The Mysteries of Udolpho

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest Gothic Mystery
Review: The story of a young woman who learns fortitude and practices it in a marvelous way in all her hardships. It shows the stark contrast between true love with fortitude in Emily and lustfulness with selfishness, greed, and cruelty in other characters. It may be difficult to labor through the first third of it if one is not a true lover of nature. If one continues patiently, her detailed descriptions lead the reader to enjoy the beauty of God's creation in the midst of the most difficult times of life. It has many terrifying moments and mysteries that keep one wondering until the book ends.

The plots of Radcliffe's mysteries have been efficiently summarized by Russell Noyes in an introduction of 1956:

"The hero is a gentleman of noble birth, likely as not in some sort of disgrace; the heroine, an orphan-heiress, high-strung and sensitive, and highly susceptible to music and poetry and to nature in its most romantic moods. A prominent role is given to the tyrant-villain. He is a man of fierce and morose passions obsessed by the love of power and riches. The villain can usually be counted on to confine the heroine in the haunted wing of a castle because she refuses to marry someone she hates. Whatever the details, Mrs. Radcliffe generally manages the plot and action so that the chief impression is a sense of the young heroine's incessant danger. On oft-repeated midnight prowls about the gloomy passageways of a rambling, ruined castle, the heroine in a quiver of excitement (largely self-induced) experiences a series of hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. Her emotional tension is kept to the pitch by a succession of strange sights and sounds . . . and by an assorted array of sliding panels, trap doors, faded hangings, veiled portraits, bloodstained garments, and even dark and desperate characters."