The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents was written by Ann Radcliffe. Radcliffe (1764-1823) was one of the most popular novelists of her time, winning praise from critics and her fellow writers as well as the public. But her output was limited–five novels–and her personal life was and remains mostly a mystery. Her best-known book is The Mysteries of Udolpho, which essentially co-created the Gothic genre.

The Italian is about the difficulties of love between Vincentio di Vivaldi, a proud but well-meaning young Neapolitan noble, and Ellena di Rosalba, an innocent young woman who Vincentio falls in love with almost immediately. They meet by accident, and Vincentio is taken with her, but his attempt to visit her at her home is unsuccessful. He tries again at night and watches her through a lattice. She whispers his name but when he reveals himself she closes the lattice on him. When he returns to Naples a figure in a monk’s robe sidles up to him as he passes a broken archway and warns him against visiting Ellena again. Vincentio believes this person to be a rival for Ellena’s affections, a conviction which grows when the man in the monk’s robe warns him again the following night. Vincentio decides to defeat his rival by proposing to Ellena, but her aunt, Signora Bianchi, reminds him that he comes from a much nobler family than Ellena and that his relatives would object to the match. Vincentio knows this to be true but is smitten with Ellena and argues his case so forcefully that Signora Bianchi eventually gives in and, after several of Vincentio’s visits, places Ellena’s hand in his, and the wedding is planned for the following week. But Vincentio’s parents, the Marchese and Marchesa di Vivaldi, know what he is up to and try to persuade him, with logic and scorn, to marry someone closer to his rank. Vincentio, though, is a love-struck fool and won’t be denied his Ellena. So the Marchesa turns to her confessor, Father Schedoni, for advice. The day after the engagement is affirmed Vincentio is on his way to visit Ellena when the man in the monk’s robe warns him not to visit Ellena, for “death is in the house.” Vincentio continues on to find that Signora Bianchi had died the night before. A servant tells Vincentio that she thinks the Signora was poisoned, and Vincentio almost immediately suspects Schedoni, who Vincentio dislikes. Vincentio confronts Schedoni, but he is too clever for Vincentio and makes the youth feel bad for accusing the monk—Vincentio even apologizes to Schedoni.

Ellena is planning to stay at a local convent after her aunt’s funeral, but while packing she is kidnapped by three masked men who take her to a convent in the mountains where she is kept in solitary. Vincentio and his friend decide to explore the ruined fortress next to the shattered arch, and they find the figure in the monk’s robe who tells them that Ellena had left town. They pursue the monk, but he manages to trap the pair in a chamber for the night. The next morning Vincentio, now worried about Ellena, goes to visit her and discovers that she has been kidnapped. Vincentio confronts Schedoni at his convent and is only prevented from assaulting him by the other monks. But Vincentio receives a clue to Ellena’s whereabouts from a fisherman and pursues her. After three days of imprisonment Ellena is given a choice: take the veil, or marry the man that the Marchesa di Vivaldi has chosen for Ellena. She refuses to choose but is told by a friendly nun that if she continues to refuse she’ll be forced to become a nun immediately. Vivaldi eventually finds the convent Ellena is being held in, but he is unable to rescue her. The abbess decides to send the stubborn Ellena into a “hideous chamber” from which no nun has ever emerged alive. The friendly nun, Olivia, helps Ellena escape, and Vivaldi and Ellena run, pursued by two Carmelite friars.

While all this is going on the Marchese, who does not know about the Marchesa’s schemes, is worrying about Vincentio. The Marchesa worries that her plans for her son are being ruined, and when Schedoni suggests that Ellena be murdered, the Marchesa is at first appalled and then agreeable. When Vincentio and Ellena are on the verge of marriage they are arrested by the Inquisition, with Vincentio sent to Rome and Ellena sent in a different direction. She is imprisoned in a house on the shore and visited by a monk who turns out to be Schedoni. He resolves to kill her, but when he attempts to, by knifing her as she sleeps, he sees the miniature around her neck. He wakes her and asks who that is, and she says that it is her father–who is Schedoni himself. Schedoni is shaken by this revelation and tries to make amends. He leaves Ellena at her house in Naples and then meets with the Marchesa and asks her to give her permission for Ellena and Vincentio to marry. She ignores him, and he decides to marry the pair himself.

