A member of the Accademia dei Pugni translates Frances Brooke’s. The History of Lady Julia Mandeville. From Giambattista Biffi’s manuscripts

Abstract

The present essay intends to address an aspect of Biffi’s anglomania as it appears from his partial translation from the original English language of the epistolary novel The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763), found among his manuscript papers. The name of Frances Brooke, the author of the novel, is not given with the title in the manuscript and was probably totally ignored by Biffi and by the Italian readership at large. The paper explores the reasons that might have led Biffi to start such an enterprise, the kind of appeal Brooke’s novel could have to his curiosity, and also why he suddenly dropped the experiment and left the translation at a very early stage.