Audiobook · read by volunteers
Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823)
Read by Michelle Crandall, Linda McDaniel, kristiface, Sibella Denton, Sean O'Hara, Martin Geeson, iscatel, Alison Raouf, Lady Maria, Missie · 78 chapters · 32 h 00
About the book
Emily St. Aubert is a young woman of feeling and sensibility, raised among the mountains and valleys of southern France. When she loses her father, she is sent to live with an unsympathetic aunt, and carried off to a grim fortress in the Apennines: the castle of Udolpho, ruled by the menacing Montoni.
There, Emily finds herself in a world of locked rooms, strange noises, and half-heard whispers. Something lies behind a mysterious black veil, and secrets about her family seem to be hidden in the walls. All the while, she must resist forced marriage and hold on to her courage and her love for a distant suitor.
Ann Radcliffe’s novel is a landmark of the Gothic tradition, with its atmospheric landscapes and its mingling of terror and romance. In seventy-eight parts, lasting about thirty-two hours, it is a long and richly imagined journey. A fine listening choice for those who love suspense, old castles and a heroine who will not be cowed.
Introduction
Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) was one of the most popular English novelists of the 1790s. The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794, was her most successful book, and it helped to define the Gothic novel, a genre combining romance, mystery and the thrill of the supernatural. Radcliffe’s method was distinctive: she built suspense through atmosphere and implication, and then, in her novels, provided natural explanations for apparently ghostly events.
The book was widely read and widely discussed. Jane Austen made fun of its readers and its conventions in Northanger Abbey, in which her heroine, Catherine Morland, is so absorbed in Udolpho that she begins to see menace in an ordinary English house. That affectionate parody is a sign of how familiar the novel was. Its influence can be traced in later writers, including Sir Walter Scott and Edgar Allan Poe, and in the tradition of Gothic fiction well into the nineteenth century.
Radcliffe was also a fine writer of landscape, and her descriptions of mountains, forests and the sea are an important element of the book. These passages gave readers a taste of travel at a time when few could go abroad, and they influenced the Romantic imagination.
This recording has seventy-eight parts and lasts about thirty-two hours, read by LibriVox volunteers. It is an immersive, leisurely listen, and the episodic structure makes it easy to follow over many sessions. If you want to understand the origins of the Gothic, and why generations of readers were gripped by it, this is the book to hear.
Public domain
Ann Radcliffe died in 1823: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text