Zalma was written by T. Mullett Ellis. Thomas Mullett Ellis (1850-1919) was a British poet and writer. In 1901 he edited The Thrush, a poetry magazine.

Zalma is set in the late 1890s or early 1900s and is about Zalma von der Pahlen, the product of an out-of-wedlock dalliance between a Russian nobleman, Count von der Pahlen, and a Spanish Bourbon princess. But neither royal family recognizes her, and Zalma is brought up in a convent–the Church wants to use her to convert England back to Catholicism and away from Anglicanism. Zalma is allowed to spend holidays with her father, and grows up beautiful, intelligent, and passionate about helping the oppressed peoples of the world. As a young woman she writes the poem “Juggernaut,” which causes a sensation. She makes her successful debut in London society and then goes to work as a hospital nurse, finding the work more satisfying than poetry. At a ball in Malta she meets Prince John of Umbria (for whom read King George V), who immediately falls in love with her. Zalma’s godfather, the Jesuit Cardinal Cantelupi, persuades her to marry Prince John, since the match would further the Church’s plans. Zalma and Prince John marry morganatically–that is, Zalma's rank remains unchanged and her children by Prince John would not gain access to the Duke’s property, wealth, and titles–in Malta, but Cantelupi immediately throws Zalma in a Maltese convent and Zalma and the Prince are prevented from consummating the marriage. However, the British Parliament does not approve the marriage, and after Prince John falls in love with a German princess and marries her he has his marriage to Zalma annulled.

This infuriates Zalma. After escaping from the convent she declares herself an anarchist, and throws in with her father, the Count, who is ostensibly the leader of the Russian counterintelligence department but is in reality the leader of the anarchist and Nihilist movement. The Count is brilliant and resourceful and his efforts cause a great deal of worry to the Tsar and his family. To advance her position and make herself more useful to the revolutionary cause Zalma marries Gerard Mountjoy, a member of the British Life Guards. But only a few hours after the wedding she discovers that Mountjoy dumped his former fiancée to be with Zalma and then sent the fiancée a letter pretending that his marriage to Zalma was not legitimate. Zalma immediately leaves Mountjoy. Lord Halliford, an unprincipled cad, befriends Zalma and squires her around London, accompanying her to balls and parties. Halliford lusts after her, which Zalma is well aware of. Zalma thinks little of Halliford because of the way in which he has always treated women, but she is lonely and finds his company entertaining, even though she knows he is wicked. Society is scandalized by Zalma’s behavior, for she is still married to Mountjoy, and Mountjoy is humiliated by her behavior, which Halliford enjoys. When Society begins snubbing Zalma directly, she decides to go beyond just scandalizing them and provide them with a real outrage. She flatters Halliford to make him fall in love with her. He undergoes a religious conversion and tells her he repents of all his sins, but she begins physically teasing him and agrees to spend the night with him if he will forswear Heaven. He does so. When he wakes up the next morning she has taken all of his money and left.

She poses nude, as “Venus Aphrodite,” for a painter, and the debut of the painting causes another scandal. Zalma begins conquering men and spurning their love, first out of hate, then for sport, and lastly to satisfy her need for whatever type of love she can get.Count von der Pahlen draws close to the culmination of his plans, the mass slaughter of all of the crowned heads of Europe, but before he can set them in motion he is captured by Major Charles St. Leger, the brilliant British agent in charge of tracking Nihilists and anarchists. St. Leger and Zalma have met at a party and instantly been attracted to each other, and he had seen her portrait as Venus and fallen in love with her. He is emotionally devastated at having to arrest her father, but he knows his duty and does it. Count von der Pahlen is sent to Siberia and dies there, and the heartbroken Zalma takes his place as the leader of the anarchists. She becomes famous as a poet of the oppressed, with her poem “The Vampire” becoming the revolutionaries’ anthem. She tours Europe, speaking with anarchist cells in even the most provincial locations, and she becomes infamous in the newspapers as the most dangerous woman in Europe. The anarchists proclaim her the “Angel of the Revolution,” a phrase originally applied to the Louis Saint-Just (1767-1794), a leader of the French Revolution, but which in the context of Zalma is surely a deliberate reference to George Griffith’s The Angel of the Revolution. Zalma plots the general annihilation of “the Existing” and eventually hatches a plan which will spark a socialist revolution: she will launch a fleet of anthrax-infested balloons into the capitals of Europe. Zalma has inherited some of her father’s skill at biology, and it is possible that her plan might succeed. But St. Leger uncovers the plot and foils it, capturing and killing the anarchists responsible for launching the balloons. He breaks into Zalma's apartment to arrest her, but he finds her dying–she has taken poison in despair over the failure of her plans. Zalma ends with mobs rioting in various capitals of Europe and St. Leger wondering if the revolution has begun.

