Fragment of Life

Perhaps Arthur Machen’s single most successful novella, A Fragment of Life tells the story of Edward and Mary Darnell and their transition from an everyday, materialistic London life, through to an ecstatic state of wonder. For the first time since its publication in the Horlicks Magazine, we also print the original, very different, final chapter.

‘A Fragment of Life’ ..., in its particular way, is almost perfect—tender, true, intimate, and restrained—in its exhibition of how a small suburban clerk and his wife came to awake from their dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, and of weary, useless little things, and saw the things that really mattered in life, with the result that ‘the voices of men and women came to sound with strange notes, with the echo rather of music that came over unknown hills’. Its mystical qualities are both rare and beautiful, and, as a work of art alone, it deserves to live. - The Standard