Books with author J. Meade Falkner

A story of ghosts and the evil that can be in an object, in this case an extremely fine Stradivarius violin. After finding the violin in a hidden compartment in his college rooms, a wealthy young heir becomes increasingly secretive as well as obsessed by a particular piece of music, which seems to have the power to call up the ghost of the violin's previous owner. Roaming from England to Italy, the story involves family love, lordly depravity, and the tragedy of obsession...

Set in Oxford and Naples during the 1840s, The Lost Stradivarius is a tale of demonic possession and of the terrible price paid by "those who would exalt art at the expense of everything else." Though long recognized as a classic and gripping story of the occult, it is also a work which touches the "decadent" years of the nineteenth century at sensitive points--the psychical, the moral, and the aesthetic. This is the only annotated edition available and it contains extensive notes about the Aesthetic Movement, neoplatonism, and musical instruments.

The village of Moonfleet lies half a mile from the sea on the right or west bank of the Fleet stream. This rivulet, which is so narrow as it passes the houses that I have known a good jumper clear it without a pole, broadens out into salt marshes below the village, and loses itself at last in a lake of brackish water. The lake is good for nothing except sea-fowl, herons, and oysters, and forms such a place as they call in the Indies a lagoon; being shut off from the open Channel by a monstrous great beach or dike of pebbles, of which I shall speak more hereafter. When I was a child I thought that this place was called Moonfleet, because on a still night, whether in summer, or in winter frosts, the moon shone very brightly on the lagoon; but learned afterwards that 'twas but short for 'Mohune-fleet', from the Mohunes, a great family who were once lords of all these parts. My name is John Trenchard, and I was fifteen years of age when this story begins. My father and mother had both been dead for years, and I boarded with my aunt, Miss Arnold, who was kind to me in her own fashion, but too strict and precise ever to make me love her.