What is it about?
This essay examines the startling genesis of a hundred-year-old silent film scenario, “An Evil Spirit” (1916), which was never filmed but has survived in the personal papers of Thomas Anstey Guthrie (‘F. Anstey’). Behind the film scenario is a psychological thriller, Anstey’s 1896 novel The Statement of Stella Maberly, which shows that its author could combine fantasy not just with humour (as in Vice Versâ) but with horror. Beneath the novel lies an even more remarkable text, a fictional madness memoir of 1888 - never exposed to public view - in which Anstey uses a female narrating voice. A print edition of all three works, including the two unpublished manuscripts, is forthcoming from Valancourt Books.
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Why is it important?
I hope that this essay, and the forthcoming edition of his weirdest works, will help to establish Anstey as a figure more interesting - and less one-dimensional - than is sometimes supposed.
Perspectives
I leave it to the texts themselves, rather than to anything that I have managed to say about them, to communicate a pleasurable sense of discovery. It has been gratifying to find that, even in a field so thoroughly combed over as the fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, there are still some surprises in store!
Dr Peter Merchant
Canterbury Christ Church University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Thomas Anstey Guthries Madhouse Shuffle: Steps toward a nightmare scenario, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, October 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1748372715626721.
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