Customer Reviews

The Mysteries of Udolpho (Dover Giant Thrift Editions)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This is a true late eighteenth century book in the sense that it has a leisurely (very leisurely) opening, a great deal of waxing eloquent on the beauties of nature--which are well written, but so frequent that one becomes inured to them--and enough pages to fill up the four volumes that the book originally was published as (over 600 of them).

But there's more--castles, and dungeons and darkness, Oh my! In true Gothic fashion, the book does not disappoint in the gloom and suspense department, and is replete with all the trappings that make for some fun reading. There are plenty of scares and false alarms, and a couple of true horrors, and all is told with taste and style. There are certainly flaws, in the modern sense, of the drawn-out plot, and the fainting heroine routine gets a bit tired; but all in all, a fascinating study of an early novel, and a hero and heroine you root for.

The high moral tone is refreshing though a little too strained; And surprisingly, the sense of being in the late sixteenth century is not as pronounced as one could wish for. (Aside from the castles and the absence of law and order in the land, that is.) More attention could have been given to costume, for instance, instead of just landscape, but the book earns five stars in my opinion for being an immense work that is very readable, even page-turning to a remarkable degree, and has a satisfying denouement. (There are a few elements that stretch plausability, but this is certainly nothing new in fiction; and, given what the author needed to explain at the end, she does a fine job.)

Fans of the novel, of Austen and other nineteenth century authors, will find this book interesting in other ways, too. There are whispers of later works in many of the pages; one can hardly miss that Radcliffe influenced the later writers. In addition, any Regency reader worth her salt should read this book, if only because so many Regency heroines did. This Dover edition is unabridged from the original 1794, and my only niggle with it is that I waited in vain to come upon the scene on the cover of the book, but to no avail. (There are tapestries and curtains hiding fearful discoveries, for sure, but none that exactly correspond to the otherwise fitting and intriguing cover illustration.)

Notwithstanding, my advice is to get the book, and read it. You won't be sorry.

Not only is the diegetic poetry missing from this work, but so are the epigrams and quotes that introduce chapters. While I understand that a work that has been "converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers" will have the occaisional mistake, this is just a blatant mis-representation. What is on offer here is NOT Radcliff's Udolpho, but - at best - an abridgement of it. And these errors could have been prevented with even a cursory proofing.

Volunteers or not, a title's appearance in the Kindle store carries with it certain expectations of quality that this offering utterly fails to live up to. For the same amount of money (none) I can just as easily download the text from Project Gutenburg [...] where it has ALSO been converted to digital format by volunteers but somehow manages to avoid the GLARING errors that this transcription suffers from.

it must have been a 600+ page book with 500 pages of landscapes and 400 pages of crying-i have allowed for time spent crying while looking at landscapes-. all that aside, the story is not bad at all and, the best part, is that all the mysteries are resolved at the end of the book. no loose ends are left. yet, i still cant say that i think it is worth reading in its entirety. for the amount of story Radcliff is trying to tell, she takes an ungodly amount of paper to tell it.

p.s. if you need to know why this book is so important and so many famous authors have read it:
1. it is considered the best work of the lady created the feminine/english gothic genera.
2. it's written like a dream-notice how long it takes to get places and how fast it takes to get back from them. just notice the distance between things as you read. the weather is emotions, the landscape is a foreshadowing, a castle is a secret-and dangerous-full of subterranean tunnels that go to places no one knew were there. every castle has them but no one talks about them.
3. because its a dream, your in someones head, your in there mind. so, it's about being in the mind. no one had ever written a book like it.

The book is highly enjoyable. However, this copy has left out all of the poetry, leaving something to be desired.

...the quintessential eighteenth century gothic novel.

France, 1584. The St. Auberts don't have much, but they also don't want anything other than what is before them. They live in a chateau overlooking the most beautiful landscapes, from rivers to woods to trees. Monsieur St. Aubert loves books. He has a giant library, and his biggest pleasure in life is reading Horace while overlooking the gorgeous scenery before him. He has passed his passions on to his lovely daughter Emily. But the family is never the same after Madame St. Aubert dies. Overcome with grief, both M. St. Aubert and Emily agree to travel, for fresh air would certainly do them good. During their journey, they meet a young man by the name of Valancourt. He is a handsome and chivalrous scholar, and he hits it off not only with M. St. Aubert but with Emily as well. In fact, strong feelings emerge between them. But secrets, danger and evil tear them apart when Montoni, Emily's great-uncle becomes obsessed with her. Add to it strange family secrets, ambiguous characters, a skeleton, disappearances and murders, and you get quite an interconnected gothic tale filled with romance and terror.

First published in 1794, The Mysteries of Udolpho is Ann Radcliffe's second and most popular title in her short writing career. Even though she only wrote three novels, her name is still mentioned among the first novelists to create and mold the gothic genre. The Mysteries of Udolpho is beautiful. The writing draws you in with its picturesque descriptions and gothic atmosphere, not to mention its romantic tones, sprinkled with poetry and sonnets. In many ways, this book is similar to The Romance of the Forest, Radcliffe's first novel, but this one is thicker on plot and suspense. It is also thicker on content, for it is quite long and sometimes the story's pacing is very slow. The rather over-romantic prose with its poems and sonnets got very tedious after a while, but the suspense kept me turning the pages. There are so many twists and turns it is unbelievable, but the author manages to tie all loose ends in due time. All in all, I very much enjoyed The Mysteries of Udolpho. This reminds me of why I love the classics so much. They took the time to create a story, believable or not, and they even managed to research their subjects and time frames (for this book is set during late sixteenth century Europe). They did not have Google or Wikipedia at the time, which means that they had to do their research the hard way: with books, encyclopedias and deep learning. Food for thought for today's historical fiction authors (especially the lazy ones).

I absolutely fell in love with this book. The prose and use of the english language is breathtaking. It's a long novel (but those are my favourite kind) but it kept me up into the wee hours to see what would happen next.

I have read it many many times, I can just choose a paragraph at radom and fall into her lyrical writing.

The ultimate gothic. READ IT!

I love the picture on the cover of this Dover edition!

I was definitely engrossed in the story, but there's only so much injustice a person can take without being frustrated that vindication has not come along on a white horse yet. The story had all the proper thrills and intrigues, but they were continually interrupted by Emily fainting. Perhaps I've been spoiled by being accustomed to girls with heroine's hearts rather than protagonists who are fine and delicate. I was not so engrossed that I read it cover to cover, but the ending was sufficiently astonishing with its revelations and there were enough moments of horror to keep me more than interested. The first two reviews are correct, the poetry and etc is mostly left out, but I didn't particularly miss it.