Press archive
The Lamia Legend
18 September 1912 · Otago Witness
Estate summary
Jessie Mackay traces the serpent-woman through classical legend, European folklore, Keats and Oliver Wendell Holmes before turning to Bram’s treatment. Her final paragraph describes an inhuman woman associated with an ancient snake-haunted landscape, without naming The Lair of the White Worm. Mackay finds Bram’s horror less artistically softened than that of her literary comparisons. The article is therefore useful as an early critical response to his later fiction within a wider history of the Lamia. It calls his novel posthumous, although The Lair of the White Worm was published in 1911, before his death; the Estate does not repeat that description as fact.
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