if you cut off the landscape description, the extra charachter, (there are hundreds of them), the exagerated melodrama, you have a greate reading besides all of the unnesessary characters such as the count of villeroi and family, and the exagerated emotion shown by the leading man, valancourt (remember he is a soldier he should be a toght guy), what keept me reading was the mistery about emili´s dad and the long time dead marchionaise of villeroi, the castle of udolpho itself and its banished owner