Archibald Malmaison

Archibald Malmaison has two lives and no memory of either while living the other — the fits come every seven years, and in the gaps he is a different man with a different mind. Julian Hawthorne grew up among Emerson, Thoreau and Melville, produced some fifty books and later went to prison for mail fraud over a mining stock; this 1879 novella is his best, and the horror is entirely psychological. Sixty plates by painters including Henry Fuseli and Richard Wilson follow the divided self through scenes of Milton, castles and abbeys, matching the novella's split life with images of doubled minds and ruined keeps.