| Title | : | The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0684842572 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780684842578 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 303 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1937 |
The lady's maid's bell (1904)
The eyes (1910)
Afterward (1910)
Kerfol (1916)
The triumph of night (1914)
Miss Mary Pask (1925)
Bewitched (1925)
Mr Jones (1928)
Pomegranate seed (1931)
The looking glass (1935)
All souls' (1937)
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton Reviews
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If you read about ghosts in order to be filled with dread, then Edith Wharton may not be your favorite supernatural author. On the other hand, if you are a fan of elegant realistic fiction but like a few chills from time to time, Wharton's ghost tales may belong at the top of your list.
Each of Wharton's stories is a subtle exercise rooted in everyday reality, and the ghostly presences--such as they are--emerge from the nourishing soil that constitutes her finely crafted realism. Many of her stories touch on the cruelty of domestic power relations, not only between husbands and wives, but also between mistresses and their servants. Specters haunt those who once had the power to change things for the better but did not do so, and visit the living not only as a reproach for past sins, but also as a silent exhortation for redress.
All the stories here are worth reading, but when Wharton's seriousness of purpose and subtlety of style combine with genuine ghostly thrills, the result is a handful of first-rate ghost stories ("The Eyes, "Afterward," "Bewitched," "Kerfol, "The Pomegranate Seed") that should be on everybody's reading list. "Afterward" is not only the finest tale in this volume: it is also a masterpiece of the form that not only rivals the achievement of Henry James but also deepens and enriches the Jamesian theme of how a richer knowledge of evil often derives from young America's encounter with old Europe. In "Afterward," Wharton shows us that the ghosts that haunt Americans in Europe may not be the ancestral specters inhabiting ancient houses, but rather the embodiments of crimes committed by American businessmen in their "wild cat" days back in the States, crimes that cry out for expiation. -
Edith Wharton may be an unlikely ghost story writer, but she does it rather well. As you would expect they are well written and have subtlety and nuance and don’t have the gore and bludgeoning of some modern horror. There is a sprinkling of the gothic, a few rambling and creepy houses and a variety of settings: England, the eastern US states, France and the desert in an unspecified Middle Eastern country.
Some of the tales aren’t really ghost stories, but explore everyday moral dilemmas and human conflicts in an innovative way. Most of the stories take place in daylight (or even artificial light) amidst modern technology (modern for when they were written). Several of the stories do explore the relationship between servants and their employers and the tensions between the two. Locks and keys play a significant role.
All Souls is an interesting Halloween story that makes more sense when you know it was written at the end of Wharton’s life, the last story she wrote before her death. The sense of helplessness, collapsing competence and fear of the unknown are very telling. There are some interesting explorations of the nature of marriage (Pomegranate Seed in particular) and relations between the sexes, although Bewitched has an interesting take on the sexual motivations of men and their ability to control them.
Wharton herself said that she did not believe in ghosts, but she feared them; and what is needed here is imagination rather than belief. What makes Wharton’s stories interesting is the usual supernatural dread filtered through scepticism. These ghost stories often follow a familiar format but Wharton does manage to subvert the genre in unusual ways. -
Edith Wharton, delicate yet cruel, casts a cold eye on the misdeeds and toxic egos of men, and an occasionally more empathetic one on women and their struggles, in this collection of beautifully written stories. Precise prose: each sentence has a crystalline clarity, a careful distillation of words and ideas. Gorgeously atmospheric imagery: Wharton knows her way around sprawling manors of course, but has equal talent at evoking lonely moorlands, quiet roads at dusk, even a nearly empty fortress in the Middle East. The sort of menacing ambiguity in which Robert Aickman would eventually specialize: there is no jarring, thudding obviousness in any of the horrors. A rather sour tang of misanthropy that makes the collection less than perfect - often coming out in some unnecessarily mean-spirited descriptions of various characters. And yet a clear genius in showing the depth and relatability of her characters: many times I saw myself in these disparate protagonists, be they men or women, young or old.
My favorite stories:
"All Souls'" was written the year of Wharton's death. An unnerving and surprisingly strange story about an inexplicable loss of time, of sorts. This portrait of an older woman recovering from an injury, waking up in a house where everyone else seems to have disappeared, was both prosaic and nightmarish.
"Kerfol" has a young man visiting a French manor, a tragic tale within a tale about a wife suffering appalling emotional abuse from her noble husband, the well-deserved, bloody end of said nobleman, and a winsome yet eerily silent band of diverse ghost dogs who haunt the manor grounds.
