A Sicilian Romance

One of Radcliffe's early novels, this one set in an appropriately gothic Sicilian castle with abandoned wings and hidden underground passages and dungeons, where mysterious lights are seen in desolate towers and loud groans emanate from below the floors.

Many elements we now think of as standard tropes of the gothic genre are employed here, which as I've remarked in previous reviews sometimes seem a bit more silly than scary to modern readers. But, unlike in some other early gothic novels I've read, Radcliffe manages to really pull off some very suspenseful moments here, and the story holds up quite well overall.

Ann Radcliffe continued the Gothic tradition through the late 1700s (launched earlier by Horace Walpole and propagated by others), but with her own twists: to rationalize the supernatural elements, and to provide her female characters with stronger will. This at least had me interested going in, even though Walpole had trained me not to expect too much, and I was impressed with Radcliffe's able capturing and insight into teenage love angst. That was the high point. There is a plot, but it is continually interfered with by melodrama and the self-sacrifice of unambiguously moral characters who felt scarcely human to this 21st century reader. Events hinge on enormous coincidence which was a standard and accepted device for its time; as show more with reading Dickens, you either forgive it on that basis or you can't. The final chapters were artificially prolonged to the point of my wishing she'd just wrap this up already. For all that it retains some historical value, as entertainment it's no longer much. show less

Engaging gothic novel. I loved the atmosphere and was eager to see the plot unfold. Real cons, though: so many anachronisms. Kind of took me out of the story to hear about pianos!

If you plan to read a book published in 1790 then you must account for the aesthetic differences between fiction then and now. And perhaps for some vocabulary differences, although I don't think there was any word here that I did not already know. (My feeling on that score is that dictionaries are good things to own.) Romance novels then were just that Romances. Not romantic, although love usually featured highly, but romance in the sense of being set in an exotic place that the reader had to visualize from the descriptive text. Ann Radcliffe was known for her Gothic influences too, so this romance has half a dozen tales of romantic love, most of them tragic, a couple of them vile, set in exotic Sicily. Ghosts. Bandits. Boat wrecks. show more Numerous loose ends. Par for the course for the fiction of the time. Over the top for today. show less

[SPOILERS]
A short quote from Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe, p. 196-197 (Oxford World's Classics edition):
"The joy of that moment is not to be described, but his attention was quickly called off from his own situation to that of a lady, who during the general transport had fainted. His sensations on learning she was his mother cannot be described."

Can you...I don't know...try to describe it?

Also, every single problem in this book is solved by a deus ex machina where characters just run into a person they really need to find. This happens like five times, the best one being the way Julia finds her mother who's been trapped by her father by randomly stumbling into a cave.

The first half was good, but everything good about it was show more ruined in the second half (Hippolytus not being dead being the worst thing that's corrected, it was the most interesting thing that happened in the book). show less

Okay, so from a literary perspective, perhaps not the most accomplished text, but very enjoyable nonetheless! Not half so silly or campy as Castle of Otranto, I actually found it... if not scary, at least suspenseful in places. A nice introduction to the standard tropes of the genre: domineering fathers, helpless mothers, rape or imprisonment threatening around every corner, and a high-spirited virgin who manages to navigate through it all.

A Sicilian romance by Ann Radcliffe is a short and rather muddled story. A tourist visiting a ruined castle in Sicily, gets drawn into the story of the unhappy daughters' love romances. A huge, half-ruined castle, full of crags and corners, mysterious lights, tunnels, etc., the plot takes as many unexpected turns as the labyrinthine extravagances of the imagined architecture of the castle.

When Ann Radcliffe wrote A Sicilian romance she had never visited Italy. The imagined landscape and architecture are therefore a stock pile of cliches about Italy, and so are the turns and twists of the plot. There is no real development of a story; merely a tumbling from one outrage into another.

Very disappointing.