Graziella

Graziella

Cover, 1905 English edition
Author	Alphonse de Lamartine
Translator	James Runnion
Country	France
Language	French
Set in	Naples and surrounding area
Published	1849 (serialized as part of Les Confidences; La Presse) 1852 (collected as a novel; Librairie Nouvelle)
Published in English	1875
Pages	119 (first edition)
OCLC	78282173
Original text	Graziella at French Wikisource
Translation	Graziella online

Graziella is an 1852 novel by the French author Alphonse de Lamartine. It tells of a young French man who falls for a fisherman's granddaughter – the eponymous Graziella – during a trip to Naples, Italy; they are separated when he must return to France, and she soon dies. Based on the author's experiences with a tobacco-leaf folder while in Naples in the early 1810s, Graziella was first written as a journal and intended to serve as commentary for Lamartine's poem "Le Premier Regret".

First serialised as part of Les Confidences beginning in 1849, Graziella received popular acclaim. An operatic adaptation had been completed by the end of the year, and the work influenced paintings, poems, novels, and films. The American literary critic Charles Henry Conrad Wright considered it one of the three most important emotionalist French novels, the others being Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel Paul et Virginie (1788) and Chateaubriand's novella Atala (1801). Three English translations have been published: one by James Runnion in 1875, one by Ralph Wright in 1929, and one by Raymond N. MacKenzie in 2018.^[1]