Despite achieving fame and notoriety as an avant-garde essayist and critic, Susan Sontag, towards the end of her 40-year writing career, achieved popular success with this 1992 novel. The Volcano Lover is as big, rich and complex as one might expect – using the story of Nelson's affair with Emma Hamilton as a prism through which to view the baroque drama of the Enlightenment.

Amid the orgiastic frenzy of the Neapolitan court, the reticent, enigmatic English consul, known only as "the Cavaliere", concerns himself with the creation of a perfect art collection and obsessively studies the volcano that looms over the town – its brooding presence grimly prefiguring the violent eruptions to come. Following his wife's death, he takes in his nephew's discarded mistress, Emma – a warm, vulgar, intoxicating creature who rewards his devotion by becoming first protege, then lover, then wife. However, revolution in Paris and the arrival of Nelson, dashing hero of the Nile, shatters their domestic tranquillity, and they are forced into exile as bloody reprisals and counter-revolutions convulse the country.

The Volcano Lover is a powerful, intricate novel of ideas: frequently inflected with Sontag's feminism, it applies a modern lens to the Enlightenment's moral, social and aesthetic concerns. Yet it is also a tender inventory of desire: intricately mapping the modulation from the cold mania of the collector to the lover's passion.

Making a cameo appearance, the poet Goethe exclaims: "The significant moment! That is what great art must render. The moment that is most human, most typical, most affecting." Sontag's novel resists such an apotheosis, drawing into its voracious embrace a vast panorama of history and thought. In this she imitates the lover rather than the collector, and while perhaps less perfect for it, the result is impressively truthful and humane.