With its insightful portrayals of her protagonist's inner life Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho was a hugely influential work of early Gothic horror This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction & notes by Jacqueline Howard Emily St Aubert lives with her loving enlightened parents in exquisitely happy rural isolation But when she is tragically orphaned the beautiful young woman is thrown on the mercy of her heartless aunt's sinister new husband The villainous Signor Montoni has designs upon his wife's fortune & that of her niece & imprisons them in the gloomy medieval castle Udolpho Separated from her beloved Valancourt Emily must cope with torments of wild imaginings & terrors as ghostly omens & attempts upon her virtue & life threaten to overwhelm her One of the most popular novels of its time The Mysteries of Udolpho continues to grip readers with its vivid characters its sublime Alpine settings & its dramatic sense of suspense & danger In her introduction Jacqueline Howard discusses the novel's huge success when it was first published its place as a groundbreaking work of the Gothic genre & Radcliffe's imaginative use of history poetry landscape & the supernatural This edition also
Includes:: further reading a chronology & notes Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) was the leading exponent of Gothic fiction During her lifetime she published five novels including A Sicilian Romance (1790) The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) & The Italian (1797) as well as a collection of European travel writings Her novels were immensely popular & much imitated If you enjoyed The Mysteries of Udolpho you might like Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher & Other Writings also available in Penguin Classics