Priscilla and Emily Lofft

PRISCILLA AND EMILY LOFFT by George Moore

“Priscilla had never seemed another being to her, but her second self, her shadow, her ghost, each akin to the other as the sound and its echo.”

While under the aegis and traditions of sense, sensibility and celibacy in some women of yore, this is possibly the strangest, most haunting, potentially most reasonless story I have ever read, and that includes some of the stories of Aickman himself. Ranging from Dublin to Aix, these two, self-sacrificing, close-knit twins become one twin through the death by cough of the other, and yet some uncanny written incantatory refrain of ‘In the garden’ left by the dead one leads to discovery of a ‘disgraceful’ book the latter had read and tried to hide, through shame, from others who might have found it in her possession. Or it, like this work itself, in possession of her? The surviving twin, upon realisation of this, proceeds to burn it page by page. A complex work by George Moore that I cannot remember ever reading or even hearing about before today. But I, for one, sensing it may never have existed till now, am certainly proud I found this story before it was too late to hide! And I wonder what sense can be made of its meaning by its own earlier question that asks whether “a benefit extended to all appeals to none in particular.”

“: within us one self is always mocking another self.”

Cf the man’s obliquely counterpoint syndrome in Clarimonde above: “From that night my nature seemed in some sort to have become halved, and there were two men within me, neither of whom knew the other.”

Full context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/12/27614/#comment-21738