Recommendations
Books Like The Italian
Best books to read after The Italian by Ann Radcliffe
Readers who love The Italian — Radcliffe's final Gothic masterpiece, with its sinister monk Schedoni, the Inquisition, and the persecution of Ellena in a landscape of Neapolitan atmosphere — will enjoy these works of Gothic fiction, the literature of clerical villainy, and the great tradition of atmospheric horror.
- 1Buy
The Mysteries of Udolpho
by Ann Radcliffe
Radcliffe's most famous novel and The Italian's predecessor — reading Udolpho and The Italian together gives the full picture of Radcliffe's Gothic achievement; most readers find Udolpho more famous and The Italian better.
- 2Buy
The Monk
by Matthew Lewis
Lewis wrote The Monk partly in response to Radcliffe — where Schedoni is a villain of moral corruption and intellectual grandeur, Lewis's Ambrosio is overtly diabolical and sexually violent; the contrast defines the two poles of Gothic clerical villainy and the whole first phase of the Gothic novel.
- 3Buy
Melmoth the Wanderer
by Charles Maturin
The final great novel of the first Gothic tradition and Schedoni's most powerful heir — Maturin's Melmoth (a Faust who sold his soul) combines Radcliffean atmosphere with a villain of immense philosophical power; the last and arguably the greatest of the first-phase Gothic novels.
- 4Buy
The Confessions of a Justified Sinner
by James Hogg
The Gothic novel that most fully develops the psychological double tradition — Hogg's antinomian murderer has the same combination of genuine intelligence and moral corruption that makes Schedoni so compelling; a near-perfect companion to The Italian.
- 5Buy
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
Eco's medieval murder mystery set in a monastic community is the twentieth-century heir to Radcliffe's Catholic Gothic — the labyrinthine library, the sinister Brother Jorge, and the atmosphere of persecution and hidden knowledge recall The Italian updated into postmodern form.
- 6Buy
Agnes Grey
by Anne Brontë
The Brontë novel most directly in the Radcliffean tradition of the persecuted but virtuous woman — Agnes's quiet endurance of mistreatment as a governess is the domestic version of Ellena's persecution in the convent; both heroines are vindicated by patience and integrity.
- 7Buy
Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen
Austen's loving parody of Radcliffe — Catherine Morland's expectations shaped by The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian are tested against the reality of Bath and Northanger; reading The Italian first makes Austen's comic critique fully visible.
- 8Buy
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
The Victorian Gothic that most completely inherits Radcliffe's tradition — the persecuted heroine, the mysterious master of a great house with a terrible secret, the Gothic landscape, and the eventual revelation and vindication are all Radcliffe's conventions, raised to a new power.
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