"The great English prose work has been written and perfectly written and you and I would do well to lay down our pens. . . . I believe that the worst page of prose Pater wrote is better than the best that anybody else ever wrote." - George Moore

Set in the second century A.D. against the backdrop of a Roman Empire on the verge of decline, "Marius the Epicurean" is the story of the philosophical and spiritual development of Marius, a young Italian serving as amanuensis to the great emperor Marcus Aurelius. Marius explores the various systems of philosophy in search of an elusive vision of love, moving from Epicureanism to Cyrenaicism and finally Stoicism before finally finding what he had sought in the terrible beauty of Christian martyrdom.

"Marius the Epicurean" is the rare novel that is as significant for its style as for its plot. Told in Pater's uniquely exquisite and poetic prose, "Marius" became a profound influence on writers of the Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the late Victorian era, including Pater's former student, Oscar Wilde. It is also an important forerunner of the psychological novels of Joyce, Woolf, James, and Conrad, all of whom absorbed into their fictional techniques Pater's emphasis on the rendering of impressions and his presentation of character and point of view.

This new edition, the first in over two decades, is based on the first edition of 1885 and features a new introduction and notes by Pater specialist Gerald Monsman. Also included is a generous selection of supplementary materials, such as contemporary reviews and excerpts from Pater's manuscripts, some of which are published here for the first time.

" A] book of strange adventures, of ghostly, nightmare visions; you will want to read it at a sitting, but do not begin it at bedtime unless your nerves are in a thoroughly healthy condition" - "The Reader"
" Q]uite a remarkable book . . . Mr. Henham has the exceptional gift of lending an atmosphere of reality to the fantastic. . . . Some people will find the book enthralling: others may pronounce it quite mad, but everyone must recognise its undeniable cleverness." - "The Outlook"
"This strange story . . . has a tropical luxuriance of imagination quite unusual in works by English writers . . . an atmosphere of eeriness and mystery strongly reminiscent of Poe. The plot is clever, the characters well-drawn; but it is in his power to create an atmosphere of vagueness and suggestion that Mr. Henham may be said to possess something very like genius." - "The Publisher"
In the remote hamlet of Thorlund stands the manor house known as the Strath, an eerie place that exercises a mysterious hold over anyone who enters it. The site of tragedy in 1742 when its owner, Sir John Hooper, turned highwayman and met his death on the gallows, the Strath has remained vacant for over a century, a pair of hideous masks its only occupants. When the novel opens, the Strath's new owner has just arrived from America to take possession of the house, but he is soon found horribly murdered. Now the next heir, young Charles Conway, has come to the Strath, and the house begins to work its baneful influence on him and on the local residents, causing them to behave in bizarre and violent ways. What is the connection between the sinister power of the Strath and the ghastly masks that adorn the wall? And once Conway and the others are drawn within the evil place, can any of them possibly survive?
"One of England's lost novelists, a writer of startling abilities" ("Times Literary Supplement"), Ernest G. Henham, who also published under the pseudonym "John Trevena," was the author of bizarre Gothic fantasies such as "Tenebrae" (1898) and "The Feast of Bacchus" (1907), as well as a number of unusual and highly imaginative works set in Dartmoor. This first-ever republication of Henham's novel includes a new introduction by Gerald Monsman.

"It would be difficult to find a novel more unusual or more original. That it is beautifully written, full of poetic passages, and contains many fascinating descriptions ...] will be regarded as a matter of course by those who have read any of his] preceding books, and therefore know that John Trevena is unquestionably one of the most notable of living writers." - "New York Times," Jan. 10, 1915
"The construction of the book is very artistic and is difficult to accomplish, but apart from its structural merits 'Sleeping Waters' has high value. ...] Our admiration for this author has been expressed over and over again. There is grasp and reach and power in his] books ...] and they are books that place their author among the foremost of the English novelists." - "Los Angeles Times," Feb. 21, 1915
"The story is magnificently told. . . . The vividness and monstrosity of the characters remind one of the Brontes." - "Chicago Tribune," Jan. 13, 1915
""Sleeping Waters" is a unique novel, and it discloses still further and more emphatically the genius of John Trevena." - "Boston Transcript," Jan. 13, 1915
Father John Anger is worn down from a hard life as a Catholic priest ministering to the poor of London's slums. He travels to a remote village in Dartmoor seeking to recover his health by means of the salubrious air and medicinal waters, and he anticipates a long and tedious convalescence in the sleepy place. But Anger soon finds that despite the village's rustic appearance, it holds as much drama and tragedy as even London. Curgenven, a humpbacked dwarf and scheming attorney, has a diabolical plot to steal the ignorant villagers' land and resell it at a huge profit. Anger resolves to thwart the lawyer's plan, but he is not prepared for the dangerous secrets he will uncover, or the violent climax that his interference will provoke. . . .
Ernest G. Henham (1870-1946) published melodramatic popular novels as a young man before moving to Dartmoor for his health and reinventing himself as "John Trevena." Trevena was regarded as one of the finest novelists of his time, but today he has fallen into total neglect, and his books are all but unobtainable. This 100th anniversary edition of "Sleeping Waters" (1913) includes a new introduction by Prof. Gerald Monsman, who argues for reconsideration of Trevena as an important Edwardian writer and regional novelist as significant as Thomas Hardy.

