Extricating Emily

THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO by Ann Radcliffe. 672 pages. Oxford. $8.

"Rather little wool for a very great cry." George Saintsbury's epigram was Ann Radcliffe's epitaph; for more than a century her quaint gothic masterpiece has been buried among bookworms. Yet for half a century before that, from 1794 until the triumph of Dickens and Thackeray, The Mysteries of Udolpho was an international bestseller, acclaimed by Coleridge as "the most interesting novel in the English language." It enchanted Keats, who under its influence wrote The Eve of St. Agnes; it electrified Byron, who stole its hero and called him Childe Harold; it directly inspired Sir Walter Scott to produce his greatest works, the Waverly novels. And even today Udolpho commands deference as the first successful thriller in the language and the proximate cause of the grand tradition of the grotesque that runs through Anglo-American letters from Wuthering Heights to Yoknapatawpha County. Reason enough to exhume the hoary old horror and reissue its haunting license. But there are still better reasons. In the game of suspense, Mistress Radcliffe can tease with the best of them, and in the art of natural description she can pile a crag or plummet a chasm with any man short of Scott himself. True, the dear lady is one of the ickiest prigs who ever put quill to scented paper. Yet if in 1794 her virginal vaporings came on as symptoms of high sensibility, in 1966 they come off as conventions of high comedy. All unintentionally, Udolpho is one of the funniest books ever written, a travesty of the romantic ethos that reads at times like a collection of exquisitely sappy subtitles from an old Pearl White picture.

A Maiden Fair. The story takes place Far Away (south of France, north of Italy) and Long Ago (end of the 16th century). The heroine, a young Frenchwoman Of Gentle Birth named Emily St. Aubert, is a Damsel In Distress--Alone In the Cold Cruel World with only her Lofty Principles to guide her. She is beautiful and dutiful, weeps for 30 pages at a stretch, faints wherever the carpeting permits, seeks refuge from the "vices of the world" in the "beauties of nature and the nicer emotions of the mind." She sketches, plays the lute, offers helpful hints to harried humans ("Though splendour may grace happiness, virtue only can bestow it"), and produces Poetry with alarming regularity:

Ah, merry swain, who laugh'd among the vales, And with your gay pipe made the mountains ring, Why leave your cot, your woods and thymy gales, And friends belov'd, for aught that wealth can bring?

Alas, Emily is in love with somebody almost as saccharine as herself: a Noble Youth endowed with "manly frankness, simplicity, and keen susceptibility to the grandeur of nature." His name is Valancourt, and his idea of passionate lovemaking is to beseech, if Emily thinks him "not unworthy such honour," whether he "might be permitted sometimes to enquire after your health." She, almost fainting with emotion: "I will acknowledge that you possess my esteem." He: "O Emily! this moment is the most sacred of my life!"

A Villain Vile. Fortunately, the billing and gooing is interrupted by Emily's foster uncle, who must be the villain because he is Swarthy and doesn't like scenery and has a nasty Italian name: Montoni. He also has a nasty male nature: "He delighted in the energies of the passions, and was a stranger to pity and to fear." To Author Radcliffe the man is obviously a monster; but to the modern reader he seems quite moderate in his treatment of Emily. The reader would do much worse to her if he only had the chance.

Anyway, after Emily's Anguished Parting with Valancourt, Montoni whisks her away to the "ancient and dreary" Castle of Udolpho in the Apennines, where he sets up as a Bandit Chieftain, and Emily serially experiences Hollow Groans, Mysterious Music, Nocturnal Apparitions, Secret Passages, Dank Crypts, Mouldering Corpses, Phrensies of Despair and, of course, the vulgar entreaties of a Montoni crony, a no-count count who attempts to make her his--wife? That's what the book says, and this is what the heroine says as the count, shaken by "all the delirium of Italian love," seizes her bodily by the hand. "Calm, I entreat you, these transports," she says. "This is not the conduct which can win my esteem."

Back in France after a Hairbreadth Escape from Montoni, Emily is Reunited At Last with Valancourt, only to discover that he has Fallen From Grace. While she nobly suffered in Udolpho, he heartlessly "degenerated into low inclinations." He went to (the shame of it!) Paris, and there actually (the monster!) gambled. She, with sweet disdain: "You no longer deserve my esteem. We must part and that forever." He, with meeching humility: "May you be happy, Emily, no matter how wretched I remain." And so on, until on Page 672, still "aspiring to moral and labouring for intellectual improvement," the lovers attain "rational happiness." Montoni is more fortunate. He dies.

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