SOURCE: “The Demon of Suicide and the Demon of Fiction,” in Ugo Foscolo, Poet of Exile, Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 27-116.

In the following essay, Cambon compares and contrasts Foscolo's Letters of Ortis with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's thematically similar The Sorrows of Young Werther. The critic also discusses the input provided by the Countess Antonietta Fagnani Arese, who had translated Goethe's work, and with whom Foscolo was in love.

If we are to believe Foscolo's love letters to her, Countess Antonietta Fagnani Arese, that naughty Milanese beauty who irritated him into some of his finest writing, said teasingly that he was a little novel in the flesh.¹ And a novel in the making, if we want to translate her humorous expression in a way that does justice to its larger implications. Ugo Foscolo, restless exile, patriot, soldier, scholar, poet, Byronic lover, was himself the stuff of which...