The White People

<p><strong>In a secluded garden a diary holds the final ecstatic secret of a dark initiation.</strong></p><p><strong><em>The White People</em></strong> is perhaps <strong>Arthur Machen's</strong> most celebrated and haunting work taking the form of a frame narrative that presents a single terrifying manuscript: the diary of a young girl.</p><p>The story begins with two men discussing the nature of sin and innocence leading one to produce a handwritten notebook left behind by a girl who died mysteriously. The remainder of the story is the <strong>girl's diary</strong> which chronicles her life in an isolated country house and the strange escalating lessons she learns from her nurse a woman with a dark pagan connection to the earth.</p><p><strong><em>The White People</em></strong> is a foundational work of weird fiction celebrated for its brilliant use of an unreliable innocent narrator and its exploration of <strong>atavism</strong> (the return to primitive ancestral traits). It suggests that the true horror is not external but the terrifying beauty and ecstatic pull of the ancient savage past that lies latent in the human soul.</p>