by F. Anstey
F. ANSTEY
THE STATEMENT OF STELLA MABERLY
Edited with an introduction and notes by
PETER MERCHANT
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Originally published by T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1896
First Valancourt Books edition 2017
This edition © 2017 by Valancourt Books
Introduction and notes © 2017 by Peter Merchant
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
Publisher & Editor: James D. Jenkins
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.
INTRODUCTION
In 1878, one of the happiest accidents in nineteenth-century literature thrust upon Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934) a pen name—‘F. Anstey’—which the slightest of shuffles might turn into Fantasy. Soon, Anstey’s breakthrough ‘bodyswap’ novel Vice Versâ (1882) was promising to make that name a positive byword for the thing of which it was so nearly an anagram. It is only because the books with which Anstey followed Vice Versâ were neglected (relative, at least, to the extraordinary popular success of his début) that this never happened, and not because he ever abandoned fantasy as a genre. On the contrary, that lively boyhood interest in ‘magical transformations and exchanges of bodies’ to which Anstey himself ascribed Vice Versâ would seize him again in the 1890s, and the published outcome would earn him the enthusiastic admiration of Arthur Conan Doyle.
This time, in Anstey’s 1896 novel The Statement of Stella Maberly, the site of the exchange is different; and an altogether more sinister sort of sorcery is suggested. To the magical transformation of two male bodies that in Vice Versâ left the middle-aged Paul Bultitude standing helplessly in the shoes of his schoolboy son, and led to a spiralling comedy of embarrassment, there now succeeds a transformation scene in which a female body (Evelyn Heseltine’s) is apparently given over to the powers of darkness. It is as if Anstey were bent on creating a literal example of the ‘grotesque prestidigitation’ which Thomas Hardy had recently shown Angel Clare imagining in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). Feeling cheated of the Tess whom he knew and loved, Clare laments, ‘You were one person; now you are another.’ For her part, Stella Maberly—who narrates Anstey’s novel—is convinced that the body of her beloved friend ‘is now inhabited by a lost soul, some foul and evil spirit which has taken her form for its own vile purposes’ (p. 204).
The irony here is that Stella’s narrative is itself a kind of interloper too: hosted by the shell of another story whose original occupier has fled. For, demonstrably, several elements both of the narrator’s ‘Statement’ and of the frame set around this—a frame which sees Stella, consigned by some ‘mockery of mercy’ to a place of permanent confinement (p. 249), seeming to reminisce from a ward in what would now be termed a secure hospital—are transferred to the novel from an earlier work that Anstey abandoned. This edition for Valancourt Books marks the first appearance in print of that earlier work, ‘The Statement of V.M. patient at Bethnal House Asylum, July: 19: 1886’. It has been transcribed from a British Library manuscript not just for purposes of comparison with The Statement of Stella Maberly but because it is a remarkable and startling story, or piece of purported autopathography, in its own right.
‘The Statement of V.M.’ is written in a notebook filled with early draft versions of Anstey’s works. It is strangely at variance with the surrounding material, which tends to reflect Anstey’s public image as a humorist (at that time being paid four guineas a week by the comic magazine Punch). The work appears to have been done at the end of 1888, in early December, so there is a slight chronological gap between the date of composition and the date which is set to the supposed statement. The backdating of the latter to the summer of 1886 is explained by the manuscript’s heading, which lists ‘Dr Miller & Dr Will’ as among the asylum staff to whom V.M.’s statement is made. It had indeed been in 1886 that John Kennedy Will succeeded John Millar as medical superintendent of London’s Bethnal House Asylum. Anstey evidently wanted to add accuracy and authenticity by naming the current incumbent, but felt at the same time that he owed it to George Millar—his sister’s husband and his own long-time friend—to pay what by now was posthumous tribute to George’s father by also putting, albeit with one discreetly altered vowel, that surname in the frame.
