Sir H Rider Haggard

Stella Fregelius Sir H Rider Haggard

As the title suggests, Stella Fregelius: a Tale of Three Destinies is a story of the overlapping fates of 3 people in a northern coastal region of England. The story follows Morris Monk, an aspiring inventor, as he gets engaged to his first cousin, Mary Porson, and soon complicates things by falling in love with the daughter of the new church rector, Stella Fregelius. As Morris has prior engagements in this lifetime, he and Stella dedicate their afterlives to one another in a spiritual marriage. Shortly after, Stella dies and Morris spends the next few years trying to contact her spirit before dying of exhaustion. At the beginning of the story, Morris is toiling with his biggest invention: the aerophone. In a form that resembles the earliest phones, Morris designed the aerophone in an attempt to revolutionise the world of communication by allowing two people to speak to each other from miles apart. Morris spent 6 years on it before getting it to work. After its initial success, however, he couldn't repeat the results, so he spends the next two years trying to make the finishing touches. Meanwhile, Morris' father, Colonel Monk, is struggling with the mortgage on the Monksland Estate.