The White People

Description

The White People is a collection of weird, exciting and undoubtedly excellent stories written by Arthur Machen. The tales in the book are bizarre in an intriguing way, making the reader want to go on reading till the very last page.

The framework of the title story is a discussion between two men about the nature of evil. To back up his point of view, one of the men reveals a green book that contains the diaries of a girl in which she talks about the countryside she lived in as well as of the magic rituals and other secrets she was initiated in by her nurse. She talks about nymphs, secret ceremonies, witchcraft, then the story is cut short by the girl’s death.

ArthurMachen was perhaps the best known Welsh mystic in the second half of the 19th century. Born in Wales in 1863 as the descendent of a family of clergymen, Machen became interested in the supernatural, in mysticism and occultism early in his childhood, when he came across an article about alchemy in his father’s library. His interest persisted and became the topic of his first poem published – the poem was entitled Eleusinia and it was about the Eleusinian Mysteries. He published his second writing, a pastiche entitled The Anatomy of Tobacco in 1884, a book that brought him recognition and a stable, permanent job with a publisher as editor and cataloguer.

Machenstarted writing stories built around fantasy and Gothic themes in the 1890’s. His first success as a novelist came when he published The Great God Pan, but later on his works became criticized for being just as decadent as Oscar Wilde’s writings and their publication was delayed, in the case of The White People until 1904, even though most of them, including The White People were written in the 1890’s.
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