From the Bookshelf of The New Lifetime Reading Plan…

[close] "Rappaccini's Daughter" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne about a medical researcher in medieval Padua who grows a garden of poisonous plants. Giacomo Rappaccini brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but she herself becomes poisonous to others. The traditional story of a poisonous maiden has been traced back to India, and Hawthorne's version has been adopted in contemporary works. It was published in the collection Mosses from an Old Manse (1844).