[T6K]≡ Libro The Lady of the Shroud Bram Stoker 9781500504038 Books

The Lady of the Shroud Bram Stoker 9781500504038 Books

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The Lady of the Shroud Bram Stoker 9781500504038 Books

Although this novel is a work of Bram Stoker's, it's hard to stick with because of the style he chose for writing it. The story is told through a series of letters written from the main character to his various family members and friends. The style was interesting at first but becomes tiresome after awhile.


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The Lady of the Shroud Bram Stoker 9781500504038 Books Reviews

I am with the publisher and am writing to note that contrary to the way is advertising this book as of 8/20/12, it is NOT an abridged edition. This volume contains the complete, unabridged text of the novel, taken from the scarce 1909 first edition and includes a new introduction, annotations, and supplemental materials.

And, by the way, like nearly everything else Stoker wrote, including "The Snake's Pass" (1890), "The Mystery of the Sea," (1902), and of course "Dracula" (1897), this is a really fun and fast read with some very memorable parts. If you enjoyed Stoker's other books, you're sure to like this one.
If you are looking for another stunning book like Dracula by Bram Stoker...don't look over here. This book was, in short, a trudge. It does have some redeeming quality---it maintains the same creepy, gothic tone found in Dracula, and the plot is pleasantly surprising with many twists and turn altogether it's wonderfully original, however...

The actual writing is boring. The narrating characters are not very likeable, and there is just a lot of unnecessary fluff and repetition. The plot is grossly over stretched and sometimes confusing as it dwells on irrelevant moments and flies over major plot points. It takes a long time to read. I can see why this book stayed out of print so long...
As long as there are readers of fiction and people who enjoy a thrill of the supernatural or “things that go bump in the night,” the name of Bram Stoker (1847-1912) is likely to be as immortal as his most famous creation, Count Dracula. It is just as likely that history will continue to view Stoker as a “one work wonder” even though he wrote and published a dozen novels and novellas, a number of short stories, and some non-fiction work.

The Lady of the Shroud (1909) is one of Stoker’s last works and its claim to fame is that in it he appears to be reverting to his successful supernatural, vampiric roots. Such really isn’t the case, however. There are some similarities to The Lady of the Shroud and Stoker’s earlier masterpiece. Both stories are told through a similar narrative structure—a series of letters and journal entries of various characters as well as through pseudo documents and news articles. Both have allusions to the undead. The beginning of The Lady of the Shroud opens with an excerpt from an “article” from the Journal of Occultism which includes a ghostly, vampire-like image of a woman who mysteriously appears to a crew at sea near the coastline only to then disappear.

The tone of the novel being established, The Lady of the Shroud then takes a drastic turn in a series of letters having to do with an incredible inheritance with some very unique conditions. Rupert Sent Leger is to inherit from his uncle Roger Melton “a fortune which has no equal in amount in Europe, even... amongst crowned heads.” In order to win the inheritance, however, Rupert must agree to “reside for a period of at least six months to begin not later than three months from the reading” of the will “in the Castle of Vissarion in the Land of the Blue Mountains” and in order to win the entire estate must “continue to reside there in part for a period of one year.” The letters setting the stage for future events in The Lady of the Shroud are slow reading and somewhat cumbersomely done although Stoker shows a flair for satire as he comically brings to life the elitism of the Melton family and their immense dislike of poor relations.

As he does in Dracula (with the otherwise minor character of Quincey Morris), Stoker creates a protagonist, Rupert Sent Leger, that is the ideal of heroism and masculinity (and with a physique similar to Stoker’s own).

Roger Melton is sure of his nephew’s future (especially given his inheritance) and states in a posthumous letter to his nephew that the battle-torn area of unrest, “the Blue Mountains” is Rupert’s “ground” upon which the young man will be able to prove himself.

