Other editions of book The Abbess of Castro

"The Abbess of Castro", Stendhal tells the story set in Lazio (Italy) 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 sword fights 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 characterised by themes that pervade his longer novels: political and familial machinations, a profoundly unsentimental view of war, ambitious individuals undone by passion.

Marie-Henri Beyle, 23 January 1783 – 23 March 1842, better known by his pen name Stendhal in English, was a 19th-century French writer. Best known for the novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839), he is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism.