A Sicilian Romance

Ann Radcliffe’s second novel set the template for the terror that would grip English fiction for a generation. On the coast of sixteenth-century Sicily, the Mazzini family guards a crumbling castle and a buried secret. Julia, the marquis’s daughter, is promised in marriage to a man she cannot love, and her flight from that fate leads her through hidden passages, sealed apartments, and rumors of a ghost walking the abandoned southern wing. Radcliffe builds her dread from atmosphere rather than gore, and every apparent haunting turns out to have an earthly cause. The book helped fix the shape of the Gothic that she would later perfect in Udolpho, and it still reads as a brisk chase through fear and family betrayal. Free to download as a PDF and EPUB edition.