The Mystery of a Turkish Bath

by Rita

Pages: 81

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Read by Bev J Stevens · 3 h 53 min · 15 parts

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Introduction and The First Room
28:53
The Second Room
8:56
The Cooling Room
23:26
Conjectures
14:00
Love
15:22
Enchantment
16:37
Curiosity
14:00
Surprise
9:44
Discussion
10:39
Premonition
13:24
The Dream
14:38
Effects
13:45
A Promise
10:38
The Dream Interpreted
25:41
Expiation
13:42

The Mystery of a Turkish Bath (1888) is a public domain work.

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About this book

Rita, the pen name of the prolific Victorian novelist E. M. Gollan, sets this short novel in a grand seaside hotel in Hampshire, built by speculators who hoped to lure English invalids away from Wiesbaden and the Riviera. It opens one December morning in the hotel's Turkish bath, where a handful of ladies nurse their gout and neuralgia and trade remarks about their complexions.

Into this idle company walks a strikingly beautiful woman, a princess by marriage to an elderly and very rich Russian prince. Colonel Estcourt, another guest, knew her as a child and had once expected to marry her. Her displays of occult power feed the guests' arguments about spiritualism, mediums and slate writing, and tempt a few guests to ask her to teach them.

Rita mixes sharp social comedy, such as the ladies' fuss over bath costumes and a sceptic exposing the tricks of fake mediums, with a darkening story of the supernatural. It will appeal to readers of Victorian ghost and occult fiction who enjoy a tale that takes its debates about the afterlife seriously.