Limbo

Huxley's first collection of short stories includes seven visionary and satirical stories, introducing the themes that would form the basis of all his works. The events and protagonists of these stories, while their personalities are caught between the obvious and the difficult, are also rich in parallels and points shared with the lives of their authors. In The Death of Lully, a woman suffers from breast cancer, a disease that kills her mother, with whom the young writer is very close; and suicide, like that of his brother, is repeated in Eupompus, giving art splendor by numbers. However, Richard Greenow's ridiculous story takes the form of an autobiography, from the setting to the events being told, with many touchpoints between the protagonist and the author: just as the alter ego's new hero, Dr. Jekyll (and the same Huxley), will confront his personal Mr. Hyde in the dramatization of the struggle between two different and uncompromising ways of thinking about literature and civic activism.

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