Vittoria

Milan under the Austrians, 1848: a singer at La Scala is to give the signal for the rising from the stage, and half the conspirators do not trust her because her mother was English. Meredith wrote it as a sequel to Sandra Belloni and took the revolution from Italians who had fought it; the crowd scenes are the best he ever did, and the politics are unusually adult — everyone is brave and nearly everyone is wrong.