Beatrice

Four women, four devastating tragedies. In these four novellas set in small Italian towns, Paul Heyse constructs a fierce indictment of a society where morality has been usurped by hollow convention. A young woman named Beatrice lives in isolation in a villa on the outskirts of a provincial town, her purity and gentleness offering no protection against the cruelty of those around her. A convent-educated girl named Garcinda is summoned home by her father, only to confront the consequences of family secrets. Filomena bears the weight of her sister's tragic fate. Lotka attempts to escape the stain of familial disgrace through love. These are not Greek tragedies played out by gods and fate, but rather the quiet catastrophes that unfold daily, in nearby places, in recent memory. The future Nobel laureate wields his craft to expose how respectable European society devours its most vulnerable, particularly women, while masquerading behind the comfortable fiction that propriety equals virtue. For readers who believe tragedy belongs only to antiquity, Heyse offers these stories as evidence that human cruelty requires no supernatural machinery.