cover image Beatrice's Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci

Beatrice's Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci

Belinda Elizabeth Jack. Other Press (NY), $24.95 (252pp) ISBN 978-1-59051-163-3

Beatrice Cenci died amidst spectacular controversy in Rome in 1599. Said to be sixteen and lovely, she was ""at once the ultimate victim, an innocent daughter brutalized by her father, and the aggressor, terrifying in her resolve to murder him."" Executed by Papal decree, Cenci bequeathed an irresistible well of material to the next four centuries of artists and writers. Jack's nimble account of those unfortunate souls makes it clear there is a ""safe"" and a ""dangerous"" way to follow Beatrice down the well. A lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, and the author of an equally masterful biography of George Sand (A Woman's Life Writ Large), Jack is of the ""safe"" tradition for the time being. Her style is inviting, highly poised and never out of proportion. Plus, unlike Shelley, Melville, Hawthorne, Hosmer, Artataud and the rest of this book's eerily bound subjects, Jack is yet to lose her mind or poison her career in pursuit of Beatrice. To the contrary, this accomplished work introduces readers to Jack's skill as a critic with a knack for tracing the inner shape of unquiet minds, finding depression in many-and social and psychosexual anxieties in all-who suffer from ""Cenci disease."" Jack's streamlined biographies (30 pages to unpack Melville's psychology, for example) may leave some unsatisfied, but her insoluble narrative remains. Photos.