Just when the days were starting to take on a golden edge, and my soul was transported by the barest suggestion of sunshine, its halcyon light was withdrawn, and the day is pale again.
I finished Orphan of the Rhine last night. I wonder how long it really was. It was nearly 2000 e-pages, but I don't know how many "real" pages it was. I am guessing three hundred, though books written in that time tended to be extremely long. I may retry The Mysteries of Udolpho now that I mastered Orphan. I am better used to this extremely descriptive, verbose style.
In total, I liked it very much. The sections I liked best were somewhat marred by a repetition of the text. When I realized that whole sections were repeated it made me wonder if others had been deleted, so I may never know if I have the whole story.
I liked the Marchese best. He was a perfect hero villain prototype. He conducted dastardly deeds, then literally sickened to death with guilt over them. There are many passages of his regretful, mad wanderings on cliffsides and throwing himself against rocks with angst. Then, near death, those he has wrong minister to him, and give him an elaborate funeral procession when he dies.
The funeral was described in excessive, satisfying detail, as were numerous strange rituals supposedly performed by Catholic priests and nuns. Catholic clergy figured very strongly into the story. Nearly everyone ended up being one, or masquerading as one, at some point, and the holy mysteries were described in excessive Romantic detail.
I appreciate how very much this was a gothic novel, including all of the prototypical elements.
It also did something I and I think many other modern readers will be at a loss to explain. This was common in Udolpho as well. The protagonist will be taken with the melancholy beauty of a scene, sit down and write a poem, sometimes a very long one. The action grinds to a halt. It reminds me of a musical.
Orphan of the Rhine was written by Eleanor Sleath and published by the Miranda Press in 1798. I may have that wrong. I am going by memory. I obtained the text from gothiclit.com or something like that. It should not be hard to find if you search.
For now I'm going to go into the future by a couple decades and study more on the Shelleys. I'm reading PBS' letters right now and a biography of Mary Shelley, written by Lucy Madox Rossetti. I believe she is a niece or in-law to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the wife of another Pre-Raphaelite.
Again, I wish to gently remind the swiftly turning spheres that I was, in fact, born to the wrong century. I appreciate that you have a lot to keep track of, but this is a wrong I must correct as well as possible by reading a lot-- I mean a lot-- of old literature. Because when I read it, I am as much there as ever I can be.