“For many hours she busied herself upon a piece of work which she had undertaken for Madame La Motte, but this she did without the least intention of conciliating her favour, but because she felt there was something in thus repaying unkindness, which was suited to her own temper, her sentiments and her pride.  Self-love may be the centre around which human affections move, for whatever motive conduces to self-gratification may be resolved into self-love, yet, some of these affections are in their nature so refined that, though we cannot deny their origin, they almost deserve the name of virtue:  of this species was that of Adeline.”

It is characteristic of Mrs. Radcliffe’s tendency to overlook the obvious in searching for the subtle, that the girl who feels these recondite emotions expresses slight embarrassment when unceremoniously flung on the protection of strangers.  Emily, in The Mysteries of Udolpho, possesses the same protective armour as Adeline.  When she is abused by Montoni, “Her heart swelled with the consciousness of having deserved praise instead of censure, and was proudly silent”; or again, in The Italian,

“Ellena was the more satisfied with herself because she had never for an instant forgotten her dignity so far as to degenerate into the vehemence of passion or to falter with the weakness of fear.”

Her father, M. St. Aubert, on his deathbed, bids Emily beware of “priding herself on the gracefulness of sensibility.”

Fortunately the heroine is merely a figurehead in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).  The change of title is significant.  The two previous works have been romances, but it is now Mrs. Radcliffe’s intention to let herself go further in the direction of wonder and suspense than she had hitherto ventured.  She is like Scythrop in Nightmare Abbey, of whom it was said: 

“He had a strong tendency to love of mystery for its own sake; that is to say, he would employ mystery to serve a purpose, but would first choose his purpose by its capability of mystery.”

Yet Mrs. Radcliffe, at the opening of her story, is sparing in her use of supernatural elements.  We live by faith, and are drawn forward by the hope of future mystifications.  In the first volume we saunter through idyllic scenes of domestic happiness in the Chateau le Vert and wander with Emily and her dying father through the Apennines, with only faint suggestions of excitement to come.  The second volume plunges us in medias res.  The aunt, to whose care Emily is entrusted, has imprudently married a tempestuous tyrant, Montoni, who, to further his own ends, hurries his wife and niece from the gaiety of Venice to the gloom of Udolpho.  After a journey fraught with terror, amid rugged, lowering mountains and through dusky woods, we reach the castle of Udolpho at nightfall.  The sombre exterior and the shadow haunted hall are so ominous that we are prepared for