The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe

When I reviewed Northanger Abbey many of you expressed a desire to read Mysteries of Udolpho and I feel duty-bound now to warn you: it is well and truly awful.  Read it, by all means, because it is a keystone text, but know what you are getting into.  It is a loose baggy monster. 

I didn't review it earlier because I dnf it.  There's a black curtain that heroine looks behind at one point, after which she promptly faints, and the whole of the book they keep talking about what was behind that black curtain without actually telling you and I couldn't even slog through to the end to find out.  It takes some 500 pages of steaming pile to make me not care what's behind a black curtain.

Ok so.  Emily St Aubert loses her parents one right after the other, as Gothic heroines are wont to do.  You sort of aren't sad, because her father is the kind of man who spends his time botanizing and who won't fish because 'he could never find amusment in torturing or destroying.'  You go ahead and feel bad about your spring salmon, now.

Anyhoodle, Emily goes to live with her aunt and her aunt's eventual new husband Montoni, who is wicked and mercenary and nothing else.  Gothic villains are the literary equivalent of Flat Stanley, only less adorable.

Montoni and his two-dimensional self try to get the aunt to sign over her property to him, but in her single valiant act she refuses to and then I think she dies?  This is where it all gets hazy for me.  Emily is abducted by one of Montoni's cronies who he had been trying to set her up with before he found out the crony was poor?  And now that the aunt is dead Emily owns the property and Montoni tries to get her to sign it over?  Oh!  Also, Emily is in love with a dude.  I definitely remember some star-crossed lovin' going on (except no, you know, lovin' on account of Emily's saintly purity).  Anyway, the dude may or may not have also been a prisoner in Udolpho.  I never actually found that out.

Because that's where I quit.  Radcliffe thinks it makes for awesome narrative tension when servants dither around and interrupt themselves and never get to the very life-threatening point, so that happens a lot.  And she doesn't believe in making ghosts be ghosts, so you know that none of the ghosts are going to be actual ghosts, but will end up being, like, a servant in a robe.  She also doesn't believe in narrative compression, so when Emily goes to Italy, you go to Italy with her.  You stop with her at the inn, you gaze out the window with her, you pick unappetizingly at her food.  It takes days out of your life.
And Emily is the original toostupidtolive.  She literally faints every five minutes.  Loud noise?  Emily sinks insensibly onto a chaise.  Beautiful sunset?  Emily is overcome with sentiment and loses consciousness.  You are all Dude, stop fainting so we can get on with the story.  Because I kind of want to know what was behind that curtain.

It probably isn't that horrid if you aren't trying to read it quickly for a class you already suspect might be awful, but...it probably is.

Two caterpillars.  I asked someone what was behind the black curtain and it's super disappointing.