In the prisons of the Inquisition Vincentio meets the man who wore the monk’s robe and warned him against visiting Ellena. This man tells Vincentio to tell the Inquisition that Schedoni was actually the Count Ferando di Bruno and that Vincentio should also ask the “grand penitentiary” of the Black Penitents, Schedoni’s order, to relate the contents of a certain confession he had heard years before. Vincentio does this, and Schedoni is arrested on the way to Rome. At Schedoni’s trial the truth is made known: that the Count di Bruno, envious of his brother’s title, riches, and wife, killed his brother and took his brother’s wife by force. The wife married Schedoni, but he killed her when he found her with a visitor who Schedoni thought was the woman’s lover. This was what the grand penitentiary had heard in the confession. Schedoni continues to insist Ellena is his daughter, but Sister Olivia (who helped Ellena escape) testifies that she was the Count di Bruno’s wife (the wound he gave her was not mortal after all) had two children, one by her first husband and one by her second, and had given both to the care of Signora Bianchi. Schedoni’s daughter died a year later, but Ellena, the daughter of the first Count di Bruno, did not. Schedoni poisons himself but clears Vincentio as he dies, and Vincentio is able to marry Ellena.

The Italian was Radcliffe’s final novel; it was a bestseller many times over and earned her enough money for Radcliffe and her husband to retire and travel. Critics generally view the novel not only as her best work (which is true) but as one of the best Gothic novels (which is not true). The critics in this case are confusing influence with quality.

Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho was revolutionary as well as a bestseller. It established what Ellen Moers, in a famous New York Review of Books article,¹ dubbed the “female” Gothic, narratives that “focus on female imperilment and ensuing empowerment–either through resolving their protagonists’ predicaments, through suffering–and…are characterized by dysfunctional domesticity, suspense, and terror.”² The reaction to Udolpho was two-fold. The first, from the critics, was a mixture of (justified) praise and criticism—unjustified criticism, springing from sexism and envy (for Radcliffe was a best-selling author even before Udolpho appeared), from a disapproval of the perceived feminization of the more masculine form established by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, and from an inability to grasp the aesthetics and literary quality of what Radcliffe was trying to accomplish in Udolpho.

The second reaction to Udolpho was Matthew Lewis’ The Monk. Whatever Lewis’ intentions in writing The Monk, the end result was the archetypal “male Gothic” (see: The Gothic). The Monk stood as a kind of answer to Udolpho, providing the graphic horror that Udolpho had avoided and depicting violence, blasphemy, and (for the time) sexual explicitness, as well as providing a vehicle for Lewis to promote his atheism.

Radcliffe, stung by the criticisms of Udolpho and horrified by the content of The Monk—it’s not clear that she ever read it, but she was well-informed as to its contents—and its many imitators, wrote a response to The Monk in The Italian. Via The Italian

Radcliffe defined 1790s “terror” fiction, mixing sublime aesthetic effects with Enlightenment empiricism and ratiocination into a characteristic style that sought to exhilarate rather than shock readers. She dwelt on the psychological effects of fear and dread while disdaining supernatural sensationalism.³

The Italian—which was an advance on Udolpho in nearly every way—helped to reify the “male” and “female” categories of the Gothic, with most successive Gothics falling into one of the two categories.

Although Radcliffe and Lewis permanently altered Gothic writing, they did so in different ways. Radcliffe looked back to the novel of sensibility, whereas Lewis opted for “Sadean” sensationalism…Where Radcliffe strove toward poetic realism, Lewis exulted in pastiche and irony. And where Radcliffe explained the supernatural as the product of natural causes, Lewis left it as a problem. Radcliffe famously typified their contrasting styles as the difference between horror and terror (Radcliffe, 1826, 145– 52). Radcliffe begins with what it is that induces horror or terror in the viewer, where terror forms the basis of the sublime. An explicit representation of threat induces horror, whereas terror depends on obscurity. The difference turns on materiality. Terror is an affair of the mind, of the imagination; when the threat takes a concrete shape, it induces horror, or disgust. When Radcliffe’s heroines fear physical injury or rape, they react with horror; when the inciting object is immaterial, such as the suggestion of preternatural agency or the ghostly presence of the divine in nature, they experience uplifting terror. Radcliffe’s is a Gothic of sublime terror; Lewis’s, of horror, of physicality observed with “libidinous minuteness.”⁴

The Italian was a smash hit, admired by De Quincey, Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and later Charlotte Brontë. The latter is an example of how Radcliffe served as an example for aspiring female novelists, both her contemporaries and those who wrote after she died:

