The Enchanted Castle

The Enchanted Castle, originally published in 1846, and here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is author Alphonse Esquiros' quintessential tale of magnetism. A hybrid transfiguration, the short novel combines the key motif of the story nowadays known in English as "The Sleeping Beauty" with the legend of Pygmalion and Galatea, and carefully includes further analogies to the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. As an exemplar of the original core of Romantic prose fiction, The Enchanted Castle is as remarkable for its purity as it is for its flamboyance and is not merely typical of the fiction of the Romantic Movement but archetypal, unusual only in its extremism.