This image is the cover for the book The Mysteries of Udolpho, Classics To Go

The Mysteries of Udolpho, Classics To Go

"The Mysteries of Udolpho", by Ann Radcliffe, was published in four volumes on 8 May 1794 by G. G. and J. Robinson of London. The firm paid her £500 for the manuscript. The contract is housed at the University of Virginia Library. Her fourth and most popular novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho follows the fortunes of Emily St. Aubert who suffers, among other misadventures, the death of her father, supernatural terrors in a gloomy castle, and the machinations of an Italian brigand. Often cited as the archetypal Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, along with Radcliffe's novel The Romance of the Forest, plays a prominent role in Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey, in which an impressionable young woman, after reading Radcliffe's novel, comes to see her friends and acquaintances as Gothic villains and victims with amusing results.(Excerpt from Wikipedia)

Ann Ward Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe (born Ward, 9 July 1764 – 7 February 1823). Radcliffe was born Ann Ward in Holborn, London. She was an English author and pioneer of the Gothic novel. Radcliffe's technique of explaining the apparently supernatural elements in her novels has been credited with enabling Gothic fiction to achieve respectability in the 1790s. Ann Radcliffe was the most popular writer of her day and almost universally admired. Contemporary critics called her the mighty enchantress and the Shakespeare of romance-writers. Her popularity continued through the nineteenth century; for Keats, she was Mother Radcliffe, and for Scott, the first poetess of romantic fiction. (Wikipedia)

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