"Pomegranate Seed" has an unhealthy attachment between living husband and dead but still quite controlling wife. It also has the most resonant title in the collection - and the myth the title comes from isn't even mentioned in the story. Loved both the subtle irony of that title and how it enhances the mystery of the tale.
and especially "Mr. Jones", which includes many features of prior stories: an independent, not-so-young heiress and a sprawling, creepily underpopulated mansion, a menacingly passive-aggressive ghost, and another horrific tale within a tale of an emotionally abused wife... and yet for me this was the most striking of the stories. All of those elements coalesced into perfection, delivering a story ripe for contemplation. Plus an especially ghastly murder at the end, when the ghost - in a fit of temper - becomes rather less than passive.
⌛
I actually read the Appleton Century hardcover edition of this collection, published in 1937. I was unable to find this book on Goodreads, so had to go with the collected stories published in 1973, eye roll. Oh the petty things that frustrate me to no end! I think I would make a good ghost.
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Not long before her death in 1937, Edith Wharton gathered together a selection of her ghost stories, adding an introduction that reads more like a lament, focused on the impact of modern media and technologies on the traditions of supernatural fiction. There are some arresting pieces here, although I found them more tense and eerie than outright terrifying. I was struck too by Wharton’s tendency to focus on the haunted rather than the hauntings, as well as her obsession with emotional and bodily frailty: illness, loneliness, fear of death surface throughout.
Many of Wharton’s pieces draw on familiar, established conventions, framed as fireside tales swapped after dinner as in the bizarre “The Eyes” with its lightly-concealed queer subtext; or presented as puzzling accounts suddenly confided to sceptical friends or relatives as in the memorable, elegant “All Souls.” In a number of entries her settings are also fairly standard, wintry, icy, muffled landscapes that reinforce the sense of her characters’ isolation, people who are locked within the confines of creaky, ancient, rural mansions. But despite the outer trappings, Wharton’s approach is often quite unconventional, she frequently seems more interested in the form’s potential as a vehicle for exposing everyday domestic horrors, marriages founded on violence, control or deceit as in the gothic and unnerving “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” or “Afterward” - something critics have linked to her own experiences of a destructive marriage. But for Wharton domestic strife isn’t limited to obvious intimate relationships, there’s also an unexpected emphasis on power struggles between employers and their servants, a curious interdependency in which expectations of loyalty mingle with fear and mounting suspicion.
Wharton’s writing is strong throughout, packed with marvellous phrases and descriptive passages. Her plots are less consistently satisfying, some like “Mr Jones” have awkward, disappointing endings, too rushed or anti-climactic. Although sometimes, as with the Rebecca-like “Pomegranate Seed” lack of resolution is overshadowed by the steps leading up to it. Wharton also seems most sure-footed when imagining female protagonists, her men seem a bit too thinly sketched. And there were one or two entries that didn’t really work for me on any level: one example is “Bewitched” with its austere, superstitious community with its shades of Hawthorne; another the slightly befuddled “Miss Mary Pask.”
NYRB Classics edition
Rating: 3/3.5 -
I seem to love all things Wharton, but I must say she outdoes herself with these strange and eerie tales of ghostly happenings. They are all quite well done, but there are a few that are beyond excellent. What makes most of them work is the lack of surety that they could not all be explained away with a little logical and clear thinking. Of course, here in the real world, that is how ghostly encounters always are, inexplicable phenomena or explained away--and those of us who have them are never truly sure what we have seen, and doubt our own senses.
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell gets one immediately into the gothic feel and atmosphere that carries over into all the other stories. Perhaps my least favorite, but still, very well done.
The Eyes This made me think of Poe’s Tell Tale Heart and the way the narrator there feels the old man staring at him, for this is a tale more about what is going on internally than externally.
Afterward Really loved this one, perhaps because the setting was so well pictured that I felt as if I were inside this story participating. There is a building sense of doom approaching that begins with a chance comment from a minor character and intensifies as soon as the main action of the story begins. This is a true ghost story, in that I never asked myself if the ghost was real.
Kerfol This is an very atypical ghost tale; the ghost is not human. Enough said, but another tale that is fraught with the gothic setting and mood.
The Triumph of Night What if you could see what no one else in the room saw and it spelled doom for someone else? What would you do? Wharton deals with that situation with a bit of mystery and a touch of terror.
Miss Mary Pask This one almost felt more lighthearted to me, as it was more about perceptions than realities.
Bewitched My hands down favorite of the bunch; five-plus stars. This story put me in mind of the Salem Witch Trials because, while it operates on two levels, it might well just be about ignorance and a willingness to ascribe to the occult what is done by man. Superstition can be a very dangerous thing.
Mr. Jones The most straightforward of the tales, but set in a masterfully spooky environment.
Pomegranate Seed More than one new wife has been haunted by her predecessor, but few quite like this.
The Looking Glass A bit about vanity and creating ghosts. Liked the ending and the ambiguity it provided.
All Souls’ This one felt like a classic horror film--don’t open the door! -
Se trata de la recopilación, cómo su nombre indica, de tres relatos sobre fantasmas escritos por la autora: "Después", "Kerfol" y la "La campanilla de la doncella".
Me han parecido extraordinariamente escritos, y me han enganchado de principio a fin.
La escritora consigue crear una atmósfera totalmente inquietante, ubicando los tres cuentos en casas señoriales con antiguas historias familiares llenas de misterio. Consigue que te introduzcas en este ambiente, cómo si fueras el protagonista de la trama.
Me han parecido totalmente geniales, y me he quedado con ganas de leer más cuentos de misterio de Edith Wharton. -
I loved this collection of short stories. The writing is absolutely excellent - the perfect balance of intrigue, satire and subtlety, with a hint of humour. The tales are just macabre enough to hold your attention without being too obvious or sensational, and they're all the perfect length. My favourite thing about many of these stories was that they are very open-ended, open to all kinds of interpretation - the ghostly, the metaphorical, the satirical. 'The Eyes' was genuinely frightening, aside from being brilliantly original, and I thought 'Kerfol', with its (literally) haunting dogs, was fantastic. I took this out from the library but will probably buy it at some point as I know I will want to read these stories again.
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Most of Edith Wharton's ghost stories have a sense of ambiguity. Is the supernatural at work, or did people misinterpret real events? Wharton writes her works with a Gothic atmosphere--foggy nights, creepy old houses, strange servants, and unreliable narrators. The weight of a guilty conscience leads to supernatural events in some cases. Women are victims of controlling men in a few stories, but women manipulate the men in others. Wharton's writing is elegant, and she exhibits a deep understanding of people's emotions, strengths, and failings. This collection included 11 ghost stories. Great storytelling!
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Cover of the 1976 Popular Library mass-market. You can tell it's post-Exorcist, as it definitely imitates the style, as did a lot of horror or occult-themed paperbacks of the day.
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3.5 stars
I have been reading this sporadically since Christmas, but Halloween was impetus to push ahead and read the last several stories in a couple of days. And I think the accelerated speed helped me appreciate them more.
Wharton's collection of ghost stories is one part intriguingly psychological, and one part old-fashioned. She seems to foresee this herself, commenting in the introduction that
[taste for ghosts] is being gradually atrophied by these two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema.
The cinema hasn't done away with ghost stories of course, far from it, but it has changed what we expect from them. Wharton's are quiet affairs, ghosts are often absences, or they ring bells or leave footprints, but they resolutely never jump out at you. This took a bit of getting used to... I expected the stories to have twists, as they would now, or to up the ante in some way, but many of them seem content to present the likelihood of a ghost as interest enough to the reader.
And generally, in Wharton's hands, it is. Because she is dealing with the human, regardless of the supernatural trappings. Where there are dark and rambling houses, they are backgrounds to stories of unhappy marriages, or ill-gotten fortunes, or illness or madness. Elsewhere there are slight departures from the ghost story mould -- a rural Gothic piece set among snowed-in farmers, a desert idyll of peaceful horizons and lingering stenches, an old lady left alone who realises that all her mod-cons won't save her from a final solitude.
Excellent writing and pacing. Plots are a bit uneven, but there are some standouts. I really enjoyed "The Pomegranate Seed" and particularly "All Soul's" which I reread, appropriately enough, as Halloween bled into All Souls Day. -
This is an interesting collection of 11 Ghost Stories which are short stories written by Edith Wharton spanning from 1909 through 1937. The following stories are listed & a brief review. All these stories are a different kind of ghost story which have outcomes with uncertainty & bewildering. Many stories have you wondering how it will end & your own imagination will have to suffice.
The Lady's Maid Bell- 1902 Hartley is in need of a job after recovering from a lingering illness. Due to this many not wanting her help but she finds employment as a Lady's maid where many maids don't last a fortnight.
Afterward - 1909 An American couple seek life in a castle in England occupied by ghosts unseen. Living there for many months without a ghost in sight, they are disappointed but should they have left well enough alone?
The Eyes- 1910 Ghost stories are being told by old Culwin's friends but it becomes clear that Culwin has seen some of his own!
The Triumph of Night- 1914 Faxon on his way to his new employer finds a friend in young Rainer who is quite sickly. Faxon starts seeing a dark sinister man not seen by others that makes him wonder about his friends safety.
Kerfol- 1916 What are Yves de Cornault's secrets regarding his wife & the little dogs who guard the castle?
Bewitched- 1925 Three men are summoned to help Saul Ruthedge & his wife right something that seems impossible.
Miss Mary Pask- 1925 Visiting a relative in England for a friend who is found dead but seems alive at night only & without a single visitor.
Mr. Jones- 1928 Lady Jane Lynke inherits the Bells estate but Mr. Jones is invasive caretaker which seems quite not what he seems.
Pomegranate Seed- 1928 Charlotte's husbands receives mysterious letters which her husband refuses to explain & leads to upset.
The Looking Glass- 1935 Mrs. Attlee helps out a wealthy friend to help lessen her pain.
All Souls- 1937 Sara Clauburn stays at Whitegate after her husband's death & has an experience which seems to be the spookiest of all the stories to me.
One excerpt from Wharton's preface-I found this interesting from her perspective on cinema/movies on the effect on the readers & books. Love this quote!
"But in a few years more perhaps there may be; for, deep within us as the ghost instinct lurks, I seem to see it being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of imagination, the wireless and the cinema. To a generation for whom everything which used to nourish the imagination because it had to be won by an effort, and slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned and chopped into bits, the creative faculty (for reading should be a creative act as writing) is rapidly withering, together with the power of sustained attention; and the world which used to be so grand ala charte des lampes is diminishing in inverse ratio to the new means of spanning it; so that the more we add to its surface the smaller it becomes."
Excerpt from The Triumph of Night
"Oh, facts-what are facts? Just the way a thing happens to look at a given minute..." -
Some might feel that Wharton was out of her element here, but I found these perfectly jewel-like tales. They are, as is to be expected, stylistically elegant -- Wharton doesn't lower her standards just because she's writing in a sometimes-maligned genre. These are classic "literary" ghost tales, best appreciated for the subtle shadings of tone and rich evocation of atmosphere. There are (this being Wharton, after all) heavy infusions of social class and the weight this imposes on the central characters. In order to fully appreciate these stories, readers need to let them unfold gradually and not feel impatient with what may at times seem peripheral elements. It all comes together; the patient reader is rewarded.
Personal favorites in this collection include "Afterward" and "The Lady's Maid." -
I quite like Edith Wharton's writing, but not every story here penetrated with me. A couple of them did. Kerfol is very emotional, with the ghosts of the murdered dogs. I really loved The Pomegranate Seed, with its mysterious mythological title, vague creepiness and open ended.ness
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My husband and I enjoy reading Edith Wharton stories to each other, and in fact have managed to get through all, or at least nearly all, of her shorter works in this manner. I love her writing and these stories are no exception but, as other GR members have mentioned, these stories are not horrifying and some are not even scary. They are simply great stories, some of them chilling and others sad.
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To date, I have not read many of
Edith Wharton's books, but after the stories in
Ghosts, I am about to change my mind. There are eleven stories in all in this collection which was not only written by the author but selected by her. Fully half of them are among the best supernatural fiction I have encountered.
Particularly excellent are "Miss Mary Pask" about a strange visit with a deceased old lady; "Bewitched" about a young woman who won't stay buried; and "Pomegranate Seed" about some mysterious letters that destroy a marriage.
Until I saw this NYRB edition, I didn't even know that Edith Wharton wrote ghosts stories, but now I stand corrected. -
Perhaps because she is one of the most esteemed writers of the 20th century, Edith Wharton may not be immediately associated with the genre of horror. Today, she is probably best remembered for her novels "The House of Mirth" (1905) and "The Age of Innocence" (1920), which latter book copped her the Pulitzer Prize, as well as for her classic novella from 1911, "Ethan Frome," a staple reading assignment for all English majors. In novel after novel, Wharton examined the members of the upper crust in turn-of-the-century NYC, a society and a town that she knew well by experience. But as she would reveal in her autobiography "A Backward Glance," the author was a big fan of the ghost story as well, a shivery pot in which she would ultimately dip her quill on any number of occasions. After all, her close personal friend, Henry James, had been hugely successful with his chilling novella of 1898, "The Turn of the Screw," so why not herself? Happily, Scribner's 1973 collection "The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton" brings together 11 of the author's efforts in the field of horror to winning effect. Prefaced by an introduction by the author herself, and featuring beautiful illustrations for each story by one Laszlo Kubinyi, the book may prove a real eye-opener for readers who'd thought they knew this author well.
The 11 stories in the collection were released over a 35-year period, from 1902 to 1937, and take place in a wide range of locales; indeed, very few of the stories transpire in the NYC most commonly associated with Wharton's writing. All, as might be expected from an author of Ms. Wharton's stature, are meticulously crafted and beautifully written. And while none of the stories is especially gruesome (especially when compared to the shock and gore tactics frequently employed by many horror practitioners today), all of the tales here are highly atmospheric, and many of the pieces do indeed manage to chill. In some of the stories, the reader is required to read between the lines so as to understand what has transpired; others are more explicitly spelled out. But every tale still manages to impress, in one way or another; this is a very pleasing collection, over all.
As to the stories themselves, the collection kicks off with the earliest piece, chronologically: 1902's "The Lady’s Maid's Bell." The tale is narrated to us by young Alice Hartley, a typhoid convalescent who begins a new job as a maid in a "big and gloomy" house on the Hudson, in upstate New York. But Alice's life is soon beset by the ghost of the former maid, Emma Saxon, who rings her bell in the middle of the night and seems to be endeavoring to communicate some message. In the story's most chilling scene, Emma leads Alice through a dreary field in the snow, on some mysterious mission. By the tale's end, the reader may feel that he or she has not been given enough information to solve this puzzle, although a residual chill surely remains.
In "The Eyes," which transpires mainly in England and Rome, an aged man of the world, author Andrew Culwin, tells his cronies of the one ghostly experience that he had witnessed; namely, a pair of eyes that would stare at him, at intervals, in the dark, over a period of some years. During this time, Culwin had treated his fiancée callously and taken up with a young and inexperienced writer whom he was nurturing. (The gay subtext in the story is quite pronounced.) But what is the cause of those damnable, staring orbs? Once again, the reader is required to look between the lines, especially regarding the tale's final two pages. No wonder one of Culwin’s auditors mentions being "disquieted by a sense of incompleteness"....
In "Afterward," an American couple, Mary and Ned Boyne, moves to Dorsetshire and takes over a Tudor home that is supposedly haunted by a most unusual ghost: one whose presence is never known till long after its appearance. And once settled into their rustic abode, named Lyng, Ned begins to act nervously, a mysterious and dead-voiced stranger comes calling, and Ned ultimately vanishes, leading to a rather shocking revelation concerning his business dealings, as well as a fulfillment of the ghostly legend. In all, a very satisfying story, expertly paced and handled.
"Kerfol" presents us with a most unique group of ghosts...of the canine variety! Here, a man visits an abandoned castle in Brittany and comes across the spectral mutts, who stand and stare at him dolefully. A little investigation reveals their tragic background, in a tale that stretches all the way back to the early 1600s, involving the cruel Baron de Cornault and his miserably neglected wife. This is a wonderful story, meticulously detailed and pleasingly ghoulish. Wharton makes but a single misstep here--when she refers to the Baron's "widowhood," rather than "widowerhood"--but this one boo-boo only seems to set off the perfection of the rest.
In "The Triumph of Night," a young man is marooned at a train station during the height of a New Hampshire blizzard and accepts an invitation from an even younger man to spend the night at his uncle's home, that uncle being the renowned writer John Lavington. But after being comfortably ensconced and meeting his famous host, our protagonist begins to see a doppelganger of Lavington, seemingly trying to communicate some message. A bleak, atmospheric and wintry tale, conflating a will and (again) shady business dealings, this story concludes with the forces of benevolence thwarted, and the evils that men do triumphant....
