''The Stark Munro Letters'' is a novel by British author

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for '' A Study in Scarlet'', the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Ho ...

first published in 1895 by Longmans, Green & Co. in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

, England.

Background

The book is heavily autobiographical, depicting Conan Doyle's relationship with his parents and his emerging interest in spirituality. It incorporates material he wrote early in 1891 on his rejection of Catholicism in favour of spiritualism. The book was rewritten and collated at the Swiss health spa of Davos, where his wife was recuperating from an illness. This was shortly after he had published "

The Final Problem "The Final Problem" is a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring his detective character Sherlock Holmes. It was first published in ''The Strand Magazine'' in the United Kingdom, and ''McClure's'' in the United States, under the title ...

", the story in which he killed off Sherlock Holmes; in writing ''The Stark Munro Letters'' he was attempting to expand his career in a more literary direction. In a letter to his mother dated 23 January 1894, he wrote that "It will make a religious sensation if not a literary - possibly both. I really don't think a young man's life has been gone into so deeply in English literature before."

Synopsis

As an

epistolary novel An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of letters. The term is often extended to cover novels that intersperse documents of other kinds with the letters, most commonly diary entries and newspaper clippings, and sometimes considered ...

it takes the form of twelve long letters written by J. Stark Munro between March 1881 and November 1884 and sent to his friend Herbert Swanborough of

Lowell, Massachusetts Lowell () is a city in Massachusetts, in the United States. Alongside Cambridge, It is one of two traditional seats of Middlesex County. With an estimated population of 115,554 in 2020, it was the fifth most populous city in Massachusetts as of ...

. Stark Munro is a recent graduate from medical school, and the letters, in part, detail his attempts to create a medical practice in partnership with the brilliant but unorthodox James Cullingworth—a narrative based on Doyle's experiences in Plymouth with Doctor George Turnavine Budd ( medical doctor), before he set up his own practice in Southsea, Portsmouth in 1882.

Mention in James Joyce's Ulysses

''The Stark-Munro Letters'' by A. Conan Doyle is mentioned in the "Ithaca" chapter of ''Ulysses''.The book ''The Stark-Munro Letters'', property of the City of Dublin Public Library and indicated as 13 days overdue, appears in a list of 22 books found on pages 660 to 662 of the 1st edition of ''Ulysses''. See

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Stark Munro Letters, The 1895 British novels Novels by Arthur Conan Doyle Fiction set in 1881 Fiction set in 1884 Novels set in the 1880s Epistolary novels