From the Depths of the Library Vaults....

...Well, not really, but I've got to set a tone here! October greetings, literature lovers, this is your special collections librarian Anne over in the library. To get everyone in the mood for Hallowe'en, I'll be sharing a few of our more ghoulish and garish holdings with you--and where better to start than this lovely Gothic romance by Mrs. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Abounding in all the necessary symbolic mechanisms and psychological elements of the perfect Gothic tale (drafty castles, old manuscripts, explorations of the sublime, decaying vaults, encounters with the uncanny, fainting, the terror of the other, and all that), The Mysteries of Udolpho was cited by Jane Austen in her parody of the genre, Northanger Abbey, in a list of many sensational tales recommended to the eager young heroine Catherine. Our Special Collections copy is particularly interesting because it bears the contemporary ownership signature of a Miss Juliet Georgiana Elliott--one wonders whether Miss Elliott was one of the very avid sighing readers of the genre that Austen intended to parody.

If you're writing or studying or teaching about Gothic fiction, Special Collections has several other editions of early Gothic novels, along with plenty of contemporary sources to contextualize the cultural scene of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries: tour guides for ruined castles across Europe, criticisms of certain fashions in fiction, musings on the sublime and natural beauty, evidence of religious tensions, and much much more. And don't get us started on all the cool stuff we've got for researching the later Victorian Gothic! Stop by the department to see anytime. Up next--Gorey? Poe? Spiritualist writers? Creepy Victorian photographs? We shall see.....