Clive Bell 17 min read

In the Apennines rises Monte Sibillino, where legend says the sorceress-queen Sibyl held her paradise within the mountain, a hole now bunged up, the padrone will tell you, thank God.

Clive Bell's 1923 book, printed by the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press, retells a medieval Italian legend of enchantment. Elegant, wry, literary. Read it for a graceful Bloomsbury retelling of the old tale of the Sibyl's mountain paradise, a beguiling legend of a knight lured into an underworld realm of pleasure and peril.

In its time

Published in 1923, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

17 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Vanessa Bell