“Lewis read Udolpho within days of it appearing, and there was much in the novel he would have found ‘interesting’: a persecuted and captive heroine, an implacable villain, mysterious infatuation and abduction, strange music, convents and Catholicism, robber gangs, hallucinatory occurrences and ghostly tales, a dark and claustrophobic castle, hidden corpses and the brooding omnipresence of death and murder, veiled figures, and secret passages and suffocating darkness. But.”
