Customer Reviews

The Book of the Virgins (Hesperus Classics)

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This singularly attractive little volume contains four stories by the young D'Annunzio, written in the early 1880s. Three are slight, but 'The Virgins' is a substantial and startling piece of writing, and an important example of late nineteenth-century 'verismo' or realism. It begins by describing in detail the experience of a sick woman slowly recovering from typhus: she responds with a voluptuous intensity to the returning sensations of sight, smell and sound - leading to amorous arousal, rape and death (some readers will find the story lurid and repellent). I know no text that evokes physical sensation so effectively. In other D'Annunzio stories that are equally vivid there tends to be a divorce between the thoughts of the characters and amazingly evocative descriptions that manifestly reflect not their sensibility but that of the author; here the two coincide, and the result is, in my view, D'Annunzio's finest story.