In Perry’s version of the story, she turns the titular figure into a woman: Melmoth the Witness, otherwise known as Melmotte or Melmotka, “cursed to wander the earth without home or respite. Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) told the story of a man trapped in peripatetic purgatory after trading his soul for 150 years of extra life. Melmoth, meanwhile, re-writes an early 19 th -century Gothic classic for the modern age. The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry’s last book – which was a Sunday Times number one bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Year 2016 – reads like a long lost fin-de-siècle Gothic classic.
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