The Blind Woman of Sorrento

By Francesco Mastriani

A Gothic masterwork of nineteenth-century Naples - now in its first modern English translation.

Naples, 1840. In the anatomy hall of the Hospital for the Incurables, a young medical student stands over his dead sister's body and makes a vow. What follows is one of the most gripping novels of the Italian Romantic era: a story of hidden identity, buried crimes, a blind woman of extraordinary perception, and a city where justice moves slowly but with terrible force.

Beatrice Rionero has been blind since childhood, raised by her widowed father in a villa above the Bay of Sorrento. When a mysterious foreign physician arrives - Dr. Oliviero Blackman - he claims to offer her the chance of sight. But Blackman is not what he appears. And neither is anyone else in this labyrinthine story of secrets, vengeance, and redemption.

Francesco Mastriani (1819-1891) was the great chronicler of Neapolitan society - a writer sometimes compared to Dickens and Eug ne Sue, whose serialized fiction drew enormous popular audiences while unflinching in its portrait of class, injustice, and the hidden lives of the poor. La Cieca di Sorrento (1852) is his most celebrated novel: a work of Gothic sensation and moral seriousness - vivid and at times harrowing in its depictions of injustice and violence - set in the streets and drawing rooms, courtrooms and catacombs of nineteenth-century Naples.

This first modern literary English translation, by Idara Crespi, restores the full force of Mastriani's prose - its declarative rhythms, its operatic emotional peaks, its dark comedy, and its portrait of a blind woman whose inner sight surpasses everyone around her.

For readers of Wilkie Collins, Eug ne Sue, and Alexandre Dumas.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GSS7W798
• ISBN13: 9798252094564
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"