Suspiria de Profundis - Publication

Publication

De Quincey left the work incomplete in its original publication, in Blackwood's Magazine in the Spring and Summer of 1845. He altered its content and added material when he included it in his collected works (1854 and after); and portions of the whole were not published until the first volume of his Posthumous Works in 1891.

Among De Quincey's papers, left after his death in 1859, was discovered a list of 32 items that would have comprised the complete Suspiria, if the work had ever been finished. This master list counts The English Mail-Coach, first published in Blackwood's in October and December 1849, as one of the Suspiria, though critics and scholars universally treat it as a separate work. The long essay The Affliction of Childhood, also on the master list, is more often associated with the Suspiria, since it too was printed in Blackwood's in the Spring of 1845. (The Affliction contains De Quincey's childhood recollections of the deaths of two of his sisters.) Yet for the most part, the Suspiria are commonly defined as relatively brief essays, including:

• Dreaming — the introduction to the whole.
• The Palimpsest of the Human Brain — a meditation upon the deeper layers of human consciousness and memory.
• Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow — beginning with a discussion of Levana, the ancient Roman goddess of childbirth, De Quincey imagines three companions for her: Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears; Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs; and Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.
• The Apparition of the Brocken — on an optical illusion associated with a German mountaintop.
• Savannah-la-Mar — a threnody on a sunken city, inspired by the 1692 earthquake that sank Port Royal in Jamaica; beginning, "God smote Savannah-la-Mar...."
• Vision of Life — "The horror of life mixed...with the heavenly sweetness of life...."
• Memorial Suspiria — looking forwards and backwards on life's miseries; foreshadowing and anticipation.

When the collection was reprinted in the collected works in the 1850s, another short essay was added: The Daughter of Lebanon, a parable of grief and transcendence.

The four pieces that first appeared posthumously in 1891 are:

• Solitude of Childhood — "Fever and delirium," "sick desire," and the Erl-King's daughter.
• The Dark Interpreter — he was a looming shadow in the author's opium reveries.
• The Princess that lost a Single Seed of a Pomegranate — echoes upon echoes from an Arabian Nights tale.
• Who is this Woman that beckoneth and warneth me from the Place where she is, and in whose Eyes is Woeful remembrance? I guess who she is — "memorials of a love that has departed, has been — the record of a sorrow that is...."

Of all of the pieces, Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow is arguably the most widely anthologized, the best known, and the most admired. "The whole of this vision is clothed in a prose so stately, intense, and musical that it has been regarded by some...as the supreme achievement of De Quincey's genius, the most original thing he ever wrote."