The narrator of "Tenebrae" inhabits a decaying, desolate mansion in the remote and wild countryside with his younger brother and their mad old uncle, driven insane by abuse of opium and alcohol. This nameless narrator is a morbid young man who passes most of his time in a room painted all black, poring over arcane manuscripts dealing with the mysteries of death, while sipping garishly coloured liquors brewed by his uncle or cups of coffee flavoured with arsenic.
When he falls in love with a neighbour, he looks forward to marrying her and trading his life of despondency for one of joy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, she finds him rather unpleasant company and instead falls in love with his brother. Driven to murderous jealousy, he resolves upon a brutal crime. But after the consummation of his terrible act, he finds himself haunted by a huge, monstrous spider. Is it a delusion brought on by incipient madness? the reincarnated soul of his murdered victim, returned for vengeance? or does it foretell a fate even more horrifying than can be possibly imagined?
Published in 1898, at the end of a decade in which English writers explored the literary possibilities of the Gothic with such characters as Dorian Gray, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, and The Beetle, Ernest G. Henham's weird horror novel "Tenebrae" is reminiscent of the works of Poe. Perhaps unequalled in its extreme darkness and gloom, and yet at times grimly, though possibly unintentionally, hilarious, "Tenebrae" remains one of the strangest productions of this fertile literary period. This newly typeset edition includes the unabridged text of the first edition, as well as an introduction and notes by Gerald Monsman, the foremost scholar of Henham (1870-1946), who later published under the name John Trevena. Also featured is a reproduction of the cover of the incredibly scarce first edition.

Picking up where "The King's Assegai" (1894) left off, "The White Shield" (1895) continues the story of Untuswa, the young Zulu warrior, now one of the chief indunas to King Umzilikazi.

The Ndebele people, now an established and prosperous nation, seek to expand their power by conquering neighbouring peoples, but Umzilikazi and Untuswa face a number of dangers. Within the tribe, a conspiracy is brewing to overthrow them, and meanwhile, the young Ndebele nation risks destruction from external forces, such as white Boer settlers and the ferocious Zulu army. With the help of the king's fabled white shield and two "sorcerers"-a white missionary priest and a beautiful young Zulu woman-Untuswa will face the threats looming against his people and attempt once again to win victory and honour.

The second of Mitford's tetralogy of novels peopled entirely by Zulu characters, "The White Shield" is a thrilling tale of war, love, and magic that remains as exciting today as when first published. This edition includes a new introduction by the foremost Mitford scholar, Gerald Monsman, as well as notes and contextual appendices.

Gaston De Latour is the first volume in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for its own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life. Everywhere creating themes and resonances that span his narrative, the author's voice in Gaston de Latour is intensely personal; and the reader's experience is intimate, almost invasive. Although unfinished and first posthumously published in 1896, the novel was hailed by Richard Le Gallienne 'as sensitively beautiful as in his most perfect work, as rich in delicate colour and music, and as remarkable for exquisite detail.' This edition includes six additional suppressed chapters by Pater of varying degrees of completeness as a continuation of his interrupted originally-serialized text. This revised text (now a third longer than the posthumously published edition) appears here accompanied by a scholarly Introduction, Explanatory Annotation, and Apparatus Criticus. As it now stands, Pater's never-to-be-completed Gaston de Latour seems very much to belong to artistic modernism, like a 'conceptual' work of art-an idea not formally actualized but open to ranges of realization in the process of creation.