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Desperate to elicit Leonora’s forgiveness, Ricardo marries Hannah in order to have more control over her mediumistic powers.Īfter marriage, Hannah gradually become more assertive, making her husband’s life a misery. He and his friend, Dr Steinberg, persuade her to participate in seances, where in a comatose state she manages to raise the spirit of Ricardo’s late wife, Leonora, who he had murdered in a jealous rage.

Professor Ricardo discovers that his landlady’s ungainly servant, Hannah Stubbs, is a powerful medium. In the Saturday Review, H G Wells described it as an “absurd book,” which “far from transfiguring Spiritualism, as it is intended to do, holds it up as a highly dangerous and idiotic pastime.” Short synposis The reviewer concluded: “If this volume is intended to commend spiritualism to unbelievers, we should say that it would rather confirm them in their scepticism.” The Academy thought Marryat had deteriorated with this work, and referred to its “bewildering narrative”. In this novel, the spirit of woman murdered by her jealous husband inhabits the body of his second wife and wreaks her revenge. Recommended, certainly, especially for aficionados of more obscure Victorian supernatural tales.First published in 1896, The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs is one of a number of novels in which Florence Marryat uses Spiritualism both for comic effect and to make more serious arguments about gender politics. I got way,way more than I bargained for here. The novel is delightfully subversive, it makes for fun supernatural reading, and I can't help it - I am a huge fangirl of novels in which there are séances. Wells called this novel "absurd," and considering plot alone it probably is, but there is method to Marryat's madness here as there is in many of her later novels.

The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs is certainly one of the most lurid supernatural Victorian novels I've encountered up to now, and it ticks more than just a few of my reader boxes: it is the story of a vengeful ghost, has the feel of a sensation novel cloaked in spiritualist garb but turned completely on its head, and it simultaneously engages topics and themes of Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman literature. I'm a fangirl of Florence Marryat's novels and this book is one of hers that I hadn't yet read. I settled on this book as an October read because I was looking for a novel with a séance, so when I found this one, I was a happy camper. It's a book that works on different levels - it is a story of ghostly possession, but it would also be quite at home in a study of Victorian New Woman literature of the fin-de-siècle.Įverything remotely connected to plot (without spoilers) is here: