Book review: the Mysteries of Udolpho

This book is as famous as a weasel, though by no means as slender, weighing in at 672 pages in my edition. We have owned it unread for decades; I suspect M of originating it. Were one to subtract from it all those passages wherein the heroine mopes, sighs, faints, bursts into tears and generally indulges in fits of melancholia it would be a much shorter book. But I do not think we should blame her; it is clearly the behaviour expected of a gentlewoman of the period.

Wiki says The Mysteries of Udolpho is a quintessential Gothic romance, replete with incidents of physical and psychological terror¹: remote crumbling castles, seemingly supernatural events, a brooding, scheming villain and a persecuted heroine; this is fair. This review says it 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, which is defensible.

The plot is fantastical in many respects; one in which I think it is not deliberate is her geography; I think she has only the haziest notions of the regions that her characters traverse. The most obvious is that on quitting the Pyrenees somewhere near T(h)oulouse, the party goes through Arles, before returning to the region of Beziers; you see the problem of course. Of slightly more concern is the way her characters cannot traverse a mountainous region without encountering ridiculous precipices and the like; and can never find shelter at the end of the day, but are obliged always in the gloaming to pick their way through forests or whatever and end up in a bandit's hideout.

In accordance, or so I assume, with the sentiments of her time, peasants when encountered at the end of day willingly give up their beds to gentlefolk, and of course are to be found dancing and singing in the evening light while eating enticing repasts of fresh fruit and the like.

There are some slightly odd legal loopholes, because the things described are not real things but plot-drivers. So, Montoni (an Italian) inherits from his wife (a Frenchwoman) when she dies; yet he could provide no evidence of her death (which occurred in the Italian mountains) in France, and does not ask - as he quite reasonably could - Emily (a Frenchwoman) to write a paper witnessing the death.

The plot, and the events, and the remote castle Udolpho, and the remote abandoned chateau, are all there to make your flesh creep and to sigh in sympathy with Emily and the sad turns of fate that prevent - or rather delay - her happy marriage to Valancourt. Once they have served their purpose they are no longer needed, and there is a curiously brief unwinding at the end, where the usual long digressive speeches are discarded in favour of a brief here's-how-I-stuck-it-all-together kind of plot outline, which bizarrely resembles the end of an Agatha Christie where Poirot goes through all the subtle clues you missed. The smugglers-making-spooky-noises-so-people-think-it-is-haunted is eerily reminiscent of Scooby-Doo, but never mind.

Of the supernatural: much of the "terror" comes from exploring-crumbling-castles-at-midnight kind of stuff, but some of it is from Ghosts and Ghoolies. She - being a good Christian - naturally explains most of this away in arrears; I think only a few things remain, like Montoni's cup breaking due to poison.

Enough poking holes: I did read it, and enjoyed reading it, though I confess to having skipped most of the poetry and towards the end quite a bit of the emoting. I suspect, though, that I won't read another. The writing is of better quality than most moderns, though most will find the scenery over-described. Having characters with moral scruples is refreshing.

Notes

1. My favourite example of this is Emily discovering, behind the black veil, something so terrible that she faints - and we aren't told what it is. I think this is probably a plot error - the author had intended to come back to it, but forgot, so it gets cleared up in the big-reveal-at-the-end: it was just a wax figure of a corpse being eaten by worms. The oddity then is that the next time she comes to this door it is locked - so we are lead to expect something interesting. But now we know what it is, there's no longer anything to explain why the door would be locked.