The Mysteries of Udolpho

After the death of her beloved father, the young and sensitive Emily St Aubert is placed in the care of her aunt, who marries the sinister Italian nobleman Montoni. He carries them off to his gloomy castle of Udolpho in the Apennines, where Emily is cut off from the man she loves and surrounded by mysteries: hidden passages, strange music at night and a black veil she lifts once and cannot forget.

Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) was the most popular novelist of the 1790s and the best paid, and her way of building suspense, then explaining her ghosts away, shaped the Gothic novel. Published in 1794, Udolpho is long and full of landscape descriptions and poems, and it is the book Jane Austen gently mocked in Northanger Abbey.