Not only had Anstey in the spring of 1882 stayed with the Millars at Bethnal House, as we know from his autobiography A Long Retrospect, but at the very time he committed ‘The Statement of V.M.’ to his notebook his younger brother Leonard was securing—at the Paddington Green Children’s Hospital and the Regent’s Park Hospital for Epilepsy, Paralysis, and other Diseases of the Nervous System—the first appointments of a very distinguished career in neurology and paediatrics. In addition to the access which Anstey thereby earned to specialist psychomedical knowledge, he had acquired by December 1888 some unwanted and distressing first-hand experience. Anstey’s father (or ‘P.’ for ‘Pater’) was by that time in the final months of his life, and increasingly confused, so that Anstey’s entries in his diary for 1888 include the following: ‘16: Nov. P. complaining that he was continually fancying himself in a strange house’; ‘25: Nov. P. gloomy again—inclined to self-accusation.’
From what Anstey had necessarily begun to hear and see of nervous disease and delusions, it was a short step to the disordered thinking and possibly distorted memories which inform the statement of ‘V.M.’ She speaks of mysterious voices that seem to whisper ‘Hidden Children’ to her, and in a railway tunnel outside Croydon she imagines the engine plunging into the centre of the earth and ‘that great monster dragging me with others down to an unknown world perhaps to Hell’. (Here, Anstey is on the same terrifying track as Anna Kingsford with her ‘Doomed Train’, the first item in Kingsford’s just-published collection of Dreams and Dream-Stories.) There are hallucinatory visions of the damned and haunting flashbacks to traumatic past episodes: the deaths of her first husband, ‘Capt. W. Mackeith,’ and of their daughter; a murderous attack on another woman by the seaside. Nothing resembling these torments or these rages had been in Anstey’s range before. ‘V.’ stands for Violet, but—threatening her second husband with a meat cleaver, and admitting ‘a strong desire to take to smashing things’—this Violet is certainly not for shrinking. What the text ultimately leaves open is whether she has been driven to so dangerous an edge by a deeply troubled mind or a troubled second marriage. Her unnamed second husband, a music teacher, may have conspired with a Doctor whose name is also undisclosed to have her declared insane: ‘My husband & he great friends. Easy to have me sent to an Asylum.’ That the Victorians used diagnoses of madness to manage mutinous women is a conclusion often reached by social historians today, but to find such suspicions voiced by the Victorians themselves is rare. If Anstey means them to be given any credence, then marriage rather than Bethnal House Asylum is the institution in which Violet M. has found herself restrained; and her so-called madness is less a psychological condition than a specific cultural infliction. She is one of those man-made volcanoes with which not many male Victorian novelists ventured to challenge male complacency. As George Meredith has the heroine of Diana of the Crossways (1885) reflect, with Krakatoa much in mind, ‘They [men] create by stoppage a volcano, and are amazed at its eruptiveness.’
At some stage during the winter of 1894-95, Anstey retu
rned to ‘The Statement of V.M.’ and in a notebook now held by the British Library made the synopsis which the present edition reproduces after the story proper. This résumé of what is now represented as a Millar’s tale (that name having passed peculiarly from physician to patient) served to remind Anstey of the incidents which he had invented, and the problems which he had posed, six years earlier. The reason he wanted a reminder was that he was now considering how, with an extra measure of elbow-room, he might engineer a fiction identically framed; and this was the single-volume novel, as it became when published in the spring of 1896, which would have as its title The Statement of Stella Maberly. Anstey’s diary entries for 1895 duly record: ‘14: Jan. First idea of ‘Stella Maberly.’ 15th Began outline … 3: April. Began ‘Stella Maberly’ … 14: Dec. ‘Statement of Stella Maberly’ finished & sent to Fisher Unwin.’ Anstey’s recourse to this publisher, for whose 1886 Annual (a portmanteau volume put together by Henry Norman and entitled The Broken Shaft: Tales in Mid-Ocean) he had already supplied a story of haunting, may measure his sense of the difference between the painful psychic interiors of ‘The Statement of V.M.’ and the tale of out-and-out supernatural terror into which—seven years later—that study of ‘the awful frienzy [sic] of a maddened brain’ was threatening to turn. For there was to be a transformation scene embedded in The Statement of Stella Maberly, to make the novel pivot upon what it would invite its reader to construe as a case of full-blown demonic possession.
