Suspiria de Profundis


Suspiria de profundis is one of the best-known and most distinctive literary works of the English essayist Thomas De Quincey.

Genre

First published in fragmentary form in 1845, the work is a collection of short essays in psychological fantasy — what De Quincey himself called "impassioned prose," and what is now termed prose poetry. The essays of the Suspiria "are among the finest examples of De Quincey's or anyone else's English style."
"Some critics consider De Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis the supreme prose fantasy of English literature."
De Quincey conceived of the collection as a sequel to his masterwork, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Like that work, the pieces in Suspiria de Profundis are rooted in the visionary experiences of the author's opium addiction.

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 ; 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 death of his sister, Elizabeth Quincey who died of meningitis. Yet for the most part, the Suspiria are commonly defined as relatively brief essays, including:
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:
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."

The lost ''Suspiria''

Out of the 32 pieces on the Suspiria master list, 18 are not extant; they were either planned but never written, or written but lost before publication. The lost pieces bear evocative and provoking titles:
A few pages of Notes for the missing Suspiria were found in the author's papers.

Translation, adaptation

was inspired by Suspiria de Profundis and the Confessions to write his essay Les paradis artificiels about hashish and opium and their effect on a poet's work. The second part of this essay entitled "Un mangeur d'Opium" is a translation to French of De Quincey's Confessions, with Baudelaire occasionally adding his own impressions.
Dario Argento used De Quincey's Suspiria, particularly Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, as an inspiration for his "Three Mothers" trilogy of films, which include Suspiria, Inferno and The Mother of Tears. This influence carried over into Luca Guadagnino's 2018 version of the first film.
It was adapted into Luigi Cozzi's 1989 movie Demons 6: il gatto nero, most commonly known as The Black Cat.
Fritz Leiber's novel Our Lady of Darkness, published in 1977, the same year as Argento's Suspiria, quotes from Levana in the introduction, and references the third lady in the course of the novel.