The Mysteries of Udolpho

The Mysteries of Udolpho is a Gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe, published in four volumes in 1794 and set mainly in southern France and northern Italy in a sixteenth-century landscape of mountains, convents and crumbling castles.

Emily St. Aubert is the only child of a landed family in Gascony, and she shares her father's pleasure in wild scenery. Grief and a failing income leave her dependent on relatives, and when her aunt marries the Italian Signor Montoni, Emily is carried to his castle of Udolpho. There her guardian's schemes, the household's secrets and a run of apparently supernatural terrors press on a young woman with very few people willing to help her, and the novel follows her attempts to understand what is actually happening in a place designed to keep her frightened and uncertain.

Udolpho was Radcliffe's fourth and most popular novel, and it helped establish the Gothic as a distinct kind of fiction rather than a mode borrowed from the stage. Its reputation was strong enough that Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey treats the book as both a joke and a reference point.