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sistermagpie's review against another edition
3.0
I've had this book hanging around since college and finally got around to reading all of it. The main thing I hadn't read here was Mysteries of Udolpho. This was an abridged version but I can't say I feel like I missed out in not reading the whole thing. It seems that sucker was looooong and the good parts as excerpted here don't seem like enough to sustain all that.
It's very much what you'd expect--spooky castle, a wicked guardian type, a heroine trying to keep from being married off to a bad man, a secret love, secret passages and mysterious things behind black curtains that make the heroine faint and leave the audience to fill in with their imaginations. Oh, and of course secret family connections that explain everything in the end. Of all the books I've read that are considered sort of the basis for Gothic lit--Udolpho, Otranto and The Monk I think this was my least favorite mostly for the purple prose. The other two were more to the point and actually more kooky. I believe one of the interesting points about Gothic as written by men and women is women authors tended toward mundane explanations while the guys went full out supernatural.
It's very much what you'd expect--spooky castle, a wicked guardian type, a heroine trying to keep from being married off to a bad man, a secret love, secret passages and mysterious things behind black curtains that make the heroine faint and leave the audience to fill in with their imaginations. Oh, and of course secret family connections that explain everything in the end. Of all the books I've read that are considered sort of the basis for Gothic lit--Udolpho, Otranto and The Monk I think this was my least favorite mostly for the purple prose. The other two were more to the point and actually more kooky. I believe one of the interesting points about Gothic as written by men and women is women authors tended toward mundane explanations while the guys went full out supernatural.
gwynsvan's review against another edition
4.0
I was looking for a copy of Northanger Abbey when I found this volume on my library's shelves. I found it to be a delightful way to read the least impressive of Jane Austen's novels. Austen's character Catherine Morland is obsessed with Radcliffe's novel The Mysteries of Udolpho. This edition contains the relevant excerpts from Udolpho to make sense of Catherine's fantasies. I had a lot of fun reading the "good parts" version of Udolpho, an overblown, overwrought, early Gothic work. I recommend this edition to any Austen fan.
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