THE MAN WHO HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS by Helen de Guerry Simpson

“He was no longer gracefully strong as the room was accustomed to see him, for he had forgotten to adjust that other appearance which here was his, and the clumsy and angular figure with which his mirror in the real world was familiar had leave to show itself.”

This a writerly tour de force that no review could possibly do justice to. A story about writer’s block? Paradoxically gauche, too, but inspiring what I dream to be a Big Book of Gauche Stories, Ghost characters that grow and flourish — and fight back at the author, or ironically with whom the author or his protagonist is in unrequited love, and this one is about a man with only one friend called Philip but a whole imaginative life whereby he created a real terrain with a woman who lives by having this written fiction about her, whence she then becomes autonomous. He seeks to retrieve the sole manuscript from the friend to whom he had sent it for comment, to reclaim the woman he had created… unless I have clumsily, if creatively, misinterpreted it all!
There is so much more in this work, and I guess its male author as fiction character has been effectively created by a female author, and here we experience a description of her being the one he truly seeks so as to reclaim her or to melt back into her or somehow to punish or even to love her without unrequitedness, the Guerry de Guerre and its rapprochements between fiction and reality?

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Context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/27/the-outcast-and-the-rite-helen-de-guerry-simpson/#comment-26460