The Italian
A young woman is abducted from a church and taken across Italy by a sinister monk, and the novel follows her attempt to escape a system of confessors, convents and secret tribunals. Radcliffe wrote it after The Mysteries of Udolpho and it is faster, darker and more tightly plotted.
The villain, Schedoni, is the ancestor of a whole line of Gothic antiheroes, and Radcliffe gives him a psychology rather than a mask. The Italian landscape is described with real pleasure, and the novel's attack on the Inquisition is political as well as atmospheric. It is long, but it moves.
Public-domain status
First published in 1797. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Ann Radcliffe died in 1823, so this work has been free to republish there since 1894.
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