This book is 100% Ann Radcliffe. ( )

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 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. ( )

It was great in the beginning, it was great in the middle, but then somewhere in the end it just went downhill.

One too many twists and turns to keep up with. I thought for a while some of the characters were dead the up they popped again alive and well. Ummmmmmmmm wait, last I heard of you you were at the end of a sword, when did you come back to life.

Too many times did I have to figure out the scene courtesy of the author telling me that things could not be written only imagined by one who lived through it basically or some such nonsense like that. I get needing to use my own imagination and I could have easily taken that line once perhaps twice but over and over again. You are the author, tell me what you are thinking. I can easily imagine a scene's background but I don't think I should also have to imagine the main action and details. ( )

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. Numerous loose ends. Par for the course for the fiction of the time. Over the top for today. ( )

This is a short gothic romance novel by this late 18th century author, more famous for the much longer Mysteries of Udolpho. It is very much of the same type, with evocative and dreamlike descriptions of the landscape; beautiful fainting women, handsome heroes and dastardly villains; gloomy decaying castles harbouring ghostly secrets that turn out to have a rational solution; staggering coincidences and the plot strands resolved satisfactorily at the end (slightly abruptly here, I thought). I love the language in which 18th and early 19th century novels were written. ( )