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A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe (1790)
a book review
This one was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. Ann Radcliffe is one of the earliest Gothic writers, after Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and before MG Lewis with The Monk (which she denounced as too violent). To my mind she’s a better novelist than either, and although I knew I’d enjoy the atmosphere that she creates, what surprised me on returning to A Sicilian Romance is how much I enjoyed the plot. Her characters are notedly one-dimensional and her storytelling tends towards soap opera, with all its romantic intrigues, near escapes, improbable twists, and so on, but she manages it all with a pace and talent for evoking scenery which makes it very enjoyable if you like Gothic fiction.
A Sicilian Romance is probably the best of her books to start with, since it’s among the shortest and most concise. The plot follows Julia, daughter of the Marquis of Mazzini, a tyrant in thrall to a promiscuous wife, Julia’s stepmother Maria. Julia and her sister Emilia have spent their lives in a Sicilian castle, attended by a loyal governess and troubled at night by noises in the southern reaches, where neglect has caused stairways to crumble and doors to rust. Does an unquiet spirit haunt the castle? Julia soon has larger problems when her father decides to marry her off to the equally cruel Duke de Luovo, when her heart has already been claimed by Hippolitus, a young soldier who seeks to liberate her from her impending marriage.
The evocation of the Mazzini castle might be the best thing about the novel on a literary level. The story’s early chapters are thick with spectral and romantic atmosphere, although if you know anything about Radcliffe you’ll know that the superstitious elements of her stories always have a rational explanation, a la Scooby Doo.
Much of the plot is taken up with Julia and Hippolitus fleeing both the Marquis and the Duke, sometimes assisted by her governess and sometimes her brother Ferdinand, alongside various others who flit in and out for a set piece or two. Some of the action scenes are genuinely suspenseful and even rise to horror, such as when Julia and Hippolitus find themselves trapped in a “mansion of murder” where bandits discard their victims. The narrative is studded with poems, although as Sir Walter Scott observed, Radcliffe’s prose was poetry and her poetry prose, so none of these verses are particularly memorable.
You won’t find much complexity of motivation or character here. Dialogue is relatively stilted and sparse, while credulity in the piling on of twists is not something that Radcliffe inspires overmuch. But it’s a thumping good tale designed to be consumed quickly and episodically, like a soap opera. And on that level it works, adding to the genre a powerfully evocative prose style that draws out setting like few others.
This one was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. Ann Radcliffe is one of the earliest Gothic writers, after Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and before MG Lewis with The Monk (which she denounced as too violent). To my mind she’s a better novelist than either, and although I knew I’d enjoy the atmosphere that she creates, what surprised me on returning to A Sicilian Romance is how much I enjoyed the plot. Her characters are notedly one-dimensional and her storytelling tends towards soap opera, with all its romantic intrigues, near escapes, improbable twists, and so on, but she manages it all with a pace and talent for evoking scenery which makes it very enjoyable if you like Gothic fiction.
A Sicilian Romance is probably the best of her books to start with, since it’s among the shortest and most concise. The plot follows Julia, daughter of the Marquis of Mazzini, a tyrant in thrall to a promiscuous wife, Julia’s stepmother Maria. Julia and her sister Emilia have spent their lives in a Sicilian castle, attended by a loyal governess and troubled at night by noises in the southern reaches, where neglect has caused stairways to crumble and doors to rust. Does an unquiet spirit haunt the castle? Julia soon has larger problems when her father decides to marry her off to the equally cruel Duke de Luovo, when her heart has already been claimed by Hippolitus, a young soldier who seeks to liberate her from her impending marriage.
The evocation of the Mazzini castle might be the best thing about the novel on a literary level. The story’s early chapters are thick with spectral and romantic atmosphere, although if you know anything about Radcliffe you’ll know that the superstitious elements of her stories always have a rational explanation, a la Scooby Doo.
Much of the plot is taken up with Julia and Hippolitus fleeing both the Marquis and the Duke, sometimes assisted by her governess and sometimes her brother Ferdinand, alongside various others who flit in and out for a set piece or two. Some of the action scenes are genuinely suspenseful and even rise to horror, such as when Julia and Hippolitus find themselves trapped in a “mansion of murder” where bandits discard their victims. The narrative is studded with poems, although as Sir Walter Scott observed, Radcliffe’s prose was poetry and her poetry prose, so none of these verses are particularly memorable.
You won’t find much complexity of motivation or character here. Dialogue is relatively stilted and sparse, while credulity in the piling on of twists is not something that Radcliffe inspires overmuch. But it’s a thumping good tale designed to be consumed quickly and episodically, like a soap opera. And on that level it works, adding to the genre a powerfully evocative prose style that draws out setting like few others.
Published 22nd Dec 2023
Author's Note
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