Udolpho has been breached

After four months of reading, I have finally finished The Mysteries of Udolpho by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe. If you are familiar with this book, it is most likely that you know it as the book criticized in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. I thought that being familiar with Miss Morland's favorite book would improve my reading of Northanger Abbey, and I was certainly correct. However, I did not find what I expected in The Mysteries of Udolpho.

First of all, the book is far too long. 650 pages of small type, no less, and all of them severely saturated with sentences. I have come to grips with the fact that Georgian and Victorian literature is supposed to be long. The three volume novel, I must remember. But Mrs. Radcliffe does not have story enough to make 650 pages of her work worth that much. At 400 pages it would have been a much better book.

Secondly, The Mysteries of Udolpho is not the full blown Gothic tale of terror I expected to find. Halfway through the book, I still had no idea what Udolpho was, or what mysteries it might contain. The first half of the book is a "travelogue", and would be a character novel if Mrs. Radcliffe had skill in that direction.

Unfortunately, one of Mrs. Radcliffe's greatest flaws is that she cannot create real characters. Henri came closest (and Jane Austen finished the job and gave him life as Henry Tilney), but the other characters are flat and bland. Even so, I would be somewhat hard pressed to call Udolpho a "bad" book. I would not call it, like Miss Morland, "the nicest book in the world", but it is not entirely unworthy. The story took a couple turns that I did not expect, and her descriptions can be scrumptuous. The book was a bestseller in its day, and beloved by writers and readers alike, but unfortunately, modern sentiments cannot give the book a fair chance. The truth is, few readers today could stomach Emily St. Aubert, the delicate and sensible heroine, who faints and turns pale every ten pages, and her lover, Valancourt, is nearly the same. If we look at Udolpho with modern eyes, it's silly and maudlin.

But if you try to look at it with eighteenth century eyes, the real flaws come forth. Even Jane Austen did not criticize Udolpho for its characters, but for something else entirely. In fact, if you read Northanger Abbey carefully, Jane Austen does not even criticize Udolpho, but its readers. Miss Morland's fault is not that she enjoys books like Udolpho, but that she mistakes fiction for reality. Even the Austen family enjoyed Udolpho, though they poked fun at its sensibility. Udolpho does not condone an overactive imagination either; many of Emily's troubles are imaginary, and due to her extreme sensiblity.

Udolpho was not meant to be a serious book. It is a fluff read, full of improbable characters and plots. The author is not a genius. It is my opinion that Valancourt and Emily will have many trials, being too similar in character to complement each other well. I think Emily should have married Du Pont or Henri. Also showing a lack of genius are the long scenes near the end where Emily is absent. I found myself wanting to skip past them and find out what happens to the heroine.

But despite all these faults, I think Udolpho has gotten more than its due criticism. It is certainly no great book, but it is the best example of the popular Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and it is very useful in understanding Jane Austen's greater work, Northanger Abbey. (One even notices that Northanger Abbey is very much in debt to the plot of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and not just for parody material.)