The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
*contains spoilers* ‘NATURAL things affect us, by the laws of that connexion, which providence has established between certain motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent feelings in our minds. Painting affects in the same manner, but with the superadded pleasure of imitation; […] as to words; they seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural things, or by painting or architecture; yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as any of these, and sometimes a much greater than any of them’. Edmund Burke from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). The disparity between one’s experience and the words one uses in attempting to apprehend it in writing is a gulf that has proven a perennially yawning one. What number of words, if one had the time or the inclination, could so fully and accurately express an experience as it was? Or eve...