The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs

The brass plate at Mrs. Battleby's Soho lodging-house announces Signor Ricardo, Professor of the Italian Language. His landlady tells the neighbours he is a Mystery: an exiled gentleman with a Vandyke beard, confiscated estates and almost no money at all. With his friend Steinberg he has found Hannah Stubbs, an ordinary young servant with extraordinary powers, and the two men set about developing them by means that are not entirely honest.

A séance meant to test the unseen becomes an obsession, and the young woman at its centre begins a transformation no one can explain. Florence Marryat wrote about spiritualism from the inside, and her novel turns Victorian society, jealousy and the ethics of experiment into psychological suspense.