The Mysteries of Udolpho Read Online Free PDF

Sea-Nymph’, which she has Emily compose while in Venice– the poems did not prove memorable. Without doubt, it was for her sublime and picturesque scenic travel descriptions, including her use of the supernatural as metaphor, that Thomas James Mathias, in his
The Pursuits of Literature
(1797), lionized Radcliffe. 34 She was, he affirmed, ‘a poetess whom Ariosto would have acknowledged as “La nudrita Damigella Trivulzia al sacro speco”’. 35 And, following him, Sir Walter Scott in 1824 acknowledged her as ‘the first poetess of romantic fiction’. 36
    THE GOTHIC AS A HYBRID GENRE AND CONTEXTS
FOR READING
UDOLPHO
    As we have seen, in Walpole’s terms,
Udolpho
blends more than ‘old’ and ‘new’ romance. What is more, poetry is not the only genre which it appropriates to its purpose. In creating an illusion of a past reality, it also takes into itself travel literature, drawing liberally on aesthetic discourses about the sublime, beautiful and picturesque for its characters’ viewing of landscapes and various venerable Gothic piles, as well as for their tours of Languedoc, the Pyrenees and the Alps. Radcliffe herself did not travel abroad until 1794, just after the publication of
Udolpho
and even then, because of the French invasion of the Austrian Netherlands and Belgium, her tour was cut short. But she was obviously an avid reader of travel literature as well as of Shakespeare and much else. She had read the works of William Gilpin, who, with his illustrated tours of rivers, lakes, forests and mountainous regions in Wales and England, had played a major role in popularizing picturesque travel and in the viewing of nature picturesquely. 37 Her juxtapositions of sublime and beautiful views, as well as her creative use of obscurity, owe more to his work than to Burke’s
Philosophical Enquiry
.
    For her truly splendid views of Venice, with its approach along the Brenta to the Grand Canal, ‘its islets, palaces and towers rising out of the sea’, and its gondoliers singing verses from Tasso and Ariosto, she drew on Hester Lynch Piozzi’s
Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany
(1789), capturing Piozzi’s public. Thomas Green, in his
Diary of a Lover of Literature
for 25 November 1800, exclaimed on the stunning improvement wrought by Radcliffe’s transcription, 38 while Byron’s debt to
Udolpho
in his description of Venice in
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(1818) is obvious. 39
    Yet another influence, in relation to what Emily sees behind the dreaded veil at Udolpho, was Pierre Jean Grosley’s
New Observations on Italy and Its Inhabitants
(1769). Radcliffe’s own record of travel in Holland and Germany,
A Journey Made
in the Summer
of 1794, with its criticism of Capuchin monastery-church relics and impressions of convents where ‘horrible perversions of human reason make the blood thrill and the teeth chatter’, 40 throws into relief her anti-Catholic motivation in drawing on Grosley’s macabre account and description.
    The interactions between these competing genres in
Udolpho
, as well as certain shifts in tone in the last third of the novel, raise questions about how the novel should be read. The tension generated between rationalism and enthusiasm, sense and sensibility, has already been noted. Sensibility – the eighteenth-century feeling heart – is repeatedly criticized by the narrator and by some of the characters for its dangerous potential to destabilize and weaken individuals – particularly women – making them susceptible to every fleeting emotion, and instilling illusory fears, superstition, and obsessive passion. In its capacity to render individuals thus vulnerable, it has, it seems, the potential to readmit the unenlightened beliefs and practices of a feudal age, a despotic culture which
Udolpho
explicitly repudiates. As Chris Baldick and