Agostino Ruffini

According to Robert Louis Stevenson, HCJ left her husband when she was about forty for a short-lived affair, in Paris, with Agostino Ruffini , an Italian nationalist patriot whom she had first met as a...

Stevenson describes HCJ as surrounded by brilliant friends. In Paris she became a friend of prominent liberals including Cornelia Turner (to whom Percy Bysshe Shelley had once been romantically attracted), Daniele Manin , Vincenzo Gioberti

Agostino Ruffini was said to think very highly of this novel before its publication. Again Geraldine Jewsbury wrote the Athenæum review, and this time her praise was warm. She felt that the climactic scene...