The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

Genre: Gothic romance
Pages: 650
Published: 1794

"'But my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning?--Have you gone on with Udolpho?'

'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil....I am delighted with the book!  I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.  I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.'  

--Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

I had wanted to read The Mysteries of Udolpho for a long time, ever since reading the passages in Northanger Abbey where Catherine and her ridiculous friend Isabella discuss how perfectly scary it is.  I tried for the first time nearly a year ago, but was unable to make it past the first hundred pages.  My initial impression was that the book was hopelessly dull and long-winded.  Radcliffe spends pages describing the picturesque landscapes which Emily and her father experience during an extended journey by carriage.  Very little of importance happens in those first hundred pages.  Emily herself is a somewhat dull protagonist, not exactly unlikable but so stiff and formal and helpless as to be irritating at times.

Now, having said all that...

I was not so put off by Udolpho that I didn't eventually return to it.  I sensed that maybe it had not been the right moment to read this book.  I tried again a couple of weeks ago, taking the book along on a long road trip so that, I thought triumphantly, I would be forced to read it out of sheer boredom!  As it turned out, I need not have worried.  During my second (and successful) reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho, I am happy to report that I found my inner Catherine Morland.  After those uninspiring first hundred pages, I became swept up by this sentimental story and very invested in finding out what horrible fates or happy endings might befall the characters.  Far from having to force myself to read it, I could barely put Udolpho down!  Once I stopped inwardly scoffing so much at the more wooden dialogue or rolling my eyes at the lengthy descriptions of scenery or Radcliffe's poems extolling the virtues of nature (inserted liberally throughout the book, even during otherwise frightening or suspenseful parts), I began to understand why this Gothic romance was heralded as such a thrilling sensation, a bestseller of its day.

The setting is sixteenth-century Europe and the premise is classically Gothic.  Teenage Emily St. Aubert has to leave her peaceful family home in the French countryside after her beloved parents die.  After enduring another painful separation from her beloved Valancourt, who would marry her if her aunt allowed it, Emily is forced to leave France and everything that she knows.  She must move with her aunt and her aunt's sinister new husband, a certain Montini, to Montini's isolated Italian castle, which appears to be haunted by at least one mysterious ghost, if not several.  In addition, Emily's captivating beauty and youthful innocence are such that nearly every man she encounters seems to want to marry or kidnap her.  She is subjected to the unwanted attentions of several remarkably persistent suitors and, at the castle of Udolpho, surrounded by bandits, Venetian prostitutes, and cavaliers who have turned to banditry to make a living.

Emily's chamber at Udolpho is down the corridor from a room which all the servants are terrified of, a room from which she thinks she can sometimes hear beautiful music being played.  In one corner of Emily's room is a sinister old door which leads down an unknown passage and which might permit anyone to force their way into her chamber as she sleeps at night.  And then there is the infamous black veil, the black veil which hangs over something extraordinarily gruesome, something utterly horrid... er, what is it? Emily faints not once but twice after having pulled back the veil and seen what lies behind it, but Radcliffe does not tell us what it was that terrified her heroine until nearly the end of the book!  I found this strange and very vexing, because like Catherine in Northanger Abbey I felt I had to know what was behind that veil.  Reading about Udolpho did give me a strong desire to visit some ruins and castles in the Gothic style, though not to spend the night in one of them!

Emily's guardian Signor Montini is no guardian at all, but rather wants to steal Emily's family fortune, and vows that he will torture or kill the young heiress if she does not sign over her estates to him.

Emily, while a rather uninteresting heroine in some respects and never what one might call "strong," nevertheless does have a strong response to Montini's demands:

"'You may find, perhaps, Signor,' said Emily, with mild dignity, 'that the strength of my mind is equal to the justice of my cause; and that I can endure with fortitude, when it is in resistance of oppression.'

'You speak like a heroine,' said Montini, contemptuously; 'we shall see whether you can suffer like one.'"

I liked Montini's sinister threat there!  It made my inner Catherine Morland gasp, 'Oh my, what next?'

