SALOME AND THE HEAD
A Modern Melodrama
aka The House With No Address
by Edith Nesbit (1858–1924)
First published 1909. The text of this book is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.
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Edith Nesbit Bland, English author and poet, is best known for her innovative writing for children. Later in her career she also wrote for adults, publishing several novels and numerous short stories.
Young Alexandra becomes a celebrated professional dancer in London, and hides away from her public in a secret house, together with her old nurse and a devoted childhood friend. She meets and falls in love with Edmund, but their plans are put awry by the reappearance of her husband (from an unconsummated “mock” marriage in her adolescence), demanding money for his silence. Then comes a performance in which she dances Salome – not with a prop “head” of John the Baptist, but the severed head of her murdered husband.
“Sandra/Sylvia” is loosely based on Maud Allan (1873–1956), an interpretive dancer famed for her perfomance of Salome (based on the play by Oscare Wilde).
Subtitled “A Modern Melodrama,” this macabre tale is indeed almost outrageously dramatic in some aspects – but the wry authorial commentary throughout keeps the pot at a lively simmer, without letting it (quite) boil over.
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Text obtained from archive.org. Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations by Spenser Pryse (1882–1956) were omitted. Punctuation, diacritics, and italics have been formatted; some spelling and punctuation modernized / standardized. Punctuation in this version is quite different to "The House With No Address." Embedded fonts for titling and small-caps.
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If you've only read Nesbit's childrens books, you are in for a surprise.
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