The Land of Mist and Other Spiritualist Writings
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Publishing:30th Sep '26
£125.00
This title is due to be published on 30th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This book reunites Arthur Conan Doyle’s remarkable 1926 psychic novel The Land of Mist, with the erotically charged, religiously provocative and previously unpublished chapter, ‘The Darker Side’, after over a century of separation. The book includes an introduction, a textual essay, critical apparatus, explanatory notes and thirty-one illustrations by F.E. Hiley from the work’s original serialisation in the Strand. It represents Conan Doyle’s most sustained and earnest fictional exploration of the spiritualist movement to which he dedicated the last years of his life. Here the author repurposes the famous protagonist of his popular Professor Challenger series for spiritualist ends, hoping that the bellicose scientist’s dramatic conversion to afterlife belief would inspire a similar effect among its readers.
This is an important moment in the history of the publication of Arthur Conan Doyle. Christine Ferguson’s landmark edition of The Land of Mist finally allows us to understand this much-misunderstood novel for what it really is: Conan Doyle’s most personal novel, the one in which his deeply-held Spiritualist views get their fullest fictional exploration. Far from being, as is often thought, an anomaly or an outlier in his work, Ferguson reclaims The Land of Mist as perhaps the key book for understanding the later Conan Doyle. For the first time, we get to read The Land of Mist in the context in which it belongs, surrounded by Conan Doyle’s other Spiritualist writings. Ferguson’s meticulously edited, brilliantly annotated edition of The Land of Mist changes the way we look at Conan Doyle’s later life and work. -- Darryl Jones, Trinity College Dublin
ISBN: 9781399500487
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
384 pages