The Mystery Hidden in Dante’s Divine Comedy: Dante’s Influence on The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

By A. Martin

Mann, David. Cover design. The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton. Sourcebooks Landmark, 2018.

For my paper, I wrote about how Stuart Turton’s novel The Seven ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle weaves the most exciting and relevant aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy into a creative mystery thriller. This story takes place in a reforming prison disguised as an abandoned mansion, rife with the most vile criminals, resembling Inferno. However, every prisoner has the chance to leave the prison once they reform, making this world a mix of Purgatorio and Inferno. Structurally, Turton takes Dante’s most engaging narrative elements to the extreme to keep his reader mystified yet engrossed throughout all 450 pages. By making the narrator not know anything at the start, the reader learns every bit of information with the main character, bridging the gap between reader and narrator making the reading experience immersive. Additionally, Virgil and Dante clearly inspire Turton’s main characters, who mirror Dante and Virgil’s guiding relationship. Even more directly, the two stories’ journey of reformation rescues both Dante and Turton’s main character from the misery and senselessness of their exiles. Upon starting the Divine Comedy, I did not immediately realize the similarities to the mystery thriller I read over the summer, but revisiting the novel revealed the connections and made me think more deeply about the prison reform system and Dante’s exile. While reading The Seven ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, the description of the main character’s exile made me empathize with him, the severity of which I did not fully grasp while reading Inferno. However, once I linked the two characters, I better understood Dante the character and his motivations.

Works Cited

Barolini, Teodolinda. “Inferno 1: Myth Meets History, Isaiah Meets Aristotle.” Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.

Dante Alighieri and Allen Mandelbaum. Inferno. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980.

Dante Alighieri and Allen Mandelbaum. Purgatorio. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982.

Raffa, Guy P. Danteworlds : A Reader’s Guide to the Inferno. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Took, John. Dante, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. 

Turton, Stuart. The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Sourcebooks Landmark, 2018.