At least, for reasons which it is necessary at this point to tease out a little more, that becomes what the second and subsequent editions invite. Initially, there is a complicating factor already present in the novel’s unpublished precursor. As is of course indicated by the ‘Statement of’ pattern into which both titles fall, the subject of each story is also its narrator; and Stella, like Violet, is volatile, fanciful, prone to nervous breakdowns, the very definition of unreliable. We cannot know whether to regard her perceptions as true or mistrust them as delusions arising from that grey area in late nineteenth-century mental science where neurology and psychiatry overlap. Stella’s own conviction that demonology holds the key to the plot is countered in Chapter 8 by Canon Broadbent’s insistence that Stella is suffering from those staples of the Victorian sensation novel, ‘ill-health, a disordered imagination, overwrought nerves’ (p. 205) and ‘mental agitation’ (p. 207), and that it is therefore psychological medicine which must solve the mystery. Crucially, Fisher Unwin encouraged this view by not crediting The Statement of Stella Maberly to Anstey at all at first but publishing it, at the end of March 1896, as ‘Written by Herself’. The book was asking its readers to take it as a madness memoir, and so to look in it for the sort of ‘morbid hallucinations’ (p. 161) which might illustrate the narrator’s increasing detachment from reality. It is no wonder that most reviewers of The Statement of Stella Maberly sided with the Canon. Rather than taking the incidents which the narrative recounts as pointers to demonic possession, the reviewers advised, readers should consider them ‘hallucinations of Stella’s as her madness increases’ (Saturday Review, 5 September 1896). So what the book offers is ‘a curious portrayal of the neurotic temperament’ (Leeds Mercury, 1 June 1896) or ‘merely a mad story about a madwoman, who takes it into her head that an evil spirit is occupying her friend’s body’ (Pall Mall Gazette, 13 May 1896).
After six months, however, that ‘Written by Herself’ label which had made this ‘a mad story’ was superseded by the publisher’s belated identification of Anstey as the author. What earlier in the year had had to be read as a psychological case history, whether faithful to the facts or fabricated, could now be read as a carefully crafted thriller about demonic possession. The physician might still see ‘a perfect picture of … a paranoiac [led] to a violent deed’, as Smith Ely Jelliffe put it in the New York Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (November 1897); but lay readers could approach the book as based on a strong storyline idea suggested by the spirit world, rather than on professional or personal knowledge of a mind diseased. The Statement of Stella Maberly became, potentially, as much a Gothic encounter with embodied evil as a curious portrayal of the neurotic (or neurasthenic) temperament. The balance that Anstey was able to strike between those competing possibilities is indeed a hallmark of the book’s period, the 1890s. Situated both by date and by inclination midway between the psychological insights of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) and the supernatural frissons of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Anstey’s novel seems to take some tincture of each.
Since the 1880s, in fact, Anstey had counted Stoker and his wife as friends; and on 17 February 1895, with Stella Maberly just starting to take shape and a good deal of material already gathered for Dracula, they met for Sunday lunch. Each man’s work-in-progress positively reinforced the interest of the other in concentrating his resources upon the recently resurgent literary Gothic and in developing the powerful binaries of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). For Anstey, this would entail creating within the ‘Statement’ a second character whose presence might promote the exploration of the divided self and permit a pitting of good against evil. So he couples Stella, who descends from Violet, with Stella’s cherished childhood friend, Evelyn Heseltine, for whom ‘The Statement of V.M.’ had contained no counterpart and in whom thanks simply to Anstey’s choice of forename, ‘Evelyn,’ ‘evil’ is already phonetically present. From an admirer of Walter Scott’s Tales of the Crusaders—such as Anstey had already shown himself to be—the choice of that name might already be a declaration of plotting intent. Scott’s novel The Betrothed (1825) had a heroine called Eveline to whom ‘it often seemed … as if a good and evil power strove for mastery over her destiny’. She is protected by a portrait of the Virgin Mary which seems to come to life; but she is also threatened in her bed by the phantom Vanda; and both the ‘benign saint’ and the ‘vindictive fiend’ then feature in her dreams.
