The Extinguished Light of the Stipančić Family. The defeat of the yearnings and hope in the context of family decline

Vjenceslav Novak’s novel, The Last of the Stipančićs (1899), has intrigued the public and literary criticism until the present day. The Stipančić family includes the father Ante, mother Valpurga, son Juraj and daughter Lucija. Lucija is a girl confined within four walls, who has her girlish dreams, and who aspires to, and hopes for, a better life, wishing to realise her right to happiness, love and a life worthy of a human being. Lucija lives in a patriarchal society that has its strict rules, the disrespect of which is drastically punished. After the rebellion against her marginality, deprivation of her rights, confinement and neglect, and ill from tuberculosis, exhausted, weary, exploited, cheated, betrayed, left alone and disappointed, Lucija dies. The fate of Lucija, Valpurga, Ante and Juraj Stipančić embodies the fall of the patricians of Senj due to political, social and economic conditions in Senj in the first half of the 19th century