The Viper of Milan: A Romance of Lombardy

by Marjorie Bowen

The Viper of Milan, published in 1906, was written by Marjorie Bowen when she was sixteen and rejected by several publishers before it became a sensation. Set in fourteenth-century Lombardy, it pits Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, cruel, brilliant and cowardly, against Mastino della Scala, the dispossessed lord of Verona, sworn to recover his city and his captive wife. Visconti's sister Valentine, the painter's daughter Graziosa and a court of poisoners and mercenaries fill out the story, which moves through betrayals, a secret passage and a wedding to a conclusion that spares almost no one. The book has no chivalric softening; its power is in its speed and its appetite for cruelty, and Graham Greene called it the novel that made him a writer. It is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, with the first chapter free.