First edition of this collection of six of Stevenson's best tales, including the uncanny classics "Olalla" and "Thrawn Janet."
Very good.
Price: $400.00
"[W]hile I knew that to love such a woman were to sign and seal one's own sentence of degeneration, I still knew that, if she were alive, I should love her."
In his essay "A Chapter on Dreams," Stevenson explains that the ambiguously vampiric "Olalla" was an attempt to work out an essential situation glimpsed in his dreams: A collaboration between the author's conscious mind and "the little people who manage man's internal theatre," who "do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep." Another horror classic, "Thrawn Janet," is the story of a possessed "witch-wife" cleansed of the devil by a pious minister marked for life by the battle and one of just two stories that Stevenson wrote in Scots. The title story confronts "the horror — the horror o' the sea"; "Will O' the Mill" a long and profitless life of self-denial lightened at last by Death; and "Markheim" another encounter with the devil, but one which allows its murdering hero to choose atonement and confession over the array of further sins laid out to tempt him. A wonderfully gothic collection.
Read more: Melville, "Tempting the Angels: 'Olalla' as Gothic Vampire Narrative," The Bottle Imp.
First printing. London: Chatto & Windus, 1887. 7'' x 4.75''. Original pictorial blue cloth stamped in black and silver. Decorative botanical endpapers. 296 pages, followed by 32-page publisher's catalogue (dated September 1886). Slight spine lean, light edgewear and rubbing to boards, corners bumped.
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