SOURCE: “Emily's Demon-Lover: The Gothic Revolution and The Mysteries of Udolpho,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, edited by Kenneth W. Graham, AMS Press, 1989, pp. 163-70.

In the following essay, Graham discusses the narrative pace of Udolpho and how it works to build suspense in a storyline that contains very little actual action.

In a metaphor that Ann Radcliffe probably and perhaps rightly would have found lacking in taste, Robert Scholes compares the act of fiction with the act of sex:

For what connects fiction … with sex is the fundamental orgastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation. In the sophisticated forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated practice of sex, much of the art consists of delaying climax within the framework of desire in order to prolong the pleasurable act itself.¹

Although the quotation is taken from...