The Betrothed

First published in 1827, The Betrothed introduced a new genre-the historical novel. This was noted by Edgar Allan Poe who, reviewing the classic Italian novel in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, hailed Manzoni's epic as "a work which promises to be the commencement of a new style in novel-writing." Though the novel's centripetal force is the simple story of a betrothed couple whose forthcoming wedding is halted by a lustful noble's dubious designs, Manzoni takes the reader...
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First published in 1827, The Betrothed introduced a new genre-the historical novel. This was noted by Edgar Allan Poe who, reviewing the classic Italian novel in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, hailed Manzoni's epic as "a work which promises to be the commencement of a new style in novel-writing." Though the novel's centripetal force is the simple story of a betrothed couple whose forthcoming wedding is halted by a lustful noble's dubious designs, Manzoni takes the reader through war, famine, plague, and riot, corrupt prelates and humble priests, as the betrothed thirst for reunification. A panoramic meditation on politics, power, and pain, this novel is above all dramatic proof of love's power-a power that cannot exist without pain. Renzo determined in an instant that it was better to fly than to stop to justify himself. Rapidly casting his eyes around to see on which side there were the fewest people, and fighting his way through those that opposed him, he soon freed himself from their clutches. The street was deserted before him; but behind him the terrible cry still resounded, "Seize him! stop him! a poisoner!"Wiseblood Books is a publishing line particularly favorable toward works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope. Visit us at www.wisebloodbooks.comWe are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty.