The Original Svengali Was A Conductor, And Other Goodies From The Novel That Gave Us The Word

That novel was Trilby (you may recognize that name as well), which was written as a serial for Harper’s Monthly by George du Maurier (Daphne’s grandfather) in 1894. The title character was a tone-deaf working-class girl whom the conductor-pianist Svengali hypnotized and turned into a world-famous opera singer. As Emma Garman recounts, both of those characters got as far beyond their creator as the monster did with Victor Frankenstein.