Biography: The Cenci - the very name has a sinister and chilly ring, redolent of evil intrigue in the marbled halls of Rennaissance Italy. Some may know it from Shelley's play The Cenci, and though we probably won't have read it and almost certainly won't have seen it, we may be aware it signalled a downturn in his life, writes Anne Haverty.
The Cenci story of incest, parricide and horrible death is among the bleakest of all stories. The Cenci were a noble and dissolute Roman family. Francesco Cenci, in the late 16th century, was perhaps the most dissolute and brutal of them all. When he raped his daughter, Beatrice, and confined her in the darkness of a remote castle, she and her brothers had him murdered.
Beatrice, her stepmother and a brother, Giacomo, were publicly executed for the crime in 1599.
The compassion aroused in the public by Beatrice's fate reflects the view, to which we are no strangers today, that incest was both common and unspeakable and that the recourse to parricide on the part of the Cenci siblings was more pitiable than criminal. That Beatrice was beautiful had not a little to do with this reaction. The painter Guido Reni was brought to her cell to paint her portrait and imbued it with every admirable feminine quality.
The Romans of 1599 were only the first to be smitten by Beatrice. Belinda Jack's thesis, written with an urgent page-turning terseness, is that artists of a certain type - those of what she calls "the dangerous tradition" are drawn to her, and always fatally. Beatrice is the über femme fatale. She leads them to an artistic doom. For many, their Cenci book or play is their last. The Cenci is a black hole that sucks them in, eats them up and spits them out as pale shadows.
Shelley wrote his Cenci play having been enthralled by Guido's portait. In her tragic story he found echoes of the transgressions and tragedies of his own life, in her father echoes of his, and his own will to power in his relations with women. He excavated his own psyche in his play. Also, he was confident it would bring him success and reputation to equal Byron's. Instead no one wanted to stage it and when published it was savaged by the critics.
Shelley fell into despair, not only because of worldly failure but because of the self-knowledge and the knowledge of the world the Cenci gave him. He had seen the abyss. Jack argues that when he drowned some months later his death was wished or at least not avoided.
Hermann Melville treated the theme of incest in his novel, Pierre, equally inspired by Beatrice's portrait. Exhausted and disenchanted, Melville too hoped for popular success - Moby Dick had been attacked and derided - and he too was disappointed. He never wrote again. Nathaniel Hawthorne was another touched by the dead hand of the Cenci. The Marble Faun, a Cenciesque novel, was his last. After it, he retreated into "emptiness".
In the 20th century, Artaud, the French dramatist, vanished into madness after writing, directing and playing Francesco in his Cenci - though it has to be said that he was often mad before it. As for Christina Stead, I have to take issue with Jack's assertion that her extraordinary novel, The Man Who Loved Children, which has Cenci blood in its veins, did for Stead. It was not a success, but none of Stead's novels were in their day, and she went on to write several more, including the equally wonderful Letty Fox: Her Luck.
This assertion exposes a weakness in Jack, the tendency to dramatise or distort her subjects to fit her thesis.
In the case of Hatty Hosmer, the 19th-century sculptor, for instance, her neo-classical figure of Beatrice was done early in her career, was much-praised and exhibited and was bought by the Mercantile Library in St Louis, where it can still be seen. Hosmer may have died in penury and more or less forgotten but this is surely due rather to the decline in fashionability of her style and to her difficulties as a woman sculptor in being taken seriously.
And there are other underdeveloped issues. The knowledge granted by an exploration of the Cenci may indeed have been too searing to bear. But society's refusal to admit the taboo subject of incest into the light of day had more than a little to do with the subsequent despair of those who did tackle it.
However, all in all, Belinda Jack's argument is forceful and shiver-inducingly superstitious enough to make any artist tempted by the Cenci to think twice about going there.
Anne Haverty is a novelist and poet
Beatrice's Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci. By Belinda Jack
Chatto & Windus , 196pp. £19.99