'You speak like a heroine', said Montoni contemptuously. 'We shall see whether you can suffer like one'.
And suffer Emily St. Aubert does, in Ann Radcliffe's best known Gothic shocker. The castle where she braves danger is Radcliffe's finest creation. 'There', said Montoni, 'is Udolpho'. Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, for the gothic greatness of its features and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone rendered it a gloomy and sublime object'. Emily endures physical threat and terror in gloomy vaults, apparently haunted rooms and a secret passageway leading from a door in her bedroom which she can't lock from the inside. And then there's the black veil....
'Udolpho' is certainly too long, and the poems Emily is inspired to write by the dramatic scenery around her I could have done without. But on her own Gothic turf, no-one did it better than Radcliffe.