In "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.

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