Frank Palescandolo

The Romantist: an Imagined Life of Francis Marion Crawford Frank Palescandolo

It is 1900, a Swedish farm girl of Minnesota desolated by the family's death during a cruel winter, is in suicidal despair. While recovering, she reads the novels of Francis Marion Crawford, the popular romancer of the day who lives sumptuously in a beautiful villa at Sorrento. The romances revive her will to live, to live, for each novel is a love potion driving her to go to Italy, to a love for the novelist which has entranced her. The novels like love potions lead to a romantic death. Francis Marion Crawford from birth was destined for a romantic life, and death in the arms of his young inamorata, Hedwige, Both sailing into the fury of a scirocco. The after talk is that Hedwige was a siren from America who lured Crawford into an ecstatic ending for both. Not quite; some say they haunt the lonely tower off the coast of Calabria where the romancer write his novels. They are seen evenings of a perfumed sea.