The Mysteries of Udolpho

The novel that invented the Gothic - and the book Jane Austen's heroine couldn't put down.Orphaned Emily St. Aubert is carried off to a brooding castle in the Apennines, where a scheming guardian, a veiled horror, and secrets behind every locked door test her reason and her courage. First published in 1794, The Mysteries of Udolpho is the founding text of Gothic romance - the book Catherine Morland devours in Austen's Northanger Abbey, and the ancestor of every haunted castle and dark-academia thriller since.This Annotated Edition includes the complete novel, an original introduction on Radcliffe and the birth of the Gothic, notes on the eighteenth-century vocabulary and the famous Austen connection, and a Reader's Guide for a long and rewarding classic.