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In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), by Ann Radcliffe, music performs a crucial role to represent psychological states. This paper argues that Radcliffe did not pit the beautiful against the sublime as radically and systematically as Edmund Burke had done in his Enquiry. The sublime cannot be restricted to the feeling of terror: one also finds a positive form of sublime resulting from what it is impossible for the mind to grasp. In Radcliffe’s novels, music often appears in conjunction with the perception by the heroine of particularly intense natural beauties; it also intervenes in scenes of perfect bliss and harmony, or in scenes of revelation, where the mind is overwhelmed by a sense of something almost sacred. Thus if music belongs to the (feminine) category of the beautiful as it reveals the sensibility of the heroine who plays and sings gracefully, yet it paradoxically partakes of the sublime as well, as it is closely associated with nature and the unknowable. The article suggests therefore that Radcliffe used music in order to define a feminine form of the sublime.