In truth it could hardly be thinner, though the author has laid under contribution an at least ample share of the improbabilities and coincidences of romance.
Nelvil, an English-Scottish peer who has lost his father, who accuses himself of disobedience and ingratitude to that father, and who has been grievously jilted by a Frenchwoman, arrives in Italy in a large black cloak, the deepest melancholy, and the company of a sprightly though penniless French _emigre_, the Count d'Erfeuil.

After performing prodigies of valour in a fire at Ancona, he reaches Rome just when a beautiful and mysterious poetess, the delight of Roman society, is being crowned on the Capitol.

The only name she is known by is Corinne.

The pair are soon introduced by the mercurial Erfeuil, and promptly fall in love with each other, Corinne seeking partly to fix her hold on Nelvil, partly to remove his Britannic contempt for Italy and the Italians, by guiding him to all the great spectacles of Rome and indeed of the country generally, and by explaining to him at great length what she understands of the general theory of aesthetics, of Italian history, and of the contrasted character of the chief European nations.

Nelvil on his side is distracted between the influence of the beauty, genius, and evident passion of Corinne, and his English prejudices; while the situation is further complicated by the regulation discovery that Corinne, though born in Italy of an Italian mother, is, strictly speaking, his own compatriot, being the elder and lawful daughter of a British peer, Lord Edgermond, his father's closest friend.