"Miss Mary Pask" finds Wharton at her most playful, offering up a chilling tale and then pulling the rug out from under the reader's expectations. This story also takes place in Brittany, and finds our narrator about to visit the sister of a close friend, the Mary Pask of the title, who was "like hundreds of other dowdy old maids, cheerful derelicts content with their innumerable little substitutes for living." But just after knocking on her door, our narrator recalls that Mary had died the previous year...a circumstance that does not change the fact that the deceased woman shortly descends the stairs and ushers him in, in this very cleverly put-together tale.
In "Bewitched," which takes place in the Anywheresville of Hemlock County, a snowbound rural area reminiscent of the one in "Ethan Frome," a small community is alarmed when one of its prominent citizens is seen trysting with Ora Brand...a young woman who had died over a year before! Wharton perfectly captures the speech patterns and thought processes of the characters in this isolated backwater, and her wintry locale is once again expertly rendered. And then matters grow quite grim indeed, when Ora's father, Sylvester, grabs his revolver and sets forth to hunt his ghostly daughter down....
Our next tale, "Mr. Jones," tells of the Lady Jane Lynke, who inherits a mansion in the English countryside, in Kent. She learns from the oddball servants there that the house is overseen and managed by one Mr. Jones, who is very old and frail and thus never ventures from his room. Before long, Lady Jane discerns the ghostly figure of an old man in the mansion's "blue room," after which the tragic story of another neglected wife, back in the 1820s, comes to light. As in "The Lady's Maid's Bell," here, even death is no barrier for the dedicated servant who wants to give eternal assistance to his or her master or mistress....
Next up is the story that turned out to be this reader's personal favorite of the collection, "Pomegranate Seed." Here, NYC newlywed Charlotte Ashby grows increasingly alarmed by a series of letters, which always arrive in the same grayish envelopes and addressed to her husband Kenneth. Kenneth had been showing signs of mounting strain after receiving these missives, a fact that becomes understandable when Charlotte finally recognizes the handwriting on the envelopes: that of Kenneth's first wife, Elsie, who had died some time before! Featuring beautifully written and realistic dialogue, great tension and a heartbreaker of an ending, this really is one very impressive piece of work.
"The Looking Glass" features no actual hauntings or ghosts per se; still, there is a made-up one to be had here. In this story, an old grandmother, living in a NJ suburb, tells her granddaughter of the time when she used to be a professional masseuse, and of a wealthy and vain woman who she used to treat. To make this dowager happy, our narrator had pretended to be able to communicate with the spirit world, and thus contact a romantic interest of the matron's youth; a young man who had gone down on the Titanic. Despite the lack of chills and overt frights, this remains a touching story, well told, in which Wharton seemingly admonishes those who are overly preoccupied with their fading beauty, while at the same time showing them some sympathy. As the grandmother says,
"For you and me, and thousands like us, beginning to grow old is like going from a bright warm room to one a little less warm and bright; but to a beauty like Mrs. Clingsland it's like being pushed out of an illuminated ballroom, all flowers and chandeliers, into the winter night and the snow...."
In the collection's final offering, "All Souls'," an elderly widow, Sara Clayburn, encounters a strange woman while taking her afternoon walk by the Connecticut River. Immediately after, she twists her ankle on a frozen puddle and is confined to her bed. But her ordeal grows even greater when she awakens in the middle of the night to find all her servants gone missing, and a preternatural silence covering the entire world. Sara's experiences during the next 36 hours are quite nerve racking, and could well have served as the basis for a perfectly respectable episode of TV's "The Twilight Zone." They bring this collection to a very satisfactory conclusion, indeed.
So there you have it...11 finely crafted and wonderfully atmospheric tales of ghosts, hauntings, the deceased, and ancient tragedies from the pen of a true American master. I read this marvelous bunch of stories over the course of a week during mid-October and found them to be a perfect accompaniment to the season. "The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton" is more than highly recommended....
(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at
http://www.fantasyliterature.com/ … a most ideal destination for all fans of the type of ghost story as written by Edith Wharton....) -
Cuando te alejas del concepto contemporáneo de la literatura de terror actual y te dejas seducir por otro tipo de propuestas más clásicas puedes adentrarte en unos mundos deliciosos. Un tipo de narración en la que se prescinde de recursos impactantes para ir generando en el lector otro tipo de sensaciones, que en un principio parecen más inocuas, pero que poco a poco van calando por dentro.
