An attractive, extra-illustrated copy of the rare, first French edition of Ann Radcliffe’s (1764-1823) gothic masterpiece, The Mysteries of Udolpho, translated into French by writer, translator and essayist Victorine de Chastenay (1771-1855). We have found just five copies outside Europe.
This translation appeared just three years after the publication of the first edition of Radcliffe’s novel in 1794. Her fourth novel overall, it was Radcliffe’s most popular, and is considered an early cornerstone of Gothic fiction. It follows romantic young heroine Emily St Aubert to the remote, haunted castle of Udolpho after her aunt’s marriage to the villainous Montoni, and her escape - after disappearances, hauntings, horrifying apparitions, threats, deceptions, and romance lost and rediscovered.
“Radcliffe was unquestionably the dominant romance writer of the 1790s. Her influence on the fiction of the decade, and on what has subsequently come to be known as the Gothic novel, was formative and deep. Her position is reflected in the unprecedented sums she received for her last two novels: £500 for Udolpho, and £800 for The Italian. To put these figures in perspective, £80 was the average payment for the surrender of copyright, a figure including Radcliffe’s distorting remuneration, while her nearest competitor was Frances Burney, whose highest figure, before 1797, was the £250 she received from Payne and Cadell for the copyright of Cecilia (Raven and others, 52). … Although Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1777), and Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–5) were Radcliffe’s acknowledged models, critics were united in saying that Radcliffe had transformed her ‘meagre’ materials into a new, powerful and ‘enchanting’ form. Among her critics there was virtual unanimity that she stood at the head of her own school of romance.”
The present translation is by heiress, writer, mémorialiste and would-be abbess Victorine de Chastenay (1771-1855). Born in Paris and exceptionally educated as a young girl, the preparations begun by her parents for her to become abbess at Epinal - which also allowed her, briefly, to live independently - were cut short by the French Revolution. She and her family would flee from Paris to Rouen - seeking refuge, rather gothically, in the Abbey of Saint-Ouen - and Burgundy. Her writing career appeared to begin with translation, both of this work and another, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village in the 1790s; her other writing included works of botany, histories, as well as her own Mémoires, which described the turbulent years between 1771 and 1815.
In her Memoirs, Chastenay reflects on the personal reasons for her decision to translate Udolpho, writing:
‘A cette époque aussi, je traduisis Udolphe, et l’idée de me faire un nom dans la république des lettres ranima toutes mes facultés. Une traduction de roman anglais me semblait une assez belle chose; Udolphe, d’ailleurs, me causait un ébranlement dans l’imagination, dont ma raison n’a jamais pu me préserver. Les terreurs d’un bruit sourd, d’une ombre prolongée, d’un effet fantastique enfin, m’atteignent encore comme un enfant, et sans que j’en puisse trouver la cause’ (p.299)
“It was also at this time that I translated Udolpho, and the idea to make my name in the republic of letters reawakened all my faculties. Translating an English novel seemed to me a fine undertaking; furthermore, Udolpho stirred my imagination beyond all reason. The terrors evoked by a muffled sound, a lengthening shadow, or some other fantastical occurrence still affect me as they would a child, without my knowing why”.
Chastenay’s choice of this as the work with which to begin to make her name is notable given the timing, and the views of the writer she was translating: “although Radcliffe was studiously apolitical as a novelist, her works are permeated with the progressive Enlightenment values that were commonplace before the terror in France … All her novels, save the first, are set in periods transitional between feudalism and modernity; and while her happy couples are themselves well born, their attitudes are distinctly bourgeois, especially as regards companionate marriage. … Her heroines evince a deep interest in natural religion, in the hand of creator that lurks behind the veil of nature, and no enthusiasm whatsoever for revealed or codified religion.”
It proved to be popular; Maradan published another edition in 1798, in six volumes and 18mo (which was, incidentally, the first to name Victorine de Chastenay as the translator on the title page), and again in 1808 and 1819.
This copy is extra-illustrated with four numbered engravings by Chaillou tipped in, yet all labelled in-plate with page numbers that correctly correspond to this setting of the text. Reportedly, according to Gerard Oberlé, Roman noir, there were two issues of the first edition, with the second differentiated from this first, by the addition of engravings by Chaillou (see Oberlé, nos. 8 & 9). Given that the in-plate page numbering of the illustrations correctly applies here, the illustrations tipped in to this copy are likely from that second issue. Of the copies described institutionally, and that we have been able to consult digitally, only those at UCLA and UNC record illustrations (UCLA: unspecified; UNC, five in total across four volumes). The copy at the BnF is not described as having illustrations; nor do the copies digitised on Gallica, or the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The 1798 edition by Maradan also had illustrations by Chaillou, with almost identical, different plates and new numbering.
Closed tear, repaired, to the half-title of volume 2, occasional waterstaining, but a lovely copy.
Provenance: 1. Exlibris of J.C. Courbin to front pastedown of first volume. 2. Exlibris of political geographer and bibliophile Xavier de Planhol (1926-2016). Pencilled note to front endpaper ‘de la Bibliothèque de Rougemont’.
Quérard VII, 430 (listing only the edition with figures: ‘Paris, Maradan, 1797, 4 vol. In 12, fig., 8fr’). Martin, Genre romanesque français, 97.58 (makes no mention of illustrations).
OCLC: US: UCLA, UNC, Columbia, Harvard. UK: Leeds.
