S4 E1: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, Part 1

Welcome to Season 4: “Haunting Women”!

Here’s your first scare: Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 gothic classic, THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO, is 290,897 words long.  For the average reader, reading at a speed of 300 WPM, that would take 13 hours and 5 minutes to read. And that does not count potty and snack breaks. If you are up for it, go for it!  If not, as Sonja likes to say, we offer “Cliff’s Notes for Adults,” and we’ll bravely take you through the book.  So are there spoilers in this episode?  YES. YES. YES.

THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO was first published in 4 volumes, so this episode (dare we say heroically?) takes you through both volumes 1 & 2 in about an hour.  What awaits you?  Lots of patriarchy in the form of castles, marriages for property, and men who say that it’s your fault they have to kidnap you because you wouldn’t say yes to their marriage proposal.  We also pay tribute to Ann Radcliffe’s expansive imagination: Radcliffe, a woman who had never left her home country of England before writing this sprawling travel narrative through mountains and dales and mountains and villages…and, well, more mountains.  We review what “Gothic” means, especially to British writers of the 18th and 19th century, and we once again find that saucy, babbling servants make the lives of bland rich people more exciting. 

Along the way, we bump into Scooby-Doo, and we play some Udolpho Bingo (Sonja wins), and both Sonja and Vanessa claim they’d marry a stalker who carved sonnets about them into garden walls.  

REFERENCES:

Vanessa’s reference to Pamela is to Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel, PAMELA: OR, VIRTUE REWARDED, which we cover in Season 3: Episode 5.