Y es que estas historias tienen la particularidad de seguir resonando en tu cabeza una vez las has terminado. En algunos casos por la originalidad de la propuesta, la manera de presentarte el elemento sobrenatural o por la sensación de haber leído una de esas historias clásicas que siempre tienen hueco en el corazoncito de los que amamos al terror. Otras veces van incluso más allá, aportándote una narración en la que tan solo te presentan unos hechos concretos a los que tú, como lector, tendrás que encontrar su significado.
En este pequeño libro de cuentos se presentan tres obras de la afamada escritora Edith Wharton centradas en la presencia de fantasmas. Cada uno de ellos muy diferente al anterior en cuanto a temática y manera de enfocarlos, pero con la deliciosa sensación de que, cuando lo has terminado, te apetece leer otro más. En estas tres historias uno consigue disfrutar de la manera de narrar que tiene Wharton, con su particular ritmo y su manera de tomarse las cosas con calma para que el lector se vaya adentrando poco a poco en el misterio que te va a proponer.
Eso, claro, provocará el rechazo de los lectores que busquen entre sus páginas la presencia de entidades sobrenaturales y vengativas de la que tantas veces se ha abusado en el cine actual. Pero en estas historias hay que adentrarse con la idea de estar acompañados de la noche, bajo la luz de una vela y dejándose llevar por la atmósfera que consigue recrear la escritora.
Cuando decides apostar por estas historias de fantasmas, cuando te quieres adentrar en esos mundos en donde la frágil línea que separa la vida de la muerte puede que se encuentre quebrada, cuando el espanto acontece en una revelación que te lleva a plantearte el cómo es que no te había dado cuenta antes de esa sorpresa, es entonces cuando admites que una buena historia de fantasmas te puede estremecer y que, siempre, espera a que apagues la luz para regresar. -
Uh-oh. Another insomnia night so I'm half dead at the moment and will be back shortly with my thoughts. For now: absolutely not to be missed -- as with all of Wharton's writings, there's often much more than meets the eye going on beneath the surface of these stories.
back soon after some sleep -
Good stories. Well told. Wide variety.
I liked 9 of the 11 stories.
List of the 11 stories.
"The Eyes"
"Afterward"
"Kerfol"
"Triumphs of Night"
"Miss Mary Pask"
"Bewitched"
"Mr Jones"
"Pomegranate Seeds"
"The Looking Glass"
"All Souls"
I did not like "Triumphs of Night". Some in buddy read group liked it, and others did not. But it is always good to have a bad one in the bunch to show as contrast to the good.
What I would like to see as a movie:
"Miss Pask"
"Pomegranate Seeds"
"All Souls" (The story is named for the wrong holiday/holy day. Any moviemakers should consider changing the name of their movie.)
I have liked some of Edith Wharton' novels. Now I know that I will like some of her ghost stories too. -
Edith Wharton has written what I term "genteel" ghost stories, with a variation in success if achieving a sense of mood and dread are the measure. There are several that I specifically enjoyed, "Afterward", "Kerfol", "The Triumph of Night", "Mr Jones". All are well written of course (it seems silly of me to judge Wharton). If I judge them as ghost stories then some don't seem as successful. "Eyes" in particular seems a let down (as discussed in the story section).
Overall though I find the stories a success in the "genteel" setting. -
So how do I rate this. The first half was a strong for but the second half a five. So 4.5 but I can only do 4 or 5. So I'll mark it 5. Really great stories.
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4 Stars
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I got off to a rough start with this one because I didn't like the first two stories. I persevered and I'm very glad I did because I enjoyed these stories tremendously. There was a remarkable range of types of stories and causes of the events. I really should read the deliciously creepy All Souls' every year on Halloween.
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These stories were okay, if a bit dry, and unmemorable for the most part. The exception for me was "Afterward," which I had read before and seen dramatized. It involves a married couple that intentionally purchases a home with ghost included. The caveat: They won't know they have encountered the ghost until long afterward. Classic.
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Збірка прекрасних едвардіанських жахливчиків, і деякі з них швидше психологічні трилери без впливу потойбічного. Розхвалений "Дзвінок покоївки" мені не сподобався, зате класна ренесансна історія вийшла в "Герцогині за молитвою". Але зірки збірки - "Зачарований" та "Пляшка Пер'є". В першому можна покрутити і так, і так, але я за справу дуже вдатних людських рук, а другий - крутий трилер в пустельних декораціях, жодних привидів там не пробігало, але з ними було б навпаки не так моторошно. Аж дивно, що досі не екранізували.
