The Volcano Lover Critical Essay | Critical Review by Richard Jenkyns

SOURCE: "Eruptions," in New Republic, Vol. 207, Nos. 11-12, September 7-14, 1992, pp. 46-9.

Below, Jenkyns offers a negative assessment of The Volcano Lover.

Sir William Hamilton, the principal character of Susan Sontag's new novel [The Volcano Lover], was what the eighteenth century called a virtuoso, a cultivated aristocrat with an amateur interest in art and science. As British ambassador to the court of Naples from 1764 to 1800, he became what passed for a vulcanologist, making more than twenty ascents of Vesuvius, and collected antiquities, especially Greek vases. His enduring fame, however, is as one of history's most notorious cuckolds.

Hamilton's second wife, Emma, of the humblest origins, was celebrated first as the great beauty of her day, then for her "Attitudes" tableaux, in which she posed in the roles of the heroines of classical myth. ("People are mad about her wonderful expression," Horace Walpole observed, "which I do...
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