Novel: The Volcano Lover

Overview
Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover reimagines the late-eighteenth-century lives of Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and Admiral Horatio Nelson in Naples, turning a famous love triangle into a meditation on collecting, desire, and the violence of history. The book tracks how an age that worships reason and beauty collides with revolution and war, and how the urge to possess, art, nature, people, shapes private life and public catastrophe.

Setting and Premise
Naples, with Mount Vesuvius looming above it, is both stage and protagonist. Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy known as the Collector, devotes himself to cataloging antiquities, classifying volcanic phenomena, and composing a life where objects are orderly and controllable. The volcano he loves and studies embodies the sublime: beauty on the verge of eruption, a power that both invites adoration and sets limits on mastery.

Plot
At first, the Collector’s world is arranged as carefully as his cabinets of vases and gems. His first wife dies; he takes into his household a young Englishwoman, Emma Hart, formerly the protégée of his nephew. Emma’s transformation becomes a public spectacle. She develops her celebrated “attitudes,” a sequence of living tableaux that turn her body into art, captivating Neapolitan society and the queen. She marries the Collector and becomes Lady Hamilton, a figure at once adored and exposed, always on display.

War carries Admiral Nelson to Naples after his victories. He enters their salon and their marriage. Emma and Nelson are inflamed by mutual adoration and by the rhetoric of heroism that has become the era’s secular faith. The Collector, a connoisseur of passions as well as porcelain, registers the affair with a mixture of tact, self-deception, and the collector’s instinct to preserve what he cannot command. Around them, Europe is convulsed: the French Revolutionary armies approach; a republican uprising briefly seizes Naples; the Bourbon court flees; reprisals are vicious. The trio’s charisma cannot insulate them from the compromises and cruelties of counterrevolutionary politics, and Sontag’s portrayal of Nelson’s implacability stains the glittering surfaces of fame.

The lovers’ exaltation passes into the era’s exhaustion. Back in England, Nelson’s death sacralizes him and abandons Emma. The Collector’s objects pass into museums and private collections; his volcanic notebooks survive; Emma’s body, which once stood for art itself, is consumed by poverty and illness. People, Sontag insists, are less durable than things, and fame is a poor conservator of women’s lives.

Themes and Motifs
Collecting is the novel’s central figure for love and power. To collect is to rescue, classify, and possess, but also to rename and displace. The Collector treats Vesuvius, vases, and eventually Emma as intelligible phenomena, things to be saved from the chaos of time. The volcano answers with its own logic: eruption, ash, burial. Sontag entwines the domestic triangle with the politics of spectacle, the court’s theatrics, Emma’s performances, Nelson’s staged heroism, to ask who gets to look and who is made into an image.

The novel interrogates the Enlightenment’s confidence. Science and taste are not innocent; they exist alongside empire, diplomacy, and the management of violence. A late “moral inventory” acknowledges complicity and the hunger for possession that underwrites aesthetic refinement and political brutality alike. Gender is everywhere: Emma is celebrated as genius and reduced to a display; her wit and labor make and unmake reputations, but she is traded, then discarded, by systems that honor her image and neglect her person.

Style and Structure
Sontag builds the story from short, titled sections that move between historical episode, portrait, and essay. An omniscient voice shifts into intimate addresses and occasional first-person meditations, splicing narrative with reflections on paintings, artifacts, and the ethics of looking. The prose is lapidary and analytic, wary of romanticizing even as it dwells on beauty.

Resonance
By the end, the novel leaves the reader before glass cases and ash, pondering what survives: shards, drawings, names; the heat remembered by stones; the lives whose intensity could not be archived. The volcano lover worships fire, but the collection that lasts is made of what fire leaves behind.