Melmoth the Wanderer

Published in 1820, this Gothic novel is built as a set of nested manuscripts and oral tales. In Ireland a dying miser leaves his nephew a portrait and a warning about an ancestor, Melmoth, who appears across two centuries offering the desperate a bargain: take over his prolonged life and the condition attached to it. Stories within stories follow a Spaniard escaping the Inquisition, a pair of island lovers, an English family ruined by greed, and other victims Melmoth approaches. Settings move from a Wicklow house to monasteries, prisons, and distant coasts. The book is a horror novel of temptation, not a single linear biography.

Bound in cream vegetable parchment with a design in black and dark red by Zakar. Red (front) and black (back) endleaves. Black slipcase.