Radcliffe’s heroines, despite their popular reputation for shrinking passivity, are made to stand up to the impositions of male tyrants and, in particular, to resist arranged marriages. It is easy to see why Radcliffe has become such an important writer for feminist literary critics, therefore, since her works repeatedly focus on the fate of the young, propertied woman negotiating, without protection, the pitfalls of the marriage market. Not only do Radcliffe’s works allow their heroines to exercise initiative, but they also isolate the heroine’s consciousness, intermittently valorizing a form of subjective insight.⁵

As mentioned, The Italian is an improvement on The Mysteries of Udolpho. Radcliffe’s style is not as stilted and her prose moves quicker and is easier to read, with less emphasis on descriptions of landscape and more emphasis on characterization. The plot, though far more complicated than Udolpho’s, is more quickly set in motion and sustained at a more even pace. Also, Radcliffe does not give in to the temptation to lecture the reader via her characters. She tries to make character (Schedoni) rather than object (landscape, portraits, the castle) the cause of fright in the reader, something critics see as a move away from the Blakean “sublimity” but which modern readers will respond to more readily. And the overall level of skillfulness in the writing is higher than in Udolpho.

But The Italian is far less interesting, as a story, than Udolpho. Radcliffe makes a good faith effort at characterization, so that Schedoni has more depth than Count Montoni and Vincentio has more sides than Udolpho’s Valancourt, but Radcliffe does not succeed in making them interesting or in making Vincentio or Ellena more than stock characters. Ellena is as one-dimensional and perfunctory as Udolpho’s Emily St. Aubert. Radcliffe’s refusal to make Schedoni the protagonist of The Italian, as Matthew Lewis did with Ambrosio in The Monk, hampers the novel. Schedoni plays a much larger role in The Italian than Count Montoni did in Udolpho, but Vincentio and Ellena are the protagonists, not Schedoni, and Vincentio and Ellena are simply not as involving as Schedoni is. Heroes needn’t be boring, but Radcliffe’s are, and her focus on them and on the heroines, who function as plot devices more than anything else, is a mistake.

Radcliffe was seemingly incapable of understanding that restraint in a Gothic is all too often deadly to the reader’s interest. The Monk, for all its flaws, is vibrant with life and fire. The Italian is by comparison dull and muted, and Radcliffe’s attempts to give different sides to Vincentio and Schedoni and to set a more even pace cannot compensate for that. Although The Italian inspired more imitators than The Monk and caused a run of Inquisition and convent Gothics, The Monk is the better read. Critics have seen The Italian as the better novel and Schedoni as influential on nineteenth century characters from Maturin’s Melmoth (see: Melmoth the Wanderer) to Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab (see: Moby-Dick), but The Monk is definitely the more enjoyable of the two novels.

Father Schedoni is one of the archetypal Gothic Hero-Villains. He is a mixture of great capabilities and potential, and weaknesses and unchecked urges. Although Ambrosio is more alive to the reader, both to Lewis’ readers and to modern readers, it was Schedoni, not Ambrosio, who captured the imagination of Radcliffe's contemporaries and inspired more imitations. Schedoni has a brooding grandeur to accompany his melancholy guilt, a deliberate hearkening to Milton's Satan and an anticipation of the Hero-Villain in his prime, both as Byron’s Manfred and as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth. He also has the Gothic glare of the Hero-Villain. Schedoni is defiant to the end, robbing the Inquisition of its torture in fine high style, but he is not completely evil, feeling regrets at various points along the way and unable, for pity’s sake, to kill Ellena when he has the chance. He is a sophist and manipulator to the Marchesa, but his decision to help Vincentio is honestly meant. His is a more sophisticated and refined evil than Ambrosio’s, for Schedoni is much more a man of the world than Ambrosio, and Schedoni’s sin is ambition, while Ambrosio’s is simple lust; Ambrosio's desires are primarily self-indulgent and self-destructive, while Schedoni's ambition can only harm others. But Ambrosio’s evil, and emotions, are more unalloyed, while Schedoni is a combination of malignity and melancholia and guilt.

The Italian is historically significant in the development of the Gothic genre, but modern readers will not find it the equal of The Monk in terms of enjoyment or readability.

Print: Ann Radcliffe and Nick Groom, The Italian. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2017.

¹ Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother,” The New York Review of Books (Mar. 21, 1974): 12-13.

² Nick Groom, “Introduction,” The Italian (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2017): iv.

³ Groom, “Introduction,” iii.

⁴ Robert Miles, “Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis,” in A New Companion to the Gothic, David Punter, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 93.

⁵ James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1999), 116.