The Mysteries of Udolpho

Emily St. Aubert loses her mother, then her father, before she is twenty, and is left to the guardianship of an aunt who promptly marries Signor Montoni — an Italian adventurer with debts, a temper, and a remote castle in the Apennines called Udolpho. Montoni wants Emily's inheritance more than her company; Udolpho, once she is inside it, offers a black veil nobody will explain, sounds nobody will account for, and a great many locked doors.

Ann Radcliffe published The Mysteries of Udolpho in four volumes in 1794, her fourth novel and the one that made Gothic fiction fashionable rather than merely disreputable. Every chapter opens with a few lines of verse — Radcliffe's own, or borrowed from Shakespeare, Milton, Collins and Thomson — in a manner that became a genre habit after her. Jane Austen satirised its influence directly a generation later, sending Catherine Morland off to hunt for horrors of her own in Northanger Abbey.

Radcliffe's particular trick, the one Udolpho is famous for, is explaining every terror by the end without once cheating the reader out of being afraid of it first. Bibliomancer publishes all four volumes complete, epigraphs included.