Behind the black veil : Italian terror and English imagination

Abstract

Everyone will recognise this snatch of conversation recorded in Bath. Isabella Thorpe: 'Have you gone on with Udolpho?' Catherine Morland: 'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the Black Veil. ' Isabella: 'Are you indeed? How delightful; Oh ! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world. Are you not wild to know?' Catherine: 'Oh yes, quite; what can it be ? - But do not tell me - I would not be told on any account. I know it must be a skeleton.' In fact, what lay behind the black veil is one of the great disappointments in literature. The revelation that what Emily had thought was the embalmed corpse of the murdered Lady Laurentini was only a wax-work memento mori adds little or nothing to the unravelling of one of the more bizarre and operatic plots of its time. Yet publishers were mad to have a good mystery and paid the author the unprecedented sum of £500 for the rights to The Mysteries of Udolpho. And 'Tout Bath', according to a novel that earned Jane Austen £10 was talking about it as one might today the latest episode of Inspector Morse.