The Viper of Milan was first published in 1906 when its author, Marjorie Bowen, was only sixteen years old. The book has been hailed by many critics as an exemplary first novel, and one of England’s leading writers, Graham Greene, has this to say: “I think it was Miss Bowen’s apparent zest that made me want to write. One could not read her without believing that to write was to live and enjoy.”
The background of this novel is fourteenth-century Italy and the warring struggles between the City States to gain control over the Northern Plains. The story is about the enmity between two princes, between Gian Galeazzo Visconti, hated Duke of Milan, known by his ill-treated subjects as The Viper, and Mastino della Scala, dispossessed Duke of Verona, respected, honourable, and courageous, but with a capacity for loving which was to result in his own death and that of many of his trusting followers. The hatred of these two men is the absorbing basis of the plot, but the lyrical descriptions of Milan and the countryside, and the almost unbelievable cruelty and black-heartedness of the unscrupulous “Viper, ” help to make the impact of this story a really tremendous one.