A Strange Story, by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1862)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, with prolegomena by H.P. Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 337 pages

By some distance the longest item in this series — a complete Victorian novel of 337 pages, reproduced with the author's preface and a prolegomena by Madame Blavatsky. Bulwer-Lytton published A Strange Story in 1862, and it belongs to the small class of nineteenth-century fiction that theosophical writers treat as something other than fiction: a novel in which the occult machinery is not a device but an argument, written by a man who was taken seriously by occultists of his own century and after.

The story turns on the confrontation between a materialist physician and a figure of apparently unnatural longevity, and on the elixir that stands between them. Blavatsky's introductory matter is what earns the book its place here rather than in a literary section: she reads the novel as a deliberately veiled statement of doctrine by an author who knew more than he could say directly, and the placing of it in the Black versus White Magic series indicates which side of that division she thought its antagonist occupied. For readers who want the theosophical case made as narrative rather than as exposition, this is the fullest example the library holds.

Read the full text (PDF, 5.4 MB, 337 pages)