It isn’t until Rupert journeys to Vissarion in Book II of The Lady of the Shroud that Stoker truly introduces his reader to the gothic aspects of his novel. Much like the homeland of Count Dracula, Vissarion is filled with beautiful yet rugged landscapes. The inhabitants of the area, Rupert declares, “are in reality the most primitive people I ever met—the most fixed to their own ideas, which belong to centuries back...” The people are “so proud, so haughty, so reserved, so distant, so absolutely fearless, so honourable, so hospitable.” It is also in Vissarion that Rupert first learns of the inexplicable mystery of the “dead woman floating in a coffin” from one of the eye-witnesses. Rupert writes to his Scottish Highlander Aunt Janet (who is going to join him at the castle) “that our new home is not without superstitious interests of its own. It is rather a nice idea, is it not, to have a dead woman cruising round our promontory in a coffin?” The castle (a typical Gothic archetype) Rupert inherits from his uncle is “so vast” that Rupert “can’t describe it in detail… the belief that this place is haunted, [is] conveyed in a thousand ways of speech and inference.” And then he meets “a ghost or spiritual manifestation of some kind which moved in [a] silent way”... the Lady in the Shroud.

Told as it is in the form of diary entries, letters, and diverse documents, the story of The Lady of the Shroud gets narrated by various voices and perspectives. This narrative format has events unravel slowly. Stoker is at his narrative best when he maintains longer diary or letter entries, allowing a single character to maintain the story-line for a period of time, a device he employs more once he has Rupert established in Vissarion. It is at this point, too, that the narrative begins to build momentum as Rupert becomes convinced that his ghostly visitor, for a variety of reasons (the least of which not being his life-long indoctrination into the occult from being told stories by his Aunt Janet) is a vampire— “one of that horrid race that survives death and carries on a life-in-death existence eternally and only for evil.” Complicating matters, Rupert has fallen in love with the Lady in the Shroud at nearly first sight—without even knowing her name.

Running parallel with the story of Rupert and the Lady in the Shroud (along with Aunt Janet’s distressing and ghastly “veesions” of death and disaster for her nephew) is the story of the “troubled and restless” mountaineers who fear invasion of their homeland by neighboring Turks. Thus, nights Rupert reserves for the Lady because “the night is her time of freedom” while the “days have been full of national movement” with “the mountaineers... evidently organizing themselves.”

Two-thirds of the way through The Lady of the Shroud Stoker spills the beans and the truth about who the Lady is (as well as what she is and the reason for her vampire-like behavior). At this point, Stoker’s novel takes a dramatic turn and becomes a story that resembles something much more from the pen of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells than from the noted creator of one of gothic horror’s greatest nightmares, Count Dracula. Fantastic, futuristic areoplanes and warships come into play as does nation building, allowing the “splendid land” of the fictitious Blue Mountains and its “freedom-loving people [to] flourish and become a power in [the] world.” Ironically, Stoker was writing this at a time when Europe was on the verge of catastrophe—World War I—and the story takes place in 1907-1908. Still, The Lady of the Shroud has an almost fairy-tale, story-book ending.

Undoubtedly, Stoker’s finest and most characteristic writing comes in the middle third of The Lady of the Shroud. During many portions of Rupert’s diary, Stoker evokes some of the same fear and imagery that readers are familiar with from Jonathan Harker’s journal in Dracula as he comes to realize the horrors that lurk for him in the Count’s castle as well as the hideous monster that is his host. In both works Stoker floods the reader with riveting, sensuous details that vividly bring the eerie setting to life. The last third of The Lady of the Shroud suffers in comparison to the middle section. The unbelievable mixture of near-primitive means of communication and hand-held weapons as compared to the almost science-fiction like elements of the plot create a difficult juxtaposition. Another small, but irksome curiosity is Aunt Janet’s Scottish accent. It is reproduced verbatim in Rupert’s journal (at times almost to the extent that the passages need translating), but when readers are treated to pages from Aunt Janet’s own diaries, her language is pretty much the same as everyone else’s whose “writing” appears in the novel with only an occasional run of dialect that comes and goes.

Less successful than Dracula, The Lady of the Shroud remains an intriguing tale and valuable to those who wish there was more of the master’s novel-length horror fiction to read. Curiously, The Lady of the Shroud has often been printed in edited versions. Valancourt Books presents the original unabridged text, with a new introduction by Sarah E. Maier, annotations, the text of contemporary reviews, a chronology of Bram Stoker's life and works, a bibliography, and Stoker's important 1908 article "The Censorship of Fiction."
Although this novel is a work of Bram Stoker's, it's hard to stick with because of the style he chose for writing it. The story is told through a series of letters written from the main character to his various family members and friends. The style was interesting at first but becomes tiresome after awhile.