The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Candlelight, crumbling battlements and a heroine's racing heart: with this novel Ann Radcliffe set the template for Gothic fiction and thrilled a whole generation of readers.

What it's about

The Mysteries of Udolpho follows Emily St. Aubert, a sensitive and virtuous young Frenchwoman who, after the loss of her father, falls under the control of a scheming guardian and is taken to the remote and forbidding castle of Udolpho in the Apennines. There, amid shadowy corridors, veiled horrors and half-glimpsed threats, her courage and composure are tested to the utmost, while a thwarted love waits somewhere beyond the walls. Radcliffe unfolds the suspense at a deliberate, atmospheric pace, letting dread build in the reader's own imagination.

Themes

The novel explores fear and its workings, the pull between reason and superstition, and the vulnerability, and resilience, of a woman at the mercy of others. Landscape and mood are everywhere charged with feeling, and Radcliffe famously favours suspense and the suggestion of terror over crude shock, trusting sensibility and the sublime to do their work.

Why it still matters

Enormously popular in its day and gently mocked by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, this is one of the defining Gothic romances, a direct ancestor of the mystery, the thriller and the horror novel. Its blend of atmosphere, peril and heightened emotion still casts a spell, and shows where so much later fiction of suspense began.

Who it's for

Lovers of Gothic and atmospheric fiction, readers of classic romance and suspense, and anyone curious about the roots of the modern thriller.