A Sicilian Romance

A Sicilian Romance is a Gothic novel by the English writer Ann Radcliffe, first published anonymously in 1790. It was her second published work.

The story is told by a traveller who meets a monk among the ruins of the Mazzini castle and is shown a manuscript that sets out what happened there. It concerns two sisters, Emilia and Julia, whose tyrannical father arranges a marriage for Julia that she has not agreed to and will not accept. Julia's attempt to escape with the man she loves is intercepted, and from then on the novel is a pursuit: she hides in convents, in the hills and eventually in the disused southern wing of her own family's castle, and her father and the duke he has chosen for her keep finding her. The supernatural events the household fears are resolved in Radcliffe's usual way, by explanations rather than ghosts, but the book keeps its menace in the architecture. It is a novel about a woman with no legal power over her own life, and its suspense comes from the fact that the men around her are acting entirely within their rights.

Radcliffe published it before The Mysteries of Udolpho, and the pattern of the pursued heroine and the explained mystery is already in place here.