Trapped in a gloomy medieval fortress, an orphaned heroine battles the devious schemes of her guardians as well as her own pensive visions and melancholy fancies. Generations of readers have thrilled to this famous Gothic tale from 1794 and its hypnotic pre-Freudian exploration of the psyche.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Buy from Quality Classics instead,
By Kay Allison Stranges (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Mysteries of Udolpho (Kindle Edition)
I agree with the first reviewer and wish I had read the review before starting the book. Many sentences are left hanging. When I downloaded a Quality Classics edition for 99 cents I discovered that all poetry is left out of this free book. The poetry is not just fluff. It is crucial to the book so do not waste your time with this free edition.
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
free kindle edition,
By Jennifer A Paul (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Mysteries of Udolpho (Kindle Edition)
I haven't read the book yet, but this free kindle edition does not include all of the text. It leaves out all of the poetry which seems to be important to the plot. I suggest buying a different version for the kindle.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Secret Passages, Veiled Portraits, Ruled Passions,
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This review is from: The Mysteries of Udolpho (Dover Giant Thrift Editions) (Paperback)
Accomplished, refined, and beautiful, our heroine Emily St. Aubert finds herself orphaned, her finances in doubt, and surrounded by uncaring, vacuous, and social climbing relatives. Refusing to marry her true love Valancourt, she accompanies her aunt to Italy. There, they both become the prisoners of the sinister Count Montoni. His Castle Udolpho has all the stock trappings of the Gothic: the medieval architecture, the heavy tapesteries, the veiled and oddly familiar portraits, requisite secret passages, horrible sights in the dungeons, mysterious apparitions, hinted murders, and ghostly voices. Through it all, Emily finds time to write a fair amount of poetry. (It's not for nothing the novel's subtitle is "A Romance Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry".) Radcliffe was one of the most influential Gothic writers, and this 1794 work is generally regarded as her best. Is it worth reading today solely on its own merits? Not quite. Radcliffe's story is too long, her reveries over landscape wearisome. There is a flavor of earnest moral instruction as Emily not only struggles to master her emotions, but Radcliffe, in her contrived solutions to supernatural mysteries, is intent on stamping out the unreasonableness of superstition. Yet, there is not just great sentiment but psychological insight too. And the ending is surprising despite the inevitable familiarity of many of the story's trappings. Matthew Lewis The Monk (Dover Thrift Editions) is much more fun, a distillation of much of Radcliffe's images and tropes into a delightfully lurid and supernatural plot. (To extend Stephen King's metaphor that the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto was the genre's Elvis Presley and Lewis' novel its Sex Pistols, one is tempted to say this is its prog rock.) But students of the genre and the novel in general will want to read one of the most popular Gothics and study Radcliffe's technique -- including her somewhat clumsy backstory passages. Finally, it would be a mistake to leave the impression this is just a novel of fear and anxiety. The love between Valancourt and Emily makes this a romance in every sense of the word.
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100
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- The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge Companions to Literature) by Jerrold E. Hogle on 9 pages
- A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century by Henry A. Beers on 9 pages
- The Rise of the Gothic Novel by Maggie Kilgour on 8 pages
- A Companion to the Gothic (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture) by David Punter on 8 pages
- Mastering the Novels of Jane Austen (Palgrave Master Series) by Richard Gill on 7 pages
See all 100 books citing this book
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