Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton 56 min read

In the glittering, corrupt world of eighteenth-century Naples, the mysterious immortal adept Zicci moves among mortals, master of secret wisdom, and dangerous to any who love him.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1838 novella (volume one) is the seed of his later occult classic Zanoni. Lush, mysterious, influential. Read it for an early version of Bulwer-Lytton's celebrated Rosicrucian romance, a deathless magician, forbidden knowledge, and the peril of loving one who has passed beyond mortality, a foundational work of the occult-fantasy tradition.

In its time

Published in 1838, during the 1830s, poe and the german romantics.

Reading it

56 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).