Penguin Classics, £9.99, ISBN 0-140-43759-2
Gothic Fiction, 2001 (Reissue)

If you’ve ever read a regency romance where the heroine clutches a weathered copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho and you thought to yourself, “I wonder what that’s like?”—allow me to enlighten you: it’s a 600-plus page spiritual endurance test in which very little happens very slowly, until suddenly it does, and then—oops—it’s just a curtain flapping in the wind.

OG Gothic fiction queen Ann Radcliffe penned this melodramatic epic, a novel so famous among fainting bookworms that it’s been name-dropped by more fictional heroines than actual readers. It’s also the spiritual grandmother of every overwrought, castle-infested, storm-drenched romance ever written—complete with trembling maidens, villainous noblemen, and an alarming number of descriptive paragraphs about trees.

Emily St Aubert, a gentle, sensitive, virtue-laden heroine whose main hobbies are playing the lute and sighing at landscapes, starts her journey as the daughter of a philosophical dad who dies early (as is tradition). Left with a comically evil aunt, Madame Cheron—who might actually be a powdered donut in human form—Emily is swept away to Italy where she’s imprisoned in the gloomy, spooky, and endlessly corridor-ed Castle Udolpho by her aunt’s new husband, Count Montoni, a moustache-twirling villain so textbook he probably wrote the textbook.

Cue mysterious music. Ghosts? Maybe. Hidden rooms? Definitely. Supernatural happenings? Only until Ms Radcliffe peeks out from behind the curtain to go, “Just kidding, it’s all perfectly rational—that corpse was just a wax figure!”

Oh, and there’s a love interest. Valancourt. He’s… fine. Honestly, most readers forget him exists until he shows up again like a soggy bookmark near the end.

This is not a book that grabs you. It wafts toward you like distant organ music and then describes the organ, its wood grain, and the tragic backstory of the person tuning it.

For the first 200-plus pages, Emily just sort of… travels. She sees landscapes. She sighs. She faints artistically. Everything she does, thinks, eats, wears, or dreams is detailed with the meticulous fervor of someone trying to hit a word count.

Furthermore, Ms Radcliffe is more committed to describing every peak in the Pyrenees than she is to describing human emotion. Emily cries a lot, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell you anything about her inner world beyond “sensitive” and “fond of nature”.

The book only earns its gothic street cred once Emily reaches Udolpho, the castle so atmospheric it should get its own Netflix show. It creaks. It groans. It probably sighs in Latin. And within its moldy walls, Ms Radcliffe finally turns up the melodrama to eleven: mysterious locked doors, shadowy figures, a veil-covered horror (yes, that veil), and secret letters conveniently hidden in furniture.

Once Ms Radcliffe finally assembles all her signature ingredients—the overwrought yet weirdly resourceful heroine who survives by equal parts dumb luck and indomitable pluck, the ominously creaking castle riddled with secret panels and conveniently placed manuscripts, the dramatic jump scares involving shadows, cloaked figures, and possibly a draft—well, it’s hard not to get swept up in the spectacle.

Sure, it takes an eternity and several detailed descriptions of moonlight on a crag to get there, but when it hits, it hits. It’s pure, uncut 18th-century melodrama, the literary equivalent of clutching your pearls in candlelight.

No wonder readers were absolutely hooked when it first came out in serialized volumes—by the time Emily’s veil-lifting moment arrives, you’re as breathless as she is (though hopefully less prone to fainting).

So, to sum it up: The Mysteries of Udolpho is not for the faint of heart—or the short of time. It’s a book that rewards the patient, the masochistic, and those with a high tolerance for punctuation-stuffed sentences about pine trees. It’s also a fascinating window into the roots of modern horror, romance, and every “creepy castle with candles” aesthetic that’s ever graced a paperback cover.

Is it a good book? That depends on how much you like:

• Reading about mountains
• Reading about Emily crying
• Reading about Emily crying while looking at mountains

If yes: welcome to your new religion. If no: perhaps consider the far more efficient option of watching a dramatic fog machine in a castle ruin.