Melmoth the Wanderer

Maturin’s sprawling 1820 masterwork follows a scholar who has bargained away his soul for a hundred and fifty additional years and now roams the earth trying to persuade someone in utter misery to take the pact off his hands. Through a series of nested stories, tales opening inside other tales, he appears to prisoners of the Inquisition, asylum inmates, shipwreck survivors, and the desperate, always offering escape at a price no one will pay. The structure is dizzying and the mood relentlessly dark, a late high point of the Gothic tradition. Oscar Wilde later borrowed the name for his own exile. It is offered here as a free PDF and EPUB.