Таинства Удольфо

1794 novel by Ann Radcliffe

The Mysteries of Udolpho is a Romance novel by Ann Radcliffe, which appeared in four volumes on 8 May 1794 from G. G. and J. Robinson of London. Her fourth and most popular novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho tells of Emily St. Aubert, who suffers misadventures that include the death of her mother and father, supernatural terrors in a gloomy castle, and machinations of Italian brigand Signor Motoni. It is often cited as an archetypal example of the Gothic novel. The Mysteries of Udolpho is satirized in Jane Austen's 1817 novel Northanger Abbey, in which an impressionable young woman reader comes to see friends and acquaintances as Gothic villains and victims, with amusing results.

The Mysteries of Udolpho is a quintessential Gothic romance, replete with incidents of physical and psychological terror: remote crumbling castles, seemingly supernatural events, a brooding, scheming villain and a persecuted heroine. Modern editors note that only about a third of the novel is set in the eponymous Italian Gothic castle, while tone and style vary markedly between sections of the work, to which Radcliffe added extended descriptions of exotic landscapes in the Pyrenees and Apennines, and of Venice, none of which she had visited. The Robinsons paid her £500 for the manuscript and later also published her A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794.

In August 1794, The Critical Review published a review of The Mysteries of Udolpho praising it as "the most interesting novel in the English language," but also criticizing the novel's excessive descriptions and anticlimactic ending. Some scholars attribute the review to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, though others dispute this claim. Modern critics have noted the influence of The Mysteries of Udolpho on the works of many later writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, John Keats, and Henry James.