The narrator of “Roman Fever” notes Rome’s “great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendour” wrought by the passage of time (755). The story depicts two women working through a comparable “wreckage” in their personal lives. At the same time, the story frames these private events against both the histories of generations of people like them and the layered, indeed overabundant, history of Rome.

The story explicitly locates Grace and Alida, as well as their daughters, in a long history of women. They belong to “generations of travellers,” and for each successive group Rome “stands for” something else (754). As each age inherits what came before it, these accumulated connotations clash and combine in ways both great and small. Rome serves this function, but so too does the story of great-aunt Harriet. The interpretation that she sent her sister to the Colosseum out of jealousy is the family story Grace learns as a child, and it too shapes how she understands her world, perhaps especially the ways women relate to one another.

In “Roman Fever,” a confrontation with the past necessarily involves an assessment of the individual’s limitations and complicity in events and their reverberations. The narrator’s emphasis on both women’s limited perspectives, conveyed most powerfully in the observation that they saw one another “through the wrong end of her little telescope” (753), suggests that there can be no full understanding of what one has done or inherited without also realizing one’s limitations.