Zofloya

In late fifteenth-century Venice, the spoiled and passionate Victoria di Loredani sees her privileged world destroyed when her mother elopes in scandal and her father is killed. Sent away and embittered, Victoria grows into a woman governed by pride, jealousy, and ungovernable desire.

Trapped in a marriage to a man she does not love and consumed by lust for her husband's younger brother, she falls under the influence of Zofloya, a striking and enigmatic Moorish servant who appears to her in dreams and offers his help.

Step by step he supplies the means for her ambitions, poison and worse, drawing her into murder, imprisonment, and ever-deepening crime as she pursues the man she cannot have. A lurid and transgressive Gothic novel first published in 1806, the book scandalized readers with its frank treatment of female sexual appetite and its taboo-crossing fixation on race and class.

Dacre charts Victoria's descent from indulged daughter to ruthless criminal under a watchful, sinister guide, building toward a supernatural reckoning. It remains a key text of Romantic-era Gothic fiction, notorious, feverish, and unforgettable.