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Paperback
Publisher: Dover Publications
ISBN13: 9780486440330
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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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| A damsel in distress, corpses, hidden passages, dark but romantic atmosphere... |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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...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).
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| Slow and steady |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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I've only read the first 100 pages of the long novel, but so far so good. It is something to savor.
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| Sublime enchantment..... |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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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!
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| weeping, so much weeping |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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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.
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| Different from standard Gothic fare |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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First of all, this book is not easy to read in the usual course of novels. It requires concentration and a good knowledge of the English language. Secondly, it's a very intriguing and impelling story. Usually I'm able to finish books in one day, but due to the magnitude and scope of this story, I like to finish this one in smaller bits. I come back to the story again and again, only to find that I'm just as interested as I was when I put the book down initially.
While at times the slightly annoyingly virtuous sentiment of the story can be oft-putting in large doses, it is refreshing in a sense that this book highly suggests mind over matter, rather than the usual emotional excesses of Romantic Gothic fiction. Quite different in this way from the typical Gothic novel, which makes it interesting. Not my personal choice, per se, but interesting and appealing to those who place value on logic and reason as well as the emotions.
(By the way, this Dover "thrift" edition is rather handsome for a bargain-type book. I also have "The Monk" in addition to "The Mysteries of Udolpho.")
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