tremendousdetectivetheorist:artemisastarte:granada-brett-crumbs:Jeremy January » in Mystery and Imag
tremendousdetectivetheorist:artemisastarte:granada-brett-crumbs:Jeremy January » in Mystery and Imagination: The Lost Stradivarius (1966) as Sir John Maltravers, an aristocratic young man who falls disastrously under the evil fascination of an old violin. (source)I’ve just found The Lost Stradivarius on Project Gutenberg, and read it through. An interesting high-Victorian novel, with a female narrator and a strongly homoerotic theme.A sister relates the story of her brother, a young man who lives in terms of close intimacy with another young man with whom he plays violin and piano duets, until he finds a violin which bespells him into an obsession with its previous (now dead) male owner who was an evil rake. He then meets and initially falls in love with a pretty girl, who is related to the evil rake, (whose portrait adorns the walls of her ancestral home) and who even shares the same features. He marries her and takes her to Italy on honeymoon to where the evil rake lived. He falls out of love with her and into an obsession with ghost of evil rake and evil rake’s violin, then takes his wife back to England to be near the portrait of the evil rake. He can’t settle there, so returns to Italy where (accompanied by a beautiful young man who is his servant) he plays obsessively upon evil rake’s violin in the house where evil rake died, until he is worn out and dying. Meanwhike his wife dies in childbed. Sometime later, on the point of dying, the protagonist is rescued and taken home by his sister, the narrator. She attempts to restore him to health, but he dies having spent the night in a trance playing the violin to the portrait of the evil rake. It’s a typically Victorian and complicated plot, but what’s especially interesting is the homoerotic subtext. One can listen to the audio on youtube! The quality is…not bad, for what it is. artemisastarte’s summary helped me follow the story. -- source link