One day in 1978, Russell Kirk was delighted and amazed to receive a letter postmarked from a place called Saracinesca House, located not in Italy but in Nashville, Tennessee.1 Its author, John C. Moran, had divined Kirk’s unwritten appreciation for the Romantic novelist Francis Marion Crawford. Moran spent much of his career at Peabody College attached to Vanderbilt University, a post from which he directed the Francis Marion Crawford Society, published the definitive six-hundred-page compendium of Crawford’s works, and oversaw an annual literary journal called The Romantist, which he typeset manually. Moran died on April 9, 2009, exactly a hundred years after Crawford.

If not for the efforts of men like Moran, it is possible that Crawford, who in the early twentieth century outsold his friend Henry James, would be forgotten to us today. For his part Kirk became a Crawford apostle, later endorsing his novels as “handsome approaches which we traverse by owl-light” in a “fresh search for the wondrous.”

Born in Italy to American parents in 1854, Crawford was raised in the Villa Negroni on the Esquiline Hill. By the 1880s, when he began his career as a writer, the Rome, indeed the Europe, of his childhood was long gone. As he wrote in the first chapter of Saracinesca:

In the beginning of the year 1865 people crossed the Alps in carriages; the Suez Canal had not been opened; the first Atlantic cable was not laid; German unity had not been