The Other Heroine: Lady Blanche De Villefort’s Role in The Mysteries of Udolpho

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This article argues for reading minor characters like Lady Blanche De Villefort from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) not as ‘doubles’ of a central heroine like Emily St Aubert but rather as gothic heroines in their own right. Treating them as separate characters with distinct personalities reveals how seemingly repetitive characterization actually shows the novel’s commitment to depicting heroines’ experience of shared and patriarchal violence as systemic. First, my argument addresses how, in the last third of the novel, Blanche begins to encounter gothic conventions for the first time and becomes in some respects like Emily but never becomes an exact ‘double’ of her. Second, it turns to a harrowing episode that Radcliffe focalizes primarily through Blanche’s perspective. Lastly, it expands beyond Udolpho and shows – using Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and A Sicilian Romance (1790), and Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–85) – how early Gothic novels have a frequent and shared commitment to representing multiple heroines instead of treating a single protagonist as exceptional.