Our story of Udolpho begins in a lovely French chateau (not Udolpho) where we meet the angelic and lovely and very virginal Emily. Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.
In her work, she sought to inspire “terror,” saying: They liked to travel but not to mingle with society. The author herself was described as pretty but shy, and led a mostly reclusive life with her husband and her dog.
It’s notable for being the ultimate Gothic novel, for having a lot of changes in tone and mood throughout the story, and for the fact that Radcliffe liked to give all her supernatural horrors mundane explanations. The Mysteries of Udolpho was a huge hit for author Ann Radcliffe when it first came out in 1794. My paperback Oxford World’s Classics edition (1998) of The Mysteries of Udolpho is 679 pages long, not counting introduction and notes. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the heroine is mesmerized by the scandalous gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Readers, I read that novel.
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