The Mysteries of Udolpho

wow this book was just so unnecessarily long. I felt like it could've been easily halved.

idek where to begin so here's just a thought dump. I can't believe emily ended up with valancourt in the end. what the hell was the point of du Pont then?? why was he introduced as another suitor like 70% of the way through only to be discarded at the end? I actually feel like I may have liked the ending more if we had seen a complete degradation of valancourt and we see emily learning to esteem du Pont with a more rational kind of affection. BUT NOPE.

the irony that this is called mystery of udolpho when barely anything mysterious happened at udolpho. sure, a lot of annoying, dangerous, dramatic things happened but not exactly mysterious. the chateau le blanc chapters were far, far more interesting, mysterious, and potentially horrifying than the udolpho chapters.

I felt like this book kept beating dead horses. st aubert takes ill, he's close to dying but takes soooo long to die. Emily is tortured by her aunt, and then we just keep seeing more of the same instances of how Emily is tortured by her aunt.

the book felt like it kept beating dead horses and going around in circles. sequences were just endlessly draggy. I didn't need to keep reading about montoni's cronies one more time, or how much mysterious music and singing emily hears at night. in particular, I feel like a lot of the moments of suspense felt very contrived. emily sees a line in her father's documents and is so horrified that she tries to forget it as she burns them - but we literally never find out till the end of the book what it is. emily opens the veil at udolpho and is terrified at what she sees behind it - and again we never find out till the end whst she saw. perhaps this is a modern sensibility thing but I don't find that this keeps me on the edge of my seat, I'm just annoyed that this protagonist whom I'm supposed to experience the mystery and suspense vicariously through, now knows more than I the reader so we're just on unequal footing now.

overall I still give this 3 stars cos the story was not bad and fairly entertaining - if it would just be condensed into half its size.

This book left me with much sadness that it felt like a draft of a better novel. And in reality the planning of it seems rushed and slowed at random times. The beat part is about 200 pages long leaving the remaining 500 to be a slog to read. It is still good, the 200 pages are incredible, Udolpho comes to life in many ways even if the castle is constantly shadowed by the characters.