The complete online text of A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe.

In 1883, baffled by an almost complete lack of information about one of her favorite romance writers, the poet Christina Rossetti abandoned her projected biography of Ann Radcliffe. "Someone else, I daresay, will gladly attempt the memoir," she wrote to...

One of the most popular novelists of her era, Ann Ward Radcliffe created a female Gothic that transformed the emotional extravagances of the classic male Gothic novel, pioneered by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Usually set in haunted cas...

In 1900, the Sicilian poet Ignaziu Buttitta warned, "Un populu diventa poviru e servu quannu ci arrobbanu a lingua addutata di patri: è persu pi sempri." ["A people become poor and enslaved when you rob them of the tongue handed down by their forefathers:...

GENERALLY SPEAKING, the modern novel is not so much an art form as a predicament. When belief in man as the rational animal wavers, as it often does in modern fiction, one or the other of two extremes predominates: angelism (the self-regarding, purely...