Before You Begin

Before you begin.

Volume II begins on the road. Emily St. Aubert has left France under the authority of her aunt's new husband, Signor Montoni. The landscapes ahead are magnificent, but travel no longer means freedom: every mile carries her farther from Valancourt and closer to a household governed by bargains she did not make.

Ann Radcliffe turns the passage through the Alps, the spectacle of Venice, and the remote architecture of Udolpho into instruments of suspense. Beauty never disappears; instead, it stands beside coercion, armed power, uncertain sound, and the fear produced by a locked door. Emily's discipline is therefore more than composure. It is a way of judging what she sees when everyone around her would prefer to decide its meaning for her.

This volume follows seven principal figures: four carried forward from Volume I and three newly central to the action. Its illustrations preserve their established identities while mapping the Italian route, the castle, the objects of pressure, and the twelve completed chapter movements—without borrowing events from Volumes III or IV.