Emily is the quintessential Gothic heroine who would inspire many others in the next century of literature, and she certainly does suffer in each setting she encounters (though the book is called The Mysteries of Udolpho, there are also a number of scenes in Venice, southern France, and at a monastery among other places).  She is oppressed and punished for her attempts to lead the sort of moral life she thinks her mother and father would have wanted for her, separated from the only person in the world who loves her (Valancourt), and mistreated by the people on whom she is legally dependent.

The theme of the importance of fortitude and inner strength resonates throughout the book.  Another reoccurring theme is the superiority of the life of the mind and the quiet admiration of nature over the corrupting influences of the city, material wealth, and vice which have made Madame Cheron (Emily's aunt) so frivolous and Montini so vicious.  Emily's father, a gentle and intellectual nobleman who gave up his life at Paris and other European capitals to retire to his country estate with his family, instills a love for nature in Emily, a love which is shared by her beloved Valancourt:

"'These scenes,' said Valancourt, at length, 'soften the heart, like the notes of sweet music, and inspire that delicious melancholy which no person, who had felt it once, would resign for the gayest pleasures.  They waken our best and purest feelings, disposing us to benevolence, pity, and friendship.'"

Landscape with Travelers by Salvator Rosa

 While I found Radcliffe's nature poetry to be mediocre and rather intrusive upon the story,  I did appreciate some of her scenery descriptions and I concur with Emily that nature and simple pleasures such as friendship, family, and good books are some of the greatest things in life, far superior to those material and industrialized things touted by some as indispensable.  I understood where Radcliffe was coming from and felt that this book helped me to better understand the times in which she wrote.

This was during the Industrial Revolution in England.  As cities and their populations expanded and industry grew, many people saw cities as centers of vice and inhumanity and longed for simpler times in the countryside before the time of enclosure and the building of railways.  The nostalgia for "medieval times" is far from new, but was a key part of Romanticism.  Like other British Romantic writers and artists, Radcliffe was enamored of landscape paintings like those of Salvator Rosa.  Salvator painted nature at its most gorgeous but, like Radcliffe, he also liked to create some seriously creepy scenes!  This beauty at right is entitled "Witches at Their Incantations."  It reminds me of some of Goya's darker paintings.

This combination of strong admiration for nature and fear of primeval darkness, barbarities of antiquity, and/or the supernatural is very evident in Udolpho.  At one point Emily comes across an old instrument of torture and, imagining the gruesome work it might have done in the not so distant past, she swoons.

Did I mention that Emily faints quite a lot?  I think everyone who has heard of Udolpho knows that the heroine faints all the time, and I did start the book knowing that much.  While she may be strong in fortitude and resistant to oppression, she is depicted as physically frail and easily overwhelmed.  I took the liberty of counting how many times Emily faints in the book, and I came up with eleven.  (I saw another reviewer on Goodreads said it was ten times, but I think they must have overlooked one scene where Emily fainted and then immediately fainted again upon reviving.)

Three Panel Review of Udolpho by Kate Beaton

While the fainting is a bit silly, Emily is somewhat justified in that she does end up in some truly harrowing situations.  The suspense  as Emily approaches the dreaded black veil or goes to plead with Montini on the behalf of her aunt is palpable, and once again I had difficulty putting the book down after I got through the first hundred pages. 

I was less thrilled with the last fourth or so of the book, which introduces many new characters all at once and contains a very silly plot twist, along with a pointless subplot about some secondary characters' adventures in a cave filled with bandits.  However, I did not find my attention lagging!  Another pet peeve is that we do not find out the fates of all of the characters, a few of whom disappear from the pages entirely.  Certain things are inconsistent; certain plot revelations are disappointing and others seem too incredible.

I did end up really enjoying Udolpho, though, and am very glad that I finally read it.  I would recommend to it any fan of Jane Austen and Northanger Abbey, which parodies many elements of this book, but also to anyone interested in the Gothic genre.  I am feeling brave enough to add Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest to my to-read list and I may even try another of her bestsellers, The Italian.  What did Ann Radcliffe have against Italians, anyway?

This book is

verbose                    melodramatic              suspenseful         chilling

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Genre: classic novel
Published: 1859
Pages: 670 (paperback)

Synopsis: The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Review:

I recently gave in to re-reading temptation and revisited one of my all-time favorite novels, The Woman in White.

I first picked up the book after one of my professors showed our class five minutes of a clip from the film version which stars Andrew Lincoln (Rick from The Walking Dead).  In the scene we watched Marion Halcombe, looking wan yet determined in her rain-soaked pale nightgown, climbs across a narrow ledge outside her second story window in order to eavesdrop on the conversation of her sister's cruel husband Percival Glyde and his friend, the Italian Count Fosco, on the patio below.  Marion edges along the ledge past a window and only just avoids being spotted by a severe-looking woman who appears in the window to draw the curtains.  She then manages to overhear enough of Glyde and Fosco's conversation, despite the noise of the rain, to ascertain that her sister Laura is in terrible danger from some scheme the two men are planning in order to steal her inheritance.  Fosco drinks two glasses of sugar water and the rain increases so that Marian can hardly hear what the men are saying or keep from slipping on the ledge...  A rattled Marian eventually manages to return to her bedroom, but alas falls ill from having been so long out in the rain.  Caught in a feverish sleep for days, she is unable to warn Laura of the danger she faces.

Walter Hartright encounters the woman in white

While the film is in many respects different from (and inferior to!) the book, this scene was more than enough to pique my curiosity.  I wanted to read about this brave and almost reckless heroine Marian, who seemed so different from the passive women in some other Victorian novels, and to find out about this diabolical scheme to steal her sister's fortune.  I also wanted to learn more about the machinations of Count Fosco and his incongruous love of sugar.  The Woman in White was therefore a book that I commenced reading both with very high expectations and a strong feeling that I was going to love this book.  Approximately three years and four re-reads later, I can confirm that the powers of this suspenseful "sensation novel," written in 1859, have indeed stood the test of time.

Like Dracula, which it predates by several decades, The Woman in White is an epistolary novel.  The story is told through the written accounts of different characters, chiefly Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe.  However, Laura Fairlie's family lawyer, her hypochondriac and misanthropic uncle Frederick, and even one of the villains also take their turn at narrating.  Each of the characters has a unique and engaging style of narration and, like his better-known colleague Charles Dickens, Collins did not scruple to give them all interesting quirks or to pair humor with dire situations.

Count Fosco is one of my favorite Victorian villains.  A far cry from the archetypal Gothic villain who twirls his mustache and rides a black horse, Fosco is an elderly and extremely fat Italian gentleman.  He delights in taking care of his beloved pets, little white mice and parakeets. His wife seems to adore him, he stands up for Marian and Laura on several occasions, has impeccable manners, and absolutely loves the opera.  His words and his character are such that at times even the reader, like Marian, wonders if they haven't terribly misjudged the Count.

I adore that very forthright and intelligent Marian Halcombe.  She is not merely determined to win or be won by a suitor, or to passively survive the machinations of the villains, but to protect her sister and foil the schemes of those who would threaten her.  She is fearless and determined when facing villains who can wield all the advantages, granted to them by their gender, of education, power, and wealth against her.

Said schemes and the plot twists of the novel are masterfully executed.  While I own that I am the worst at guessing plot twists or mystery murderers, The Woman in White is riddled with surprises.  Even while reading it for a fourth time, I found myself wondering "How in the world are the heroines going to get out of this situation??"  The mysterious and titular woman in white is also not who I expected her to be.  Though this is not a ghost story, she and the other characters are certainly haunted by their pasts.

Wilkie Collins

I really cannot recommend The Woman in White enough.  Marion is one of my favorite narrators in any novel, and she and the other characters greet me like old, eccentric friends whenever I revisit this book.  Wilkie Collins' writing style is one that never fails to engage and delight and he succeeds in creating the eerie Gothic mood one might expect from this sort of novel.   The novel is from start to finish so suspenseful that I imagine any reader would have difficulty putting it down for more than a few minutes at a time.  My only complaint is that it tends to overshadow other classic thrillers that I read.  Just as I and many other readers are still searching for the next best fantasy series to Harry Potter, I am still searching for the Victorian thriller that is nearly as good as The Woman in White!

Some favorite quotes:

"The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil?"

"Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper."

...and the best of Frederick Fairlie (Laura's hypochondriac uncle): 

"I sadly want a reform in the construction of children.  Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise."

"I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!"

