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  A Witch's Den - A look into the...

  Helena Blavatsky

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  Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, often known as Madame Blavatsky, was born on 12th August 1831 into an aristocratic family in present day Dnipro in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire.  She was the younger sister of the writer Vera Zhelikhovsky. 
   
  Much of Blavatsky’s life story relies on her own memories which changed much during her lifetime and therefore parts of it are unreliable.  What appears to be certain is that much of her life was lived first on family travels and postings and then on her journeys in an effort to further her own self-education and quest for knowledge. 
   
  As a teenager she developed an interest in Western esotericism and from there she claimed many travels including a trip to India where she encountered a group of spiritual adepts, the ‘Masters of the Ancient Wisdom’, who sent her to Shigatse, Tibet, where they trained her to develop a deeper understanding of the synthesis of religion, philosophy, and science.  
   
  By the early 1870s, Blavatsky was involved in the Spiritualist movement, which was then popular both in Britain and abroad, even though she argued against its main tenet that those ‘contacted’ were the spirits of the dead.  
   
  She moved to the United States in 1873 and became close to the journalist Henry Steel Olcott who helped her gain public attention as a spirit medium and then also became an adherent to her principles.   
   
  In 1875 in New York City she co-founded the Theosophical Society and two years later published ‘Isis Unveiled’, a book outlining her Theosophical world-view from its ancient roots to the modern day.  Her work was even more popular in Asia than elsewhere and is said to have influenced both Ghandi and Nehru amongst many others.  
   
  In 1880, she and Olcott moved to India, where the Society was allied to a Hindu reform movement.  That same year she converted to Buddhism.  However, she was often plagued with accusations of fraudulent paranormal phenomena.  
   
  With her health failing she returned to London and published ‘The Secret Doctrine’, her commentary on claimed ancient Tibetan manuscripts, and other books.  
   
  Helena Blavatsky died in London of influenza during the global pandemic on 8th May 1891.  She was 59.

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  Benito Cereno

  Herman Melville

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  Benito Cereno is a novella by Herman Melville, a fictionalized account about the revolt on a Spanish slave ship captained by Don Benito Cereno, first published in three installments in Putnam's Monthly in 1855.

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  The Narrow Corner

  W. Somerset Maugham

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  The Narrow Corner is a novel by the British writer W. Somerset Maugham, published by William Heinemann in 1932.A quote from Meditations, iii 10, by Marcus Aurelius, introduces the work: "Short therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells." In the story, set "a good many years ago" in what is now Indonesia, a young Australian, cruising the islands after his involvement in a murder in Sydney, has a passionate affair on an island which causes a further tragedy.William Somerset Maugham was an English playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.Both Maugham's parents died before he was 10, and the orphaned boy was raised in Whitstable, Kent by a paternal uncle, who was emotionally cold. He did not want to become a lawyer like other men in his family, so he trained and qualified as a physician. His first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. In 1915 he wrote Of Human Bondage, widely considered his masterpiece.During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service. He worked for the service in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire. During and after the war, he travelled in India, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He drew from those experiences in his later short stories and novels.

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  Marriage à la Mode

  Katherine Mansfield

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  Marriage à la Mode is a 1921 short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in The Sphere on 31 December 1921, and later reprinted in The Garden Party and Other Stories. - The title is a play on the phrase mariage à la mode in French, which means 'fashionable marriage'.
  William would usually buy his children sweets because he knows his wife won't let him buy them 'big donkeys and engines', as that would be unseemly. This time he buys fruit instead.

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  Gabriel-Ernest - From their pens...

  Saki Saki

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  Hector Hugh Munro, more familiarly known by his pen-name ‘Saki’ was born in what was then Akyab in British Burma on 18th December 1870. His father was an Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police, and his mother the daughter of a Rear Admiral. 
  When he was 2 his mother died and he and his siblings were sent back to England to be raised by their grandmother and paternal maiden aunts in a strict, puritanical household near Barnstaple, Devon. Educated by governesses Saki used many of these women as character models for his later writing. 
  At 17 his father retried and returned to England and then embarked on a series of European travels with Saki and his siblings. 
  After a short stint working in Burma with the Indian Imperial Police Saki decided to move to London to make a living as a writer. Initially he wrote as a journalist for a number of newspapers and magazines before attempting an historical study, ‘The Rise of the Russian Empire’, whose real value lay in directing him to writing short stories instead, the first of which, ‘Dogged’, he published in 1899. 
  From here it was a short stab of the pen to writing political satire before in 1902 he became the foreign correspondent for The Morning Post, first in the Balkans, then Russia, Paris and back to London in 1908, where 'the agreeable life of a man of letters with a brilliant reputation awaited him.'  
  Collections of his short stories full of witty, mischievous and often macabre stories that satirized Edwardian society and two novels now appeared in the years up to the Great War.  At its’ outbreak he was 43 but managed to join as an ordinary trooper. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially too sick or injured.  
  On 14th November 1916 Hector Hugh Munro was sheltering in crater during the Battle of the Ancre, when he was shot and killed by a German sniper. According to several sources, his last words were "Put that bloody cigarette out!"

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  Going to Sea a Hundred Years Ago...

  R. J. Cleveland

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  In the ordinary course of a commercial education, in New England, boys are transferred from school to the merchant's desk at the age of fourteen or fifteen. When I had reached my fourteenth year it was my good fortune to be received into the counting-house of Elias Hasket Derby, Esq., of Salem; a merchant, who may justly be termed the father of the American commerce to India; one whose enterprise and commercial sagacity were unequalled in his day, and, perhaps, have not been surpassed by any of his successors. To him our country is indebted for opening the valuable trade to Calcutta; before whose fortress his was the first vessel to display the American flag; and, following up the business, he had reaped golden harvests before other merchants came in for a share of them.

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