Original language: English
Original title: The Statement of Stella Maberly
Translation: Cris García?
Year of publication: 1897
Valuation: Recommended (with nuances)
Stella Maberly’s statementa novel of barely two hundred pages that the writer Thomas Anstey Guthrie published under the pseudonym F. Anstey, is very interesting. A Victorian classic in every rule, its love for the gothic and the psychological gives it a certain originality and thickness.
Although it takes place in opulent and open British settings, it has an accomplished yet subtle sordid and claustrophobic atmosphere. It is about Stella, with whose sullen temperament and perverse character she alienates others and martyrs herself. Stella works as a companion to an old school classmate, the beautiful, generous and rich Evelyn. One day, Hugh, a handsome and wealthy acquaintance of Evelyn’s, begins to hang out with both young women. This worries Stella, because she believes that she will lose her only friend if she marries Hugh, and at the same time it stirs the jealousy and envy that she has always felt towards her.
The story is narrated to us retrospectively in the first person by Stella herself. Although Stella tries to convince us of the veracity of her words and point of view, we soon realize that we should not trust her: between the lines we guess a hint of madness and we recognize a desperate attempt to convince others and herself with regarding his innocence in the terrible fate of Evelyn and Hugh.
Certainly, the secondary characters of Stella Maberly’s statement They are somewhat simple. To the linearity of her characterizations we must add that her way of being is intrinsically implausible: Evelyn puts Stella’s happiness before her own and is excessively devoted to her, Mrs. Maitland is an ingenue incapable of intuiting the perversity of the lady-in-waiting. of his niece and Hugh is too gentlemanly a suitor. Although Anstey is aware of this and captures it in his own text: for example, Stella says of Mrs. Maitland that “I might have expected her to regard me as a rival and to treat me with some reserve, if not repressed hostility, but her greeting He was as cordial as he was obviously sincere” (pg. 31).
Be that as it may, the supporting cast does not weigh down the story, since Stella alone supports it on her shoulders. And her contradictory voice and her Dostoyevskian psychology make her a most memorable, complex and fascinating figure, with whom it is very easy to sympathize despite her many defects (or perhaps thanks to them).
Maybe it lacks a little ambiguity Stella Maberly’s statementsince, in my opinion, it is quite clear that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator who suffers from a psychiatric disorder. Be that as it may, his perception of an Evelyn possessed by a gloomy demon seems so sincere that the supernatural element, although apparently fictional, is extremely clear, which will delight horror lovers.
In summary: I recommend Stella Maberly’s statement. If your interpretation is similar to mine, you will find an entertaining, disturbing and well-written suspense novel seasoned with a perverse and unreliable protagonist, jealousy, rivalry, obsession, paranoia and criminal rationalizations. Although perhaps you belong to those who opt for an also interesting, more ambiguous horror work, in which demonic possession and revenge are recounted.
Finally, I would like to talk about the edition of Stella Maberly’s statement that I have read. It belongs to Beetruvian, a publishing house that fell into disgrace due to a controversy that accused it of not employing translators in its publications (and the truth is that Anstey’s work, although it credits a certain Cris García, presents a translation whose style, although has never taken me out of the story, it often seems suspiciously forced or redundant). Which is a shame, because both the Beetruvian catalog and its graphics are tremendously attractive. I hope that, if the accusations leveled against the publisher are true, they rectify it in time and continue bringing us unique gems like the one I mentioned today, although pampering the content of their works as much as they do with their continent.
Source: https://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2024/11/f-anstey-la-declaracion-de-stella.html
