelling and punctuation and Austin Freeman wrote an introduction. Bonamy Dobrée’s 1966 edition for Oxford University Press, which makes very few emendations, has been reprinted many times – most recently in 1998, with a new introduction and notes by Terry Castle.

  The text used here is that of the first edition of 1794; unlike her next romance, The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1796), Udolpho was not revised by either Radcliffe or the publisher for subsequent editions. For the sake of authenticity, original spellings – including eighteenth-century variants, such as ‘poinard’ and ‘poniard’ – have been retained, as have inconsistencies of hyphenation. A few obvious printer’s errors, such as ‘hebade’ for ‘he bade’ and ‘frem’ for ‘from’, have been silently corrected, and Radcliffe’s misspellings of ‘Thompson’ for the poet James Thomson and of ‘Sayer’ (on one occasion) for the poet Frank Sayers have been emended. Her ‘heavy’ punctuation, with its proliferation of commas and dashes, has been left virtually untouched, preserving the logical ordering of hierarchical relationships of units within her sentences. However, the jarring capitalization of ‘de’ in ‘de Villeroi’ has been returned to lower case wherever it appears in Volume II, as has the capitalization of ‘de’ in ‘de Villefort’ on occasion in Volumes III and IV; ‘D’Emery’ has been changed to ‘d’Emery’ in Volume I. Again for consistency, ‘St Claire’ in Volume III has been silently corrected to the ‘St Clair’ which appears elsewhere. Some passages originally in square brackets in Volume IV have instead been enclosed in parentheses, and asterisks and closing quotation marks have been transposed in references to Radcliffe’s footnotes. The chapter numbers in Volume I have been emended after Chapter VII, to make them sequential, and that of Chapter III in Volume II has been corrected. A few loose stitches in the textual fabric, to adapt Sir Walter Scott’s knitting metaphor, have also been attended to. One example occurs in Chapter VIII of Volume III, where ‘replied Ugo’, which is obviously a mistake, has been emended to ‘replied the soldier’. Emendations of such minor incoherencies are tabulated below.

  The Penguin Classics house style has been imposed throughout. Full stops after contractions such as ‘St’ and after headings and source lines have been deleted. Unspaced em dashes have been changed to spaced en dashes, and other dashes have been halved in length. ‘CHAP’ has been spelt out in chapter headings, and the opening words of chapters have been set in upper and lower case rather than capitals and small capitals. Single quotation marks have been used throughout, with double quotation marks for quotations within dialogue, and closing quotation marks have not been used at the end of a paragraph when dialogue continues at the start of the next paragraph.

  Radcliffe’s inconsistent practice in identifying the source of quotations which occur as epigraphs to chapters and in the text has been addressed by citing both the name of the author and the title of the work, the added material being placed in square brackets. The titles of the works quoted have been changed to upper-and-lower-case italics. Omission of whole lines in quoted verse has been indicated by a line of spaced full stops, rather than by the long rule or rules used by Radcliffe. Fuller details of the sources are given in end-notes, as are details of those quotations for which Radcliffe does not herself give a source. Notes have also been provided on matters of textual interest as well as on passages which assume knowledge of eighteenth-century society, literature, customs, taste and manners.

  PENGUIN TEXT 1794 EDITION

  [I/139] Montoni was not at home Montoni was at home

  [II/227] hall. Says Carlo hall, says Carlo

  [III/366] lest it should not be he lest it should be he

  [III/404] replied the soldier replied Ugo

  [III/442] my late lord, the Marquis my late lord, the Count

  [IV/529] Henri and the Count Henri and the servant

  THE

  MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO,

  A

  ROMANCE;

  INTERSPERSED WITH SOME PIECES OF POETRY

  BY

  ANN RADCLIFFE,

  AUTHOR OF THE ROMANCE OF THE FOREST, ETC.

  IN FOUR VOLUMES.

  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.

  VOL. I.

  LONDON:

  PRINTED FOR G. G. AND J. ROBINSON, PATERNOSTER - ROW.

  1794.

  VOLUME I

  CHAPTER I

  ‘_______home is the resort

  Of love, of joy, of peace and plenty, where,

  Supporting and supported, polish’d friends

  And dear relations mingle into bliss.’

