I am reading Mysteries of Udolpho for the first time. I find it simultaneously readable and intolerable. Please, please say less of the landscape; my executive is dysfunctioning. Please, Annette, get to the point. Emily, girl, I beg you -- not one more poem. If one more man tells Emily to keep a stiff upper lip, my fury will achieve interdimensional proportions. Her melodrama is amusing and irritating, yet I fully recognise & admire her perseverance in the reality of limited agency.
Then Radcliffe will give us absolutely cutting lines like:
"... a party of young men, who had more money than rank, and more vice than either."
"It was new to Emily to part with any person, with whom she was connected, without feeling of regret; the moment, however, in which she took leave of M. and Madame Quesnel, was, perhaps, the only satisfactory one she had known in their presence."
" '—who could have foreseen, when I married the Signor, that I should ever repent my generosity?'
Emily thought she might have foreseen it, but this was not a thought of triumph.
"A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within."
(btw this book would have killed in a serial format.)
Still, I understand a bit more about Catherine Morland's mental state now. I, too, feel like my grasp on reality is slipping. I have read for an eternity and still have over 1/3 left. So much has happened and almost nothing has happened? What is time? Where are we? Who am I?
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