Stark Munro Letters

James Machin is an associate researcher at Birkbeck, University of London. His editorial work includes British Weird Tales (Handheld Press, 2020), Faunus: the Decorative Imagination of Arthur Machen (Strange Attractor, 2019), Of Mud and Flame: a Penda’s Fen Sourcebook (Strange Attractor, 2019), a special edition of Textual Practice on weird fiction (31:6, 2017), ’Twixt Dog and Wolf (1901) by C. F. Keary (Valancourt Books, 2017), Arthur Machen’s The Cosy Room and other stories (Tartarus Press, 2016), and co-editing Arthur Machen’s 1890s Notebook (Tartarus Press, 2016). Since 2013 he has been editor and co-editor of Faunus, the journal of the Arthur Machen society, and he has also been an editorial assistant on the Birkbeck journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. He has published work—including a monograph and peer-reviewed essays and chapters—on the Gothic, supernatural, and decadent and fin-de-siècle literature and culture, and in 2017, he undertook a six-month research project on representations of brain surgery in Victorian fiction, with a grant from the Birkbeck/Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund.

• General Editor’s PrefaceAcknowledgementsChronology of the Life of Arthur Conan DoyleIntroductionThe Stark Munro LettersAn Essay on the TextAppendicesApparatusAbbreviationsGeneral principlesEmendations and VariationsExplanatory Notes

An impressively responsible scholarly edition of a work which, with its intertwining of medicine, memoir, and malfeasance, is likely to become increasingly important to Victorian Scholars. Machin carefully assembles biographical, cultural, and historical contexts, offering thoughtful discussions of its genre, cultural moment, and position in Conan Doyle's oeuvre.