The Abbess of Castro

Brigands, convents under siege, a prince who'd do Machiavelli proud...This adventurous novella from a writer famous for far longer works is a singular take on love and war in Renaissance Italy.

Claiming to be translating from sixteenth-century manuscripts, Stendhal tells the story of two doomed young lovers-one the daughter of the wealthiest man in the district, the other a brigand. It's a genuinely moving tale of impossible love-with plenty of swordfights thrown in-that's unique in Stendhal's oeuvre, not least in its portrait of an intelligent woman who, ill-starred in love, turns to worldly power. There's also some sparkling analysis of the conditions that produced the great art of the Renaissance.

But The Abbess of Castro-first published in the same year as Stendhal's novel The Charterhouse of Parma-is also characterized by themes that pervade his longer novels: political and familial machinations, a profoundly unsentimental view of war, ambitious individuals undone by passion.