In Arthur Machen’s
The Great God Pan, a short novella
published in 1894, Helen Vaughan is the mysterious femme fatale who dies
horribly at the end. In Rosanne Rabinowitz’s
Helen’s Story, a slightly longer sequel
to Machen’s story published in 2013, we learn that Helen Vaughan didn’t die--Machen
made that up. She is immortal, both Pan’s daughter and Pan’s lover. In modern
days Helen is an avant-garde artist in Shoreditch in London, whose paintings are immersive,
bringing together inside the art her fans and critics into amazing gender-bending
and boundary-defying orgies. Yawn. What a deflation from Machen’s threatening
and literally soulless character into to a mere modern bohemian artist. Detached
from the associations with Machen, it might have made a better tale, but with
its primary motivation being to undermine Machen's classic story it is itself
diminished by the comparison.
