Standing at the critical juncture between traditional romance and early novelistic realism, "Zayde" is both the swan song of a literary tradition nearly two thousand years old and a harbinger of the modern psychological novel.
"Zayde" unfolds during the long medieval struggle between Christians and Muslims for control of the Iberian Peninsula; Madame de Lafayette (1634-93) takes the reader on a Mediterranean tour typical of classical and seventeenth-century romances from Catalonia to Cyprus and back again with battles, prophecies, and shipwrecks dotting the crisscrossed paths of the book...