Udolpho bietet alle Klischees der frühen Romantik auf. Die Jungfrau in Nöten die von ihrem Geliebten gerettet wird, durchtriebene Nebenbuhler, die Jungfrau fällt von einer Ohnmacht in die andere, düstere Burgen und Klöster dürfen natürlich auch nicht fehlen. Ich hatte damit gerechnet spätestens nach einem Viertel das Buch genervt abzubrechen. Allerdings musste ich feststellen, dass ich große Freude an diesen romantischen Klischees hatte. Es finden sich natürlich auch die klassischen Stilmittel der Romantik, mit denen man mich fast immer begeistert bekommt. Düstere Schlösser, mystische Wälder und wundervolle Landschaftsbeschreibungen. Letzteres schafft Ann Radcliffe wirklich meisterhaft. Allein diese Beschreibungen habe ich aufgesogen, wundervoll bildlich, plastisch und kitschig. Genau die Art von Kitsch die ich liebe. Manchmal war ich doch etwas genervt von den Ohnmachtsanfällen und der Naivität der Protagonistin, ebenso von den vielen Missverständnissen die durch mangelhafte Kommunikation entstehen. Letzteres Klischee ist aber offensichtlich so beliebt, dass es sich bis heute erhalten hat. Einige Szenen haben mich wiederum überrascht. Als unsere Jungfrau in Nöten eine sehr grausige Entdeckung macht fällt sie in Ohnmacht, wacht auf, sieht erneut ihre Entdeckung, fällt in Ohnmacht. Dieses Spiel hat sich ungefähr dreimal wiederholt und war so komisch geschrieben, dass ich wirklich lachen musste. Ann Radcliffe nimmt ihre Figuren nicht allzu ernst und gibt viele Klischees sehr humorvoll wieder. Trotz der vielen Nöten und Ohnmachten, ist die Protagonistin erstaunlich progressiv. Sie lässt sich nicht zum Spielball machen, lehnt Heiratsanträge ab wenn sie es mit ihrem Gewissen nicht vereinbaren kann und bringt mit ihrer passiven, aber standhaften Art auch den großen Bösewicht zu Fall. Ich wurde hervorragend unterhalten und habe mir sofort das Gesamtwerk von Ann Radcliffe gekauft. Für mich ist diese Autorin eine großartige Neuentdeckung.

I don't know if my patience was ever tested so intensely by a book before, but after I finished it some weeks ago, I didn't find myself having the same sentiment as most reviewers here. Yes, the story could have been told more economically from today’s reader’s point of view. Yes, even though it centers around a female character you definitely root for, it might be a bit of a stretch to call it feminist. In terms of despair, horror, and your casual ghostly apparition, it comes off relatively tame — even considering its age — because all supernatural phenomena are rationally explained away. That can be rewarding, since it satisfies the need for resolution, but it also feels compulsively neat, like the novel is too eager to comfort the reader. That might be a dissapointin strategy to be read in one of the defining Gothic novels, especially considering how psychologically discomforting the genre can be. And yes, the long-winded descriptions of landscapes and the delight every character feels while traversing them may bore the hell out of you. "Yes", you may yawn, "nature is beautiful, now get on with the plot please". You know what? Screw all that. I had a surprising amount of fun with this book — especially because of its weird, overly old-fashioned charm, its escapist tendencies, and the slowness it forces on the reader. I also identified a lot with its core theme: a protagonist losing all familial roots and having to use the little power she has as a girl of her time to build new bonds. It gave me a hard time, no doubt — by page 250, shortly before the plot finally picks up, I suspected I was only grinding through due to sunk cost fallacy — but it also gave me something rare. It slowed me down in a way that let me absorb its visual, symbolic, and psychological motifs in a deeper way. That slowness became meaningful. Yes, the prose is often repetitive. Yes, it has its "child of its time" flaws: a clear moral, stereotypical characters, constant fainting. But at its heart is a moving story about a girl who loses all familial safety. She trades parents who respect her individuality for guardians who don’t care at all. Of course, the orphan trope is common in Gothic and Victorian literature, but to me, despite the protagonists situation not being all that realistic, it rarely feels as fleshed out (at least psychologically) as it does in the character of Emily St. Aubert (Dickens aside, but I'm almost ashamed to admit I never read one of his novels). Though Emily sometimes adapts to the manipulative logic of her upper-class family — and at times acts a bit questionably toward those socially below her, while at other times maybe respecting and caring for them more than any other — and has a hard time of taking action that does her felt solidarity justice, she ultimately stays true to the values she genuinely believes in and is able to escape all the sh*t surrounding her. She suffers, but she also builds something new: a patchwork of family, autonomy, and inner strength. Madame Montoni and, ultimately, Montoni himself, have no interest in Emily — they want obedience. She sometimes has no choice but to obey, but she also resists in her own ways. Even if this is a tale about fictional nobles in a made-up medieval world (and sometimes about people only pretending to be powerful), I found it relatable for very personal reasons. I still think about Emily's journey a lot. Other Gothic tales might offer more supernaturally charged plots or more psychological twists, but Radcliffe's protagonist does more than faint and suffer her way through the story. She is (limited through her fear, her grief, her young age and the structures of oppression surrounding her) doing the best she can to oppose everything that wants to control her, to slip through the cracks and secret pathways to find spaces of autonomy she always has taken away from her. The novel is also a atmospherically dense and kaleidoscopic exploration of locations and the safety and danger within them — both inside domestic spaces and out in the natural and the public world. To truly take in this panoramic parade of settings, cities, wars, institutions, and landscapes, the book’s slowness helped me follow the author’s line of thought. You could spend hours dissecting the symbolic architecture alone. Castle Udolpho — labyrinthine, ornate, and disorienting — mirrors Montoni’s violent and narcissistic personality. It’s the perfect prison for Emily at her lowest, with no safe ground left to stand on. But Udolpho isn’t the only rich setting, and I don’t want to spoil too much more. I already risked giving away the book’s happy ending. Now, I completely understand the criticism of Radcliffe’s poetry. It’s always presented as the characters’ own writing, but that doesn’t excuse how painfully cliché it is — even for its time. You can skip most of it without missing much. I also wasn’t a fan of Valancourt. Supposedly a dashing chevalier, he mostly just never knows when to stop whining. Yes, he’s madly in love, but please — just leave. He’s not even a convincing portrayal of a man in emotional distress. His feelings are expressed through flowery, repetitive speeches that lack depth. While he has a character arc that moves the plot, he remains shallow and, to me, borderline irrelevant. For how much narrative space he takes up — especially when absent and existing mostly in Emily’s imagination — he feels underdeveloped. Sure, this isn’t really a book about love, and definitely not about Valancourt. It’s first and foremost about Emily, but this is the point: she wouldn't have needed a heteronormative romance plot to have a solid agency. Those love scenes were campy at best, downright annoying at worst, and honestly, I’d rather Emily became a nun or a man-eating witch. But 18th-century readers probably weren’t ready for that. Finally, I’ll say this: I only read this book in full — and wrote this lengthy review — because I have the time. I have a care working job with generous free hours, no kids or pets, and a calm domestic life. I’m a shy queer person in a stable romantic relationship, and after periods of intense overwork and many traumatic incidents in my past years (my own Udolpho, sort of), I stay home a lot. Aside from basic chores and paying rent, I’m free. These are the circumstances under which I can say “f*ck it” to all other things I could accomplish, find comfort in my own uselessness and devote myself to an 800-page novel. If your life is more stressful than mine, it’s totally understandable if this book drives you up the wall. Yes, this story could be told in 250 pages and still be a classic. But if you do have the time to immerse yourself in its full length, you might find it rewarding. I did. The time I spent reading helped me discover more than just entertainment — I found a story about grief, PTSD, nature, domestic space, and the tension between reason and belief in the supernatural that is a basic trait of human nature. If that’s not for you right now, that’s fine. This novel may be a divisive hit-or-miss entirely. But somehow, I wanted to defend it against the modern criticism it often gets. Even if I don’t feel the urge to read another Radcliffe novel — because I suspect they might just be flatter repetitions of what I already read (not sure if I'm right though) — this one was an experience I wouldn’t want to miss.