Olalla

by Robert Louis Stevenson

First published 1885

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2.5(5)

Spain during the Peninsular War. A wounded British officer is sent to recover in a remote residencia occupied by an impoverished aristocratic family. The indolent Señora and her son Felipe appear isolated from ordinary society, while a portrait suggests generations of physical beauty accompanied by mental and moral decline. The officer becomes fascinated by the absent daughter, Olalla, before he has even met her.

His love for Olalla is challenged by the family’s violent impulses and by her conviction that their inherited corruption must end with her. When an injury provokes the Señora into a terrifying attack, the officer can no longer dismiss the household’s secrets as illness or superstition. Stevenson combines the wartime Spanish setting with Gothic ideas of degeneration, vampirism and doomed romance, keeping the supernatural element suggestive rather than fully explained.