The Italian — Ann Radcliffe

Father Schedoni is enlisted by the imperious Marchesa di Vivaldi to prevent her son from marrying the beautiful Ellena Schedoni has no scruples in kidnapping Ellena and in undertaking whatever villainy will further his own ends His menacing presence dominates a gripping tale of love and betrayal abduction and assassination and incarceration in the dreadful dungeons of the Inquisition Uncertainty and doubt lie everywhere in Radcliffes last and most unnerving novel Ann Radcliffe defined the terror genre of writing and helped to establish the Gothic novel thrilling readers with her mysterious plots and eerie effects In The Italian she rejects the rational certainties of the Enlightenment for a more ambiguous and unsettling account of what it is to be an individual particularly a woman in a culture haunted by history and dominated by institutional power This new edition includes Radcliffes important essay On the Supernatural in Poetry in which she distinguishes terror writing from horror