The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe Read Free Book Online Page A

pp. 231–53.
    32 . My translation. See Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, 1772–1807),
Heinrich von Ofterdingen
, with
Hymnen an die Nacht
(Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1964), p. 124. Heinrich, a young artist in medieval Germany, tells his beloved, Mathilde, ‘Ja, Mathilde, die höhere Welt ist uns näher, als wir gewöhnlich denken. Schon hier leben wir in ihr, und wir erblicken sie auf das innigste mit der irdischen Natur verwebt.’ Novalis wrote his novel in response to Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrejahre
(
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
) (1795–6), which he considered to have ruined ‘the poetry of nature’ and forgotten ‘the miraculous’, ‘nature and mysticism’. Selections from his notebook entries on this are cited in John Neubauer,
Novalis
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), p. 127.
    33 . In his
Essay on Original Genius
(1767; reprint edn New York: Garland, 1970), pp. 170–71, William Duff described this capacity as the emotional speed with which the impassioned heart could externalize its effusions in language.
    34 . [Thomas James Mathias,]
The Pursuits of Literature, or What You Will: A Satirical Poem in Dialogue
. Part the First (London: T. Beckett, 1797), p. 14. As the anonymous author’s satire pilloried other female authors for what he saw as their political and literary failings, his praise was considered high indeed.
    35 . I translate Ariosto’s archaic Italian literally as ‘the nursed-at-the-sacred-cave Damsel Trivulzia’. In Ariosto it is ‘e la notrita/Damigella Trivulzia al sacro speco’, but ‘notrita’ and ‘nudrita’ seem to be ancient variants. Rictor Norton (
Mistress of Udolpho
, p. 133) glosses ‘Trivulzia’ with an annotation from John Hoole’s translation of
Orlando Furioso
(London: Otridge & Son, 1783; Vol. 5, pp. 259–60):
    Trivulzia, a virgin of Milan, who at fourteen years of age gave surprising marks of genius; she was learned in the Latin and Greek languages, and from her excellence in poetry is said to have been bred in the cave of Apollo, where the Sybils delivered their oracles in verse.
    36 . Walter Scott, ‘Prefatory Memoir’, p. iv.
    37 . See note 25.
    38 . Green comments, ‘Read the first volume of Mrs Piozzi’s Travels in Italy. Tolerably amusing, but for a pert flippancy, and ostentation of learning. Mrs Radcliffe has taken from this work her vivid description of Venice, and of the Brenta, but oh! how improved in the transcript’,
Gentleman’s Magazine
, New Series, 1 (January 1834), p. 10; quoted in Rictor Norton,
Mistress of Udolpho
, p. 75.
    39 . See
Childe Harold
, IV.xviii.
    40 . Ann Radcliffe,
A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, with a Return down the Rhine: To Which are Added Observations during a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland
(London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795), p. 109. Radcliffe makes this comment apropos the ‘severe rules’ of the convent of the Order of Clarisse in Cologne, which forbade its members to see even their parents, allowing conversation with them only on rare occasions, and then from behind a curtain and in the presence of the abbess. Radcliffe continues (pp. 109–10), ‘The poor nuns, thus nearly entombed during their lives, are, after their death, tied upon a board, in the clothes they die in, and with only their veils thrown over the face, are buried in the garden of the convent.’ In Bonn (pp. 125–6) she is critical of ‘relics… pretending to a connection with some parts of Christian history, which it is shocking to see introduced to consideration by any means so trivial and liable to ridicule’.
    41 . See Robert Mighall,
A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction
, p. xviii; Chris Baldick, ed.,
The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales
, pp. xiii–xiv.
    42 . Rictor