![]() ![]() But he regards her obvious capabilities with amused irony. Stearne notes how literate and efficient Maud is compared to his slower son. His hunger for arcane knowledge is equally obessive, especially when it comes to a lost fifteenth century manuscript relating to one Alice Pyett, mystic and saint.Ĭommandeering his undervalued daughter Maud to act as his secretary, Stearne prepares his modern translation and exegesis on the Pyett document. Without a shred of remorse, he sleeps with his underage maid and drives his wife into multiple miscarriages and ill-health by insisting on his ‘conjugal rights’ every night regardless of her situation. Emotionally frozen though he is, Paver’s Edmund Stearne is a man of lustful appetities and incessant demands. James (1862-1936), perhaps Britain’s most admired writer of ghost stories.īut the antiquarian in Michelle Paver’s novel Wakenhyrst (2019) does not belong to James’s world of confirmed bachelors. ![]() ![]() ![]() Together with its rural East Anglian setting, these elements seem to belong to a story from M.R. An unearthed relic from the ancient past, a Last Judgement painting which fuses Christian and pagan symbolism into a Hieronymus Bosch-style nightmare. Unseen horrors, half-animal, half-spirit, lurking in a fen. A cold and crusty middle-aged antiquarian. ![]()
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