Who wrote the 1794 Gothic novel 'The Mysteries of Udolpho'?

Ann Radcliffe wrote the 1794 Gothic novel “The Mysteries of Udolpho.”

Radcliffe was an English novelist who helped establish the Gothic romance as a major literary form. “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” her fourth novel, follows Emily St. Aubert as she faces bereavement, imprisonment, mysterious terrors, and the schemes of the Italian brigand Signor Montoni at the castle of Udolpho.

The novel appeared in four volumes on 8 May 1794, published in London by G. G. and J. Robinson. Its suspenseful castles, landscapes, hidden histories, and apparently supernatural events made it one of the best-known Gothic novels of the eighteenth century.

Readers often mix up the authors in this genre. Horace Walpole wrote “The Castle of Otranto,” while Matthew Lewis wrote “The Monk”; neither wrote “Udolpho.” Emily Brontë and Mary Shelley belong to later generations of nineteenth-century Gothic writers. Radcliffe’s influence is especially visible in Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” which both parodies and celebrates the reading culture surrounding Gothic fiction.