The Mysteries of Udolpho follows the fortunes of Emily St. Aubert, who suffers, among other misadventures, the death of her father, supernatural terrors in a gloomy castle and the machinations of an Italian brigand. Often cited as the archetypal Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, along with Radcliffe's novel The Romance of the Forest, plays a prominent role in Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey, in which an impressionable young woman, after reading Radcliffe's novel, comes to see her friends and acquaintances as Gothic villains and victims with amusing results.

Ann Radcliffe was an English author and pioneer of the Gothic novel. Radcliffe's technique of explaining the supernatural elements of her novels has been credited with enabling Gothic fiction to achieve respectability in the 1790s. Radcliffe portray her women characters as equal to male characters, allowing them to dominate and overtake the typically powerful male dominant villains and heroes, creating new roles for women in literature that were previously not available. Radcliffe's fiction is marked by seemingly supernatural events that are then provided with rational explanations. Throughout her work, traditional moral values are asserted, the rights of women are advocated, and reason prevails.