Marahuna, a romance was written by H.B. Marriott Watson. Henry Brereton Marriott Watson (1863-1921), born an Australian, made his success in England as a writer of historical romances and supernatural fiction.

Marahuna begins with a nautical expedition searching for the South Pole. After encountering many obstacles the ship breaks through to an open polar sea which grows increasingly warm and full of life as it draws closer to the Pole. But the Pole itself this ringed by a circle of flaming water, and the heat of the water is too much for those on the ship. They are about to return to Chile when the narrator, an annoying and none-too-bright man named Percy Grayhurst, sees a beautiful blonde woman, wearing a strange red dress, floating toward the ship in a skiff. He rescues her and then faints from the heat, but not before hearing her murmur the word “Marahuna,” which becomes the name she is known by. When she revives she is unable to talk, and the decision is made to take her back to England, with Grayhurst assigning himself as her guardian. In England Marahuna learns English, although she never becomes completely comfortable with it, and Grayhurst introduces her to his friends and family. Marahuna has no memory of her past and cannot explain anything about herself, and she is so alien in manner that her adjustment to English society is only very gradual. But despite her odd manner she is so beautiful that other men fall in love with her, although she does not reciprocate their feelings in any way. After various misadventures she falls in love with Grayhurst, or seems to, and out of jealousy she murders Grayhurst's fiancée. Grayhurst, who is infatuated with her but also afraid of her, decides to leave England with her so that the English police will not jail her for the murder. Marahuna and Grayhurst go on the run. They end up in Hawaii, where Marahuna dies, or kills herself, in the Kilauea volcano, her end as unexplained and mystifying as her never-delineated origins.

Although it is still readable, Marahuna is most interesting for of its portrayal of the title character. She is legitimately Other. Marahuna is human-looking, but emotions are wholly alien to her, and when one of Grayhurst’s friends, a nobleman smitten with Marahuna, drowns in front of her, she takes no actions to save him, because she is busy examining some water lilies. She is aware that the man is drowning, but finds the flowers more important. Concepts like “love,” “hate,” and “sorrow” are meaningless to Marahuna, and there are several interesting conversations between Marahuna and other characters in which they attempt and fail to explain emotions to her. She is innocent and childlike, as the narrator himself points out, but innocent of human virtues as well as failings. Marahuna is a well-thought-out attempt at portraying how a truly emotionless being, thrust into the middle of human society, would react. Marriott-Watson may have been trying to write a modern version of the kunstmärchen or an update of Fouqué’s “Undine,” but the romantic subplot in Marahuna and especially Marahuna’s falling in love with Grayhurst rings false. Marriott-Watson implies that Marahuna’s prolonged exposure to people has given her a soul and emotions, but the modern reader is likely to find this forced and unconvincing.

There is a recurring feel of the sinister about Marahuna. It is not overwhelming, and is not obvious, but it is there nonetheless. Her lack of emotion and affect can become chilling, as in her seemingly flippant reaction to the drowning death of her suitor. Her murder of Grayhurst's fiancée, a spirited, likable, and entertaining woman named Ellen, is an almost casual and off-handed act on her part. And there is the matter of her powers and intentions. She is not invulnerable–a thorn draws blood from her–but she is stronger than a normal human, seemingly invulnerable to flame as well as able to control it, possessed of undefined powers (her murder of Ellen occurs off stage and is never explained), and capable of dulling wills and dominating others, as she does with Grayhurst at the end of the novel.

Marriott-Watson dedicated Marahuna to “the author of Elsie Venner,” and like Elsie Venner Marahuna is a Fatal Woman. But like Venner, and unlike other Fatal Women of the late nineteenth century, Marahuna is essentially an innocent. Characters like Helen Vaughan (see: “The Great God Pan”) and Medea da Carpi (see: “Amour Dure”) are aware of their sexuality and their power over men. Marahuna is not, and although she exercises the same deadly attraction that they do, it is not voluntary or controllable on her part.

This was not, of course, what the contemporary audience fixated on. The explicit invocation of evolution was:

As the Longman publisher’s note explained, the hero’s “conclusion that she is the result of an evolution diverse from that which has given origin to human beings” was the principal source of interest in the novel: Marahuna lacked the elemental human emotions of fear, pity, or anger, though she could experience passion...If Marriott had in Marahuna anticipated the Vulcan Mr. Spock, his novel also looked back to H. Rider Haggard’s She, as the Athenaeum noted (19 May 1888, 628). Yet something in the novel offset its link to masculine writing. The Saturday Review treated the novel as a work of substance and high invention in a literary review but assumed that the author was female....¹

Marahuna is not in the first or even second rank of nineteenth-century fantastika, but it is generally skillfully written, with a mounting sense of dread and a well-executed examination of a truly alien personality.

Print: Henry Brereton Marriott Watson, Marahuna, a romance. London: British Library, 2011.

¹ Linda K. Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Athens, OH: Ohio University, 2005), 158.