Edinburgh University Press The Land of Mist and Other Spiritualist Writings (The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle)

Presents the first scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s important spiritualist novel, The Land of Mist, accompanied by selected short works of his spiritualist non-fiction Features a lost chapter from the original manuscript that is here published for the first time A critical introduction and detailed annotations that explain the novel’s spiritualist theology and identify the real-life experiences, sites and figures on which the novel is based An essay on the text which explains the novel’s composition and publication A textual apparatus that collates The Land of Mist’s manuscript, original serialization in The Strand Magazine and first U.K. book edition 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remarkable 1926 psychic novel The Land of Mist, with the erotically charged, religiously provocative and previously unpublished chapter, ‘The Darker Side’, after over a century of separation.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.