Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies is a 1904 novel by the British writer H. Rider Haggard about a young inventor who falls in love with a mysterious stranger while he is engaged to another woman.
[2] The publication of Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies appears on Haggard's timeline of works in 1903 – immediately after Pearl-Maiden (1903) and directly preceding The Brethren (1904).
As the title suggests, Stella Fregelius: a Tale of Three Destinies is a story of the overlapping fates of three people in a northern coastal region of England.
The story follows Morris Monk, an aspiring inventor, as he becomes 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.
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.
As a retired soldier who lost his wife years ago, Colonel Monk hardly even manages to pay the interest on his mortgages.
Somehow managing to find her and make the treacherous day-long journey back to land, Morris quickly learns that the incapacitated man in his house is the new rector, leaving the female to be none other than the fabled Stella Fregelius.
Both bitter over the town's infatuation with her, the Layards set to work gossiping about Stella, telling everyone that she has become physically intimate with Morris, whose engagement to Mary is well known.
She does not entertain lengthy considerations of an afterlife or worry herself with theories on human existence; she simply accepts her ignorance to the mysteries of life and does not speculate on matters that cannot be proven true or untrue.
Haggard often includes these ideas as he himself was interested "in the occult, in antiquity, in mysticism", and his novels frequently "sought answers to the meaning of life in the world's ancient myths".
[2] Stella understands life as a temporary state before passing on to another realm, the logistics of which shall remain unknown to man forever as humans lack the capacity to comprehend what they have not experienced (the afterlife).
However, Stella quickly pulls Morris out of his middle ground and he eventually falls victim to his search to bring the spiritual world into the natural one.
While a frustrated Morris toils with his invention, he is never sure if the aerophone is governed by the natural laws of science, or if there is some spiritual connection that makes its wireless communication possible.
Haggard's repeated use of foreshadowing and early revelation of some of the most significant events in the story raises many questions about the concept of fate, specifically whether or not humans have any control over it.
From the beginning, Stella Fregelius has a melancholy and slightly foreboding overtone that, when paired with the closure of which the narrator speaks of the events, creates an eerie air of predestination.
Therefore, the readers observe Morris and Stella's interaction with a knowledge of their eventual downfalls, making each missed opportunity to avoid this that much more suggestive of the idea of an uncontrollable force of fate.
Lured in by her breathtaking looks, enchanting musical abilities and exceptional intelligence, Morris cannot resist becoming intimate with Stella even though he knows it will cause trouble (at the very least because he is an engaged man).
Stella possesses all of the qualities needed to turn Morris into a successful and fully realised man, but any possibility of sustaining this improvement is doomed from the start since they can never be together.
As with a femme fatale, readers are left to ask themselves whether or not the brief yet immeasurable success and happiness provided to him by Stella were worth his untimely death, or if he would have been better off living out a full life with Mary.
The readers' awareness that Stella will eventually bring about Morris' downfall along with her lack of malice make her a great example of the romanticised femme fatale characters that frequently appeared in late 19th century British literature.
[8] His writing style is emotionally charged, as with his other romances, yet has a reflectiveness and long-running ponderous undercurrent that makes the overall tone of the book much softer of and contemplative than many of his others.
[8] While a small number of his more famous works, such as She, explore spiritual topics such as Buddhism and reincarnation, these are often smaller components of a larger narrative that serves as a more holistic commentary on social issues such as race and gender from an imperialistic point of view.
[10] Modern literary critics have not paid enough attention to Stella Fregelius to nail it down into one specific subgenre, but it is widely labelled as being a part of the broader genre of domestic English romance, with roots in philosophical fiction and even a few elements of supernatural literature.
Stella Fregelius falls into the third category, as many of the British newspapers praised Haggard's efforts, but the book failed to achieve the widespread success of his others.
Haggard acknowledges this fact in his author's note, and even apologises to readers for "his boldness in offering to them a modest story which is in no sense a romance of the character that perhaps they expect from him".
For many, Stella Fregelius was a breath of fresh air, combining a love story with science and spiritual exploration in a narrative that fed readers' desire for thought rather than shallow plot.
The lengthy story allowed Haggard to develop characters that a critic from The Athenaeum said, "reveals a subtler power of characterization that we have hitherto recognized in the author".