The Witch of Prague

Name: The Witch of Prague
Author: F. Marion Crawford

The novel opens as the Wanderer, a grief-worn traveler, glimpses a woman he takes to be Beatrice—the beloved he lost years earlier after fever separated him from her and her secretive, wandering father—among the crowd at the Teyn Kirche in Prague. He pursues the fleeting, veiled figure through the frozen streets until she disappears into a strange triangular house, where he is admitted without question and finds Unorna, a beautiful, mismatched-eyed woman known as a witch, presiding over a hothouse conservatory. Unorna denies any connection to Beatrice and produces her ward, Axenia, who only faintly resembles the vision; convinced of his error, the Wanderer nonetheless finds himself oddly unable to resist Unorna's hypnotic gaze before departing to search hotels and police registers for Beatrice's name, all in vain. Wandering back toward the Teyn Kirche, he meets his old acquaintance Keyork Arabian, a gnomish, cynical philosopher obsessed with defeating death through embalming and life-prolongation experiments. Keyork reveals that Unorna practices real hypnotic power free of charge, and urges the Wanderer to consult her, while privately confiding to Unorna that the woman the Wanderer seeks died in Egypt years before and suggesting she "cure" him of his delusion through suggestion. Unorna, meanwhile, is entangled with Israel Kafka, a passionate young suitor she coldly hypnotizes into submission after rejecting his love, and with the ancient sleeping subject of her and Keyork's great life-extension experiment—a hundred-and-seven-year-old man kept in perpetual hypnotic lethargy in a mechanically elaborate sickroom. Unorna herself has fallen suddenly, violently in love with the Wanderer and consults her sleeping oracle, receiving what she takes as confirmation that he is destined to love her. Overcome by dread, the Wanderer wanders the icy streets convinced Beatrice is dead, until Unorna finds him and falsely promises to lead him to her living beloved. Using her hypnotic power, gained through touching his bare hand, she puts him under and methodically commands him to forget Beatrice entirely, insisting the beloved never existed. As she forces him to repeat the denial, a spectral, silent vision of Beatrice herself appears between them; the Wanderer cries out in agony that it is a lie, and collapses. Unorna and a watchman get him to Keyork Arabian's lodgings, a bizarre museum of embalmed and preserved corpses and specimens from Keyork's decades of research into immortality and the nature of the soul. Locked in by accident, Unorna suffers a terrifying interlude in which the dead specimens around her seem to groan, shriek, and move, while she frantically offers her own soul for assurance that the Wanderer is safe. Keyork returns to report that the Wanderer is safe and has indeed forgotten Beatrice, jokingly claiming Unorna's soul as payment—leaving Unorna's triumph shadowed by guilt and by Keyork's unresolved, obsessive speculations on death, vitality, and the soul, at which point the available text breaks off.

By F. Marion Crawford · First published 1891 · Genre: Gothic Fiction, Romance, Fantasy · 27 chapters · 160,047 words

First lines

A great multitude of people filled the church, crowded together in the old black pews, standing closely thronged in the nave and aisles, pressing shoulder to shoulder even in the two chapels on the right and left of the apse, a vast gathering of pale men and women whose eyes were sad and in whose faces was written the history of their nation. The mighty shafts and pilasters of the Gothic edifice rose like the stems of giant trees in a primeval forest from a dusky undergrowth, spreading out and uniting their stony branches far above in the upper gloom. From the clerestory windows of the nave an uncertain light descended halfway to the depths and seemed to float upon the darkness below as oil upon the water of a well. Over the western entrance the huge fantastic organ bristled with blackened pipes and dusty gilded ornaments of colossal size, like some enormous kingly crown long forgotten in the lumber room of the universe, tarnished and overlaid with the dust of ages.

What this Textopian page supports

The Witch of Prague is listed on Textopian as a novel by F. Marion Crawford, dated 1891 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Work type: Novel
Author: F. Marion Crawford
Date: 1891 CE
Language: English
Genres: Gothic Fiction, Romance, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Psychological Fiction
Length: 160,047 words
Structure: 27 chapters, 2,821 paragraphs
Reading fit: Very Easy (5th Grade or below)

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Discussion starters

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Similar titles

Genres

Gothic Fiction — The book features dark themes, supernatural elements, and a brooding atmosphere typical of Gothic literature.
Romance — The central plot revolves around the Wanderer's love for Beatrice and his quest to find her, highlighting themes of love and longing.
Fantasy — Elements of magic and the supernatural, particularly through the character of Unorna, contribute to a fantastical narrative.
Historical Fiction — Set in Prague, the story incorporates historical references and cultural elements of the time.