The Italian

Despite being classified as a gothic novel, I'm not quite sure that Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, measures up to Jo Walton's requirement that the novel should be a romance between a girl and a house, for the house is lacking. Instead the girl, who is, naturally, an ophan, has her romance with the impulsive scion of the Neapolitan aristocracy. Needless to say, Vincentio di Vivaldi's noble parents do not approve of his pursuing a destitute young woman of no particular family. Thus, while the Marchese contents himself with huffing and puffing, the Marchesa, ably assisted by her father confessor, the sinister Schedoni, sets about trying to put Ellena di Rosalba beyond the reach of her son's affections. After various adventures, including a spell in an abbey, a run-in with the Inquisition and a whole set of unlikely twists, the problem of Ellena's lower class origins are suitably resolved, all the villains end up dead, and the couple finally get to live happily ever after.

While not perhaps quite as good as straight up gothic of The Mysteries of Udolpho, the distinctive elements of Radcliffe's style are all present and well employed in The Italian. The descriptions are, as ever, rather good especially considering Radcliffe never visited Italy. The Scooby-Doo approach to the supernatural, in which all apparently ghostly events are actually explained as the results overactive imaginations or febrile sensibilities, is preserved and the story never quite lapses into the fantastic. But the book suffers slightly from the lack of a gloomy gothic house and the constant presence of Vivaldi limits the degree of peril Ellena faces at the hands of the Marchesa's henchmen.

There are also, perhaps, a few problems of plotting with at least some of the plot turns far too heavily signposted to make them genuinely startling, while other twists turn up seemingly out of the blue. But it's hard to complain about this for, as doctor_squale says, Radcliffe's generation were learning the rules of novel writing as they went along and it is hard to judge them by modern standards. In that respect, at least, Italian shows some signs of improvement over Udolpho, with the former showing far greater variation in mood and intensity than the latter, in which moods never seem to run at anything less than fever pitch...