Red Cotton Night-Cap Country. By Robert Browning (Classics)

Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or Turf and Towers (1873) is a poem in blank verse by Robert Browning. It tells a story of sexual intrigue, religious obsession and violent death in contemporary Paris and Normandy, closely based on the true story of the death, supposedly by suicide, of the jewellery heir Antoine Mellerio. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country has never been one of Browning's more popular poems, originally because of the perceived sordidness of the story, and later on grounds thus summarised by the critic C. H. Herford: