The Enchanted Castle

Alphonse Esquiros

Translated by Brian Stableford

“The Enchanted Castle”, originally published in 1846, and here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is author Alphonse Esquiros’ quintessential tale of magnetism. A hybrid transfiguration, the short novel combines the key motif of the story nowadays known in English as “The Sleeping Beauty” with the legend of Pygmalion and Galatea, and carefully includes further analogies to the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.

As an exemplar of the original core of Romantic prose fiction, “The Enchanted Castle” is as remarkable for its purity as it is for its flamboyance and is not merely typical of the fiction of the Romantic Movement but archetypal, unusual only in its extremism.

About the Author

Alphonse Esquiros (1812-1876) began his career letters in 1834 with a volume of poems, Les Hirondelles, which was extravagantly praised by Victor Hugo, and, the same year, the historical melodrama, Le Magicien. This was followed, in 1840, by the novel Charlotte Corday, and again in 1840, L’Évangile du people [The People’s Gospel], for which he was fined 500 francs and imprisoned for eight months at Sainte-Pélagie. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Second Republic following the Revolution of 1848, and subsequently exiled from France following Louis-Napoléon’s coup-d’état.

About the Translator

Brian Stableford has been publishing fiction and non-fiction for fifty years. His fiction includes a series of “tales of the biotech revolution” and a series of metaphysical fantasies featuring Edgar Poe’s Auguste Dupin. He has previously translated for Snuggly Books a number of titles, including The Soul-Drinker and Other Decadent Fantasies by Jean Lorrain, and The Unknown Collaborator and Other Legendary Tales by Victor Joly.

Paperback, 178 pages
1st edition: January 19, 2021
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-053-1
Price: US$16.00