This book is

suspenseful, extremely well-written, populated with memorable and likable characters

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Genre: Gothic/Victorian
Pages: 172 (paperback)
Published: 1898


Synopsis:
Henry James, a master of haunting atmosphere and riveting tension, presents one of the most famous ghost stories of all time. A young governess is sent to a country home to take charge of two orphans, and unsettled by a sense of intense evil within the house, becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking the children in her care. Growing increasingly uneasy, she becomes drawn into a frightening battle against an unspeakable evil that may or may not be real.
 
Review:
 I was almost entirely unfamiliar with this admittedly well-known classic ghost story before reading The Turn of the Screw. I've seen the Nicole Kidman movie it inspired, The Others, but otherwise came into this not knowing what to expect.  The Woman in Black (which I someday might review) is one of my favorite short horror novels.  It isn't Victorian, but it is set in that time period and shares some of the same eerie psychological horror with Turn of the Screw-- but this little book turned out to be far better.

So, the story is a story within a story-- a guy at a party tells a story about a ghost story which he has written down by a woman he once knew to someone, presumably Henry James.  So, metafiction-- and for the rest of the book this doesn't come up again.  The protagonist and first-person narrator after the prologue is a young governess, the daughter of a parish priest.  She goes to the country estate of Bly (and how might one pronounce this??) to take care of two children at the behest of their always-absent-on-business uncle.  We never learn this governess's name or much about her, already evoking a sense of mystery and, well, vagueness. 

The two children, Flora and Miles, who the governess must look after fit the Victorian ideal of children: they are angelic in both appearance and behavior, bright and determined to please.  Our narrator is happy in her new position-- until she begins to see a strange man, a man who she instinctively feels to be evil, around the grounds of Bly. 

When she tells the housekeeper what she has seen, the terrified woman identifies the man by the governess's description: he is Peter Quint, a man who once worked for the estate and who apparently spent a lot of time with young Miles.  Soon after the terrifying appearance of Quint, a second ghost-- the ghost of the governess's predecessor at Bly-- appears.  The governess, never once doubting her instinctual feeling that these apparitions want nothing more than to hurt her innocent young charges, seeks a way to protect them from the spectors and the corruption she associates them with.  

I don't think it is much of a spoiler to add that there are two main readings of The Turn of the Screw, as you might guess from just reading the synopsis: A. this is a true ghost story, and the governess, having perfectly identified the ghosts of people she had never met, is correct in that these spectors are trying to lead the children to their own deaths (and possibly corrupt them as well).  Reading B: the governess is paranoid, to the point of halluncinating the apparitions, and possibly insane; she creates malevolent figures where in fact there are none, for various psychological reasons.  I lean towards reading B, though I don't have a satisfying explanation for how the governess knew what Quint and Miss Jessel, the other ghost, looked like.  The character of Mrs. Grose-- the housekeeper-- seems suspect in this: maybe she matched the governess's vague descriptions of the apparitions to those of Quint and Jessel because she had always thought them to have sinister intentions.  The thing is, there are several occasions when the governess sees the ghosts and points them out hysterically to the children or to Mrs. Grose, and nobody else sees anything.  Maybe a "meeting point" between the two readings is that Jessel and Quint did corrupt the two children-- the boy and the girl-- before their deaths, and their dark influence lingers, though they are not ghosts, in the sometimes bizarre behavior of the children.  Miles in particular turns out to be much less angelic than he first appears to be...

The governess's conviction towards the nature of the ghosts has the reverse effect of causing the reader to be skeptical of their existence.  Anyway, so I really enjoyed this book.  And yet, halluncinations or not, these ghosts are more frightening to me than the ones which populate 21st century horror movies.  The description of the "pale face" of the ghost of Quint looking in through the window at the children having dinner is beyond eerie-- oh, that scene beat out only by the one with Miss Jessel by the governess's writing desk!  And I feel like I'm spewing spoilers again, but point being, there are some truly eerie scenes.  

The Turn of the Screw succeeds as a ghost story and as an interesting character study...the ambiguity of the supernatural elements and the governess's identity is great and, actually, a little bit maddening.  The ending came as a shock to me, to say the least.  Not sure how I missed the million BBC adaptations of this, but I'm glad I did-- this thin pageturner packed with heavy ambiguity and a great deal of creepiness was a unique reading experience.

My rating: