There is a story about an Indian prince who sends as a gift to Alexander the Great an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Her hair was "lovely as dawn," and she was "gorgeous as the sunset." Her breath carried a sweet and enticing fragrance of exotic flowers that amazed all who sensed even the slightest trace of it. Alexander's physician realized however, that the woman had been fed minute amounts of poison from birth, to the extent that now her slightest kiss was death to all who experienced its deadly delight.

Hawthorne's Rappaccini is a man of science, so cold and so calculating, that he has absolutely no moral regrets or compunctions if sacrificing them means even the minutest advancement of his vast knowledge. He has a beautiful daughter, and a young man, Giovanni, has fallen deeply in love with her. What follows is a tragic tale of love amidst the dark whorls of Gothic horror written in Hawthorne's singular literary style.

Publication history:
Appears in:

• Great Science Fiction About Doctors (Conklin &Fabricant, 1963)
• Strange Signposts (Elwood &Moskowitz, 1966)
• Future Perfect (H. Bruce Franklin, 1966)
• Black Magic: 13 Chilling Tales (Don Ward, 1967)
• The Other Dimension (Sara Rosner, 1972)
• Nightmare Garden (Vic Ghidalia, 1976)
• The Roots of Evil (Michel Parry, 1976)
• The Road to Science Fiction #1 (James E. Gunn, 1977)
• Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction of the 19th Century (Asimov, Greenberg &Waugh, 1981)
• The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (Pronzini, Greenberg & Malzberg, 1981)
• Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology (Eric S. Rabkin, 1983)
• Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (1985)
• The Ascent of Wonder (1994)
• The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (1992)
• Stories: An Anthlogy and an Introduction (Eric S. Rabkin, 1994)
• Major American Short Stories (A. Walton Litz, 1994)