Zalma is one of the 1890s anarchist novels most clearly influenced by George Griffith, especially in its use of the science fictional biological weapon. Zalma is more stylishly told than The Angel of the Revolution or other early anarchist novels, although Zalma will never be mistaken for the work of Henry James or Oscar Wilde. The novel has some moments of stylistic awkwardness, but generally it is professionally written, makes good use of contemporary political and cultural figures, including George Bernard Shaw, and gives the anarchists’ side a better hearing than they might otherwise have expected. (The character of Fanny, Zalma’s “negress” maid, is an embarrassing racist stereotype, however). Although Ellis never condones the deaths Zalma and her father intend to cause, Ellis describes the gruesome treatment which captives in Siberia are forced to suffer, and the reader’s sympathies, while never with Zalma, will not be with the Tsar either. Zalma’s apocalyptic thinking, that humanity had to be greatly reduced and the institutions of civilizations removed before a new Utopia could be put into place, would show up, better articulated, in H.G. Wells’ The War in the Air (1907) but was common in late-Victorian revolutionary and anarchy science fiction novels, including Hartmann the Anarchist.

The belief in the necessity for a tabula rasa even manifested itself in the planning of actual utopias; Scott recounts how the architect Le Corbusier “warned against the temptations to reform.… Instead, he insisted, we must take a ‘blank piece of paper,’ a ‘clean tablecloth,’ and start new calculations from zero” (117). Of course, the clean break required to reshape a national or global society is much larger than that required to prevent urban traffic congestion by several orders of magnitude, and it requires violence.¹

Zalma also adds a new element to the anarchist genre. St. Leger is in the Diplomatic Service and is experienced in espionage work. His fight against the anarchists is the sort of government-agent-vs-terrorists duel which would become a standard plot device in twentieth century thriller fiction, but Victorian novels about anarchy never showed a government agent as triumphing over the anarchists. The anarchists in Victorian novels are defeated through their own incompetence (see: The Anarchist), their own wickedness (see: The Azrael of Anarchy), one of their own betraying them (see: Red Riding-Hood), or through the actions of a heroic civilian (see: Stormy Waters). Government agents of the St. Leger sort never appeared. This reflects the British unease with espionage as a profession (see: The Newton Moore Adventures) and their preference for amateur spies (see: The Mysterious Monsieur Sabin).

Zalma was published in the same year as H.G. Wells’ “The Stolen Bacillus,” about an anarchist’s attempt to steal cholera from a laboratory and poison the London water supply, and Ellis’ book somewhat rode on Wells’ coat-tails, receiving reviews in journals, like the British Medical Journal, which ordinarily would have little to do with a mid-level science fictional thriller like Zalma. Zalma proved popular enough for a second, gilt-edged edition to be published in 1897—and for a supposed follower of the novel to attempt to put Zalma’s plans into action:

On 1 December 1895, the year after Zalma's initial publication, the Glasgow Herald reported that a gentleman had appeared in New York who held "Zalma's tenets, though he has adopted slightly different methods of promoting them." He had apparently taken to leaving phials of disease causing agents in street cars, which he "thoughtfully label[led] 'diphtheria,' 'cholera,’ 'pneumonia'... in order that each victim may choose his own disease."²

Zalma is among the best-written and most interesting of the anarchist novels of the 1890s.

¹ Steven Mollman, “Air-Ships and the Technological Revolution: Detached Violence in George Griffith and H.G. Wells,” Science Fiction Studies 42, no. 1 (Mar. 2015): 35.

² James F. Stark, “Medical Classics: Zalma by Thomas Mullett Ellis,” BMJ: British Medical Journal 341, no. 7771 (Sept. 4, 2010): 509.