Sasha's Reviews > The Mysteries of Udolpho

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

And if all the sentences in this book were half as good as that one, we'd be looking at a five-star book here, but sadly the rest of it is just hella boring. You might be reading a lame book if you have this thought: "Oh great, it's one of the heroine's long, shitty poems; that's three fewer pages I'll have to actually read." And if you think Montoni's threat means that the torture device you briefly glimpsed 50 pages ago is going to make a second, more exciting appearance, you are wrong.

Mysteries of Udolpho is the second classic Gothic novel, the first being Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1763), which is better mostly because it's much shorter. And Radcliffe pours on the Gothic stuff; this is like a master class in the Rules Of Gothicness, and here's a Gothic drinking game (which I fleshed out quite a bit here): drink for each of the following plot devices:

- Spooky castles
- Ghosts, vampires or other monsters
- Nasty weather
- Overwrought language
- Ancient family curses
- Damsels in distress
- (distress of losing their chastity)
- in nightgowns
- who faint a lot
- Byronic men
- with secrets

If you find yourself drunk you are reading a Gothic novel. Or watching Scooby Doo.


                                                           ^ Damsel

Anyway there are like two or three spooky castles in Mysteries of Udolpho, I lost count, and who knows how many lengthy descriptions of unpleasant weather, and not a small amount of fainting.


Image is from this terrific piece on Gothic novels, which is just about my favorite thing ever.

And she manages to make all that just spectacularly boring, which is really sortof an achievement, but not one to be proud of.

Here's one of the things about Ann Radcliffe: she really liked landscape paintings, and she didn't get out much, and what that means is that she sets the scene by spending paragraph upon paragraph describing paintings she likes, and that's exactly as boring as it sounds. Here's a painting by her favorite guy, Claude Lorrain:


"Shepherds and shit," is probably what this is called

She's made an effort to create a twisty, mysterious plot, but she's hilariously terrible at big reveals - plot twists happen with the impact of your grandfather telling an anti-Semitic joke at Thanksgiving, everyone saw it coming and no one liked it - and basically none of it works. Two stars because that one sentence I quoted above is fucking amazing; no more stars because most of the suffering was done by me. 'Cause I was so bored. This is the second classic Gothic novel, but The Monk (1797) is still the first good one.