Here we see one
possible disadvantage of reading the books listed in “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” in their order on the list – that is, in chronological order. I started reading “The Mysteries Of Udolpho” and shortly found myself thinking “Oh, great, another book regarding a young woman about to be forced into a marriage with a horrible man by a nasty relative who wants this marriage to go forward for the sake of the advantage it will bring to the family.” And the reason I found that theme so discouraging? Because several of the previous books on the list deal with the same basic plotline, including one of the longest books ever written in English - “Clarissa” by Samuel Richardson. And “Udolpho” is a whopping 900 pages. I've dealt with this already, for God's sake.
Do I have any more sensible reason for my impatience with this work? Well, let's see.
“The Mysteries Of Udolpho”, published in 1794, is today considered a perfect example of the Gothic novel, in which the (usually) heroine finds herself surrounded by crumbling castles, threatening (usually) men, ancient family secrets, hints of supernatural activity, and all like that there. In this case, Emily St. Aubert lives happily with her widowed father in the southern part of France in comfort, though not in tremendous wealth – just enough to dwell on a small estate and employ a few servants. She just has time to fall in love with a young military officer named Valancourt before her father dies, first strictly instructing her to destroy a cache of documents and a small painting without looking at them. She dutifully does this just before she moves in with her aunt, a Madame Cheron, whose social ambition moves her to forbid Emily to even see Valancourt, let alone marry him, and to herself marry a threatening Italian nobleman named Montoni. This man moves Emily and his new wife to a desolate spot in northern Italy into a castle called, you guessed it, Udolpho, where he proceeds to mistreat everyone in his orbit so severely that his wife shortly dies of illness. With help, Emily manages to escape back to France, whereupon she gradually learns first that Valancourt is not as virtuous as she thought, second that all the family secrets have non-occult though unpleasant explanations, and third that Valancourt is too as virtuous as she thought, or almost. And they all live happily ever after.
This plot, you'll agree, is nothing very unusual, especially for a piece in the Gothic tradition. It's as long as it is, in part, because author Ann Radcliffe spends pages and pages describing Emily's surroundings – her home in childhood and young womanhood, the landscapes through which she travels, Udolpho, various other buildings. Which is fine, except that Radcliffe's prose is a bit clunky to the modern ear, or at any rate to this modern ear. Those passages, of which there are a great many, slow her story way down.
The same is true of the many examples of Emily's poetry, all of which are as hyperemotional (by today's standards) as you would expect 18th- century poetry to be. There's far less poetry than there is landscape description, but it's a noticeable amount nevertheless.
All of the foregoing is certainly nothing to complain about if the reader is a fan of such prose – if, for example, the reader is a fan of modern romance novels, many of which partake of the same stylistic flourishes. Less tolerable, to my mind at least, is the episodic structure of the entire work. “The Mysteries Of Udolpho” is divided into four sections – or “books”, as they were typically called in those days – and each “book” takes place in a different setting, with a whole separate cast of characters other than Emily herself. What's more, despite the novel's title, Udolpho itself only appears in a portion of one “book”, although admittedly some of the past events as described do have an impact on Emily in the novel's present. You only find out about that in the novel's last twenty pages or so. In any case, the jumping around from place to place and tale to tale also slows the proceedings way down.
One interesting aspect of the novel derives from the fact that, although Ann Radcliffe was an English novelist, she set “Mysteries” in France and Italy, in places she never visited. I know of no rationale for this setting, except that Italy was a place of suspicion for the English at the time. England had been a Protestant nation for roughly 250 years by then, and tended to look askance at Catholic countries, particularly Italy as the Pope's home, as places of wizardry and superstition. I can only assume that Radcliffe set Emily's home in France rather than England because getting from there to the threatening landscape of Italy was a much shorter trip.
I wonder, as I often do, whether readers in 1794 found “Mysteries” at least comparatively easy to read – I imagine they did, since the novel was quite popular in its day, in fact Radcliffe's most popular work. And after all, it's still in print, which I don't suppose it would be if it didn't sell these days. Fine. I found it kind of boring. Call me a boor if you like.
Benshlomo says, as he has before, The things I do for you people.
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