SOURCE: "Susan Sontag's Cavalier Cavaliere," in The Christian Science Monitor, August 11, 1992, p. 11.

In the following review of The Volcano Lover, Rubin writes that Sontag provides a fresh approach to the story of Admiral Horatio Nelson and his lover Emma Hamilton.

A diplomat by vocation, a collector by avocation, the eponymous "volcano lover" of Susan Sontag's meditative, unconventional, historical romance [The Volcano Lover] is a typical man of the Enlightenment. As the British envoy from 1764 to 1800 to the court of Naples (capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), Sir William Hamilton—or, as Sontag dubs him, "the Cavaliere,"—divides his time between attending upon the outrageously uncouth Bourbon king and attending to his own special passions: collecting antique vases and other objets d'art and exploring the famous, still-active volcano of Mt. Vesuvius.

The Cavaliere is urbane, aristocratic, and possessed of a keenly inquiring mind. He has cultivated an...