  Thomson [The Seasons, ‘Autumn’]1

  On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St Aubert. From its windows were seen the pastoral landscapes of Guienne and Gascony, stretching along the river, gay with luxuriant woods and vines, and plantations of olives. To the south, the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrenées, whose summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms, seen, and lost again, as the partial vapours rolled along, were sometimes barren, and gleamed through the blue tinge of air, and sometimes frowned with forests of gloomy pine, that swept downward to their base. These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose. To the north, and to the east, the plains of Guienne and Languedoc were lost in the mist of distance; on the west, Gascony was bounded by the waters of Biscay.

  M. St Aubert loved to wander, with his wife and daughter, on the margin of the Garonne, and to listen to the music that floated on its waves. He had known life in other forms than those of pastoral simplicity, having mingled in the gay and in the busy scenes of the world; but the flattering portrait of mankind, which his heart had delineated in early youth, his experience had too sorrowfully corrected. Yet, amidst the changing visions of life, his principles remained unshaken, his benevolence unchilled; and he retired from the multitude ‘more in pity than in anger,’2 to scenes of simple nature, to the pure delights of literature, and to the exercise of domestic virtues.

  He was a descendant from the younger branch of an illustrious family, and it was designed, that the deficiency of his patrimonial wealth should be supplied either by a splendid alliance in marriage, or by success in the intrigues of public affairs. But St Aubert had too nice a sense of honour to fulfil the latter hope, and too small a portion of ambition to sacrifice what he called happiness, to the attainment of wealth. After the death of his father he married a very amiable woman, his equal in birth, and not his superior in fortune. The late Monsieur St Aubert’s liberality, or extravagance, had so much involved his affairs, that his son
found it necessary to dispose of a part of the family domain, and, some years after his marriage, he sold it to Monsieur Quesnel, the brother of his wife, and retired to a small estate in Gascony, where conjugal felicity, and parental duties, divided his attention with the treasures of knowledge and the illuminations of genius.

  To this spot he had been attached from his infancy. He had often made excursions to it when a boy, and the impressions of delight given to his mind by the homely kindness of the grey-headed peasant, to whom it was intrusted, and whose fruit and cream never failed, had not been obliterated by succeeding circumstances. The green pastures along which he had so often bounded in the exultation of health, and youthful freedom – the woods, under whose refreshing shade he had first indulged that pensive melancholy, which afterwards made a strong feature of his character – the wild walks of the mountains, the river, on whose waves he had floated, and the distant plains, which seemed boundless as his early hopes – were never after remembered by St Aubert but with enthusiasm and regret. At length he disengaged himself from the world, and retired hither, to realize the wishes of many years.

  The building, as it then stood, was merely a summer cottage, rendered interesting to a stranger by its neat simplicity, or the beauty of the surrounding scene; and considerable additions were necessary to make it a comfortable family residence. St Aubert felt a kind of affection for every part of the fabric, which he remembered in his youth, and would not suffer a stone of it to be removed, so that the new building, adapted to the style of the old one, formed with it only a simple and elegant residence. The taste of Madame St Aubert was conspicuous in its internal finishing, where the same chaste simplicity was observable in the furniture, and in the few ornaments of the apartments, that characterised the manners of its inhabitants.

  The library occupied the west side of the chateau, and was enriched by a collection of the best books in the ancient and modern languages. This room opened upon a grove, which stood on the brow of a gentle declivity, that fell towards the river, and the tall trees gave it a melancholy and pleasing shade; while from the windows the eye caught, beneath the spreading branches, the gay and luxuriant landscape stretching to the west, and overlooked on the left by the bold precipices of the Pyrenées. Adjoining the library was a green-house, stored with scarce and beautiful plants; for one of the amusements of St Aubert was the study of botany, and among the neighbouring mountains, which afforded a luxurious feast to the mind of the naturalist, he often passed the day in the pursuits of his favourite science. He was sometimes accompanied in these little excursions by Madame St Aubert, and frequently by his daughter; when, with a small osier basket to receive plants, and another filled with cold refreshments, such as the cabin of the shepherd did not afford, they wandered away among the most romantic and magnificent scenes, nor suffered the charms of Nature’s lowly children to abstract them from the observance of her stupendous works. When weary of sauntering among cliffs that seemed scarcely accessible but to the steps of the enthusiast, and where no track appeared on the vegetation, but what the foot of the izard3 had left; they would seek one of those green recesses, which so beautifully adorn the bosom of these mountains, where, under the shade of the lofty larch, or cedar, they enjoyed their simple repast, made sweeter by the waters of the cool stream, that crept along the turf, and by the breath of wild flowers and aromatic plants, that fringed the rocks, and inlaid the grass.