The oppositional female types thus placed either side of Scott’s Eveline come of course from the stock cupboard of fantasy fiction. But it is significant that Anstey raids it too, to make them the basic building blocks of his design for The Statement of Stella Maberly. One kind of reading of Anstey’s novel, the kind completely coloured by the assumption of a Stella who is criminally insane, would see the vindictive femme fatale as stalking the blessed virgin from the first and even as killing her. Stella may not be so ‘guiltless’ with regard to the phial of chloral as she claims (p. 89); and the strangling to which the narrative leads up is either an act of murderous malice cunningly passed off as self-defence or, at best, testimony to the massive misconstruction—seeing the fiend in the friend—that Stella’s ‘perverted imaginings’ (p. 219) have produced. On this view, Evelyn is fragile, innocent, and angelic while Stella is the dangerously unhinged dark destroyer. Maurice Greiffenhagen’s frontispiece illustration for the first edition portrays exactly this; the figure on the left is ‘fair, with a delicate, spiritual beauty which corresponded to her gentle nature’ (p. 9); and presents a marked contrast to the figure on the right, a young woman with an ‘oval, olive-tinted face’ and a ‘crown of soft dark hair’ (p. 52). If however the novel is read supernaturally, as a story of demonic possession in which the Fair Maiden is turned overnight into a Dark Lady, the ingénue and the vindictive femme fatale are not Evelyn and Stella but (respectively) the Evelyn of Chapters 1 to 4 and the Evelyn of Chapters 5 to 9. At the start of the fifth chapter Evelyn dies as one woman, to return as quite another. Instead of one of the heroines being pure while the other is crazed and predatory, both of those extremes (together with most of the contradictions which define the destiny of Scott’s Eveline, ‘Widow’d wife and wedded maid, / Betrothed, betrayer, and betray’d’) meet and are realised in Evelyn alone.
It took Anstey not six months but fully twenty years to give that supernatural reading his direct and explicit authorial sanction. In February 1916 he turned th
e novel into a ‘scenario’ for a silent movie entitled ‘An Evil Spirit’. The film was never made but aimed to do all that its title promises, dealing in an avowedly weird and fantastic fashion with the subject of demonic possession. A full transcription of this previously unknown scenario, taken from another British Library manuscript, is added in the present edition to the text of the novel itself. It will be seen that the scenario restores to the frame story of the woman who ends in a criminal lunatic asylum the prominence it had had in ‘The Statement of V.M.’, while the inner story on the other hand (which necessarily unfolds in flashbacks) owes more to The Statement of Stella Maberly. The scenario goes beyond the novel, however, in underlining the contrast between Evelyn’s ‘sweetness & innocence’ before the transformation and her malevolence afterwards. That ‘wicked, beautiful face’ (p. 244) which for Stella in the novel plainly belongs to ‘a fiend in human form’ (p. 243) taking possession of her friend’s ‘lifeless shell’ (p. 168) was to be made visible on the screen at the moment of entry, when Evelyn ‘dies’ for the first time, as well as at the exit point, when Evelyn dies definitively.
It is clear that with ‘The Statement of V.M.’, The Statement of Stella Maberly, and ‘An Evil Spirit’ Anstey moved into territory far removed from Vice Versâ. In the last of the three, planned and executed as he approached his sixtieth birthday, he seized the possibilities of the new cinematic medium while other writers of his generation were ignoring them. In the first and the second he broke new ground with his serious attempt to connect fiction to psychomedical discourse, and by subscribing to that unusual gender-crossing manoeuvre in which a male author disappears inside a female narrator. Individually considered, the story, the novel, and the scenario all deserve to be better known. Collectively considered, they plead strongly for increased critical attention henceforward to the shelfload of surprises, here and elsewhere, which their author has in readiness.