The Mysteries of Udolpho Study Guide

The only child of William Ward and Ann Oates, Ann Radcliffe was born in Holborn, London, in 1764. Her father was a successful businessman who eventually moved the family to Bath. At age 23, Radcliff married William Radcliffe, a journalist who went to Oxford; and in 1789, at age 25, she anonymously published her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. Radcliffe didn’t begin putting her real name on her novels until the second edition of her third novel, The Romance of the Forest, which both sold better and attracted more praise than either of her previous novels. This cleared the way for The Mysteries of Udolpho, which became a massive success shortly after its publication and remains perhaps her best-known novel. The strong sales of Radcliffe’s novels allowed her husband to quit his job so that he and Radcliffe could travel the world, and she published a travelogue about this time. Although rumors spread that Radcliffe retired from writing in her final years because she went insane, in fact, she lived an active social life and continued to write a novel (Gaston de Blondeville) that was published after her death. She died of a chest infection in 1823, and it took many years for a scholarly biography of her to emerge, adding to the popular idea that her life was mysterious.

Gothic fiction like The Mysteries of Udolpho primarily gets its genre name from gothic architecture, a style that became popular in Europe between the 12th and 16th centuries. Gothic architecture involved elaborate masonry and new architectural techniques, with the most distinctive feature being elaborately arched ceilings. It drew influence from Roman architecture and came to be associated in particular with religious buildings and castles. The titular castle of Udolpho in the novel is the most prominent example of gothic architecture in the novel (which is set in the 1500s, during the peak of this style), and other locations, like the monastery Emily visits, also bear some of this gothic architectural influence. Critics debate Radcliffe’s stance on Catholicism, which was the dominant religion when and where the novel is set (16th-century France and Italy) but not when and where Radcliffe wrote it (18th-century England). In 1534, King Henry VIII of England officially renounced the authority of the pope. This led to the eventual rise of Anglicanism (a branch of Christianity that, unlike Catholicism, doesn’t recognize the pope) as England’s dominant religion by Radcliffe’s lifetime. Some historians see characters like the murderous Sister Agnes as being critical of Catholicism, while others believe Radcliffe held more moderate views on Catholicism and was simply interested in the religion’s imagery.

Although The Mysteries of Udolpho built on Ann Radcliffe’s previous work and the work of other writers, it is arguably the archetypical example of a gothic novel. The first novel to specifically bill itself as “gothic” was The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, which introduced some staples to the genre, including a castle full of secret passages as well as questions about the presence of the supernatural. Walpole himself drew on the work of Shakespeare, particularly the ghost-story aspects of Hamlet. The Mysteries of Udolpho helped popularize and standardize many of these conventions in the genre. Its influence is most prominent on Jane Austen’s Northanger Abby, which directly references the novel and is in some ways both a parody and a reinterpretation of Radcliffe’s work. Another reference to Udolpho appears in William Scott’s Waverly, which, like Radcliffe’s novel, helped to define the growing genre of historical fiction. In the Victorian period, earlier gothic novels like The Mystery of Udolpho played a major influence on writers ranging from Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights) to Edgar Allen Poe (“The Raven,” “The Cask of Amontillado”) to Bram Stoker (Dracula). Radcliffe and gothic literature in general continue to be an influence on contemporary authors, including Steven King (The Shining, Dark Tower), Stephenie Meyer (Twilight), and Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Mexican Gothic).