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Abandoned at 61%.
I enjoyed Edith Wharton's
The House of Mirth and I like gothic, supernatural tales. Short story collections always tend to be a mixed bag, but I really thought that my overall enjoyment of these ghost stories would be pretty much guaranteed.
Well, I finally threw in the towel a little over half-way through, after struggling to find the will to pick this up for well over a month and entering a reading slump because of it. I skipped the final four stories (Bewitched, Mr. Jones, Pomegranate Seed, and A Bottle of Perrier), and while Miss Mary Pask was the last one I read, I didn't write down my thoughts right after, and am now finding that I have absolutely no recollection of it, and even a google search is not jogging my memory in the least.
That's the main flaw of these stories: They were unremarkable, forgettable, rather predictable, and all save the only one I actually liked, The Eyes, have almost completely faded in my memory at this point. The other big flaw is Wharton's writing being too wordy and laborious to be conducive to any feeling of creepiness—everything about her efforts just fell completely flat for me. I can only liken these to the worst Poe has to offer, and Henry James'
The Turn of the Screw, which was only saved by its historical significance and ambiguous ending, as far as I'm concerned.
While I was more generous in my ratings of the individual stories, I'm giving the full collection just one star, because clearly I didn't like it—I couldn't finish it, and I wouldn't recommend it, unless you're the type of reader who thinks The Turn of the Screw is the height of its literary genre. Unfortunately it most definitely wasn't for me.
All Souls’ · ★★
In this Halloween story, a traditional gothic tale is placed into the modern setting of a suburban house—albeit a remote one, in which a widow lives with only her servants for company. She has an accident and becomes bed-bound with a broken ankle, and the strangest 36 hours follow. I took it as a metaphor for the loss of independence that comes with old age, and the fear of loneliness and abandonment that follows, but it wasn’t a particularly memorable or impressive choice as the first story in a collection.
The Eyes · ★★★
A well-known setting: Men gather in an oak-paneled library lit only by a fire-place, to smoke and exchange stories of the supernatural. Their host, an older gentleman, goes last, and shares a story about a pair of old and cruel floating eyes that have haunted him in the dead of night years before with his group of young admirers. I liked the twist, if that’s what you can call it; it was somewhat creepy for reasons that have nothing to do with monstrous apparitions.
Afterward · ★★½
A newly rich couple wants to move to a nice old house in the countryside, preferably with all the stereotypical INconveniences, including a ghost. They are promised that there is one, but that they won’t know they’ve been haunted until…. well, afterward. The title itself foreshadows the ending, and giving any more of the plot away would spoil it. I found it relatively predictable, but it was probably still creepily shocking at the time it was first published.
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell · ★½
A new maid joins the household of an unhappily married wealthy woman after her former maid passed away, and no one will talk about the deceased… I am a sucker for ambiguity in an ending, but this whole story was so vague, it’s like everything that’s important was left out of it. I have an inkling (or several) of what Wharton was getting at, but the reader has to do all of the heavy lifting, as there is so little to go on. Pretty fascinating as a narrative approach, but I can’t say that I enjoyed it.
Kerfol · ★★
A prospective buyer visits the grounds of an old castle on his own and comes across a pack of eerily quiet and well-cared for dogs… the former mistress’ beloved pets, and the backstory slowly emerged through old court documents. Non-human ghosts provided a welcome change from the other stories in this collection so far, but for some hard-to-pinpoint reason this gothic revenge tale reminded me a little of Bluebeard.
The Triumph of Night · ★★
A secretary is left stranded at a railway station on a Siberian-like winter night, and finds shelter with a young man suffering from tubercolosis and his wealthy industrialist uncle. Spooked by a malevolent apparition only he can see, in his fear he ends up becoming an unwitting agent in an evil plan. I quite enjoyed the writing and evoked atmosphere at the start of this one, but the rushed and bland ending ruined it for me.
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Note: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. -
Wharton’s Ghost Stories – collected together in this beautifully-produced book from Virago’s Designer Collection – are characterised by the tensions between restraint and passion, respectability and impropriety. Here we have narratives rooted in reality, with the ghostly chills mostly stemming from psychological factors – the fear of the unknown, the power of the imagination and the judicious use of supernatural imagery to unnerve the soul. As one might expect with Wharton, the writing is first class and the characters brilliantly drawn – with sufficient depth and subtlety to appear fully convincing.
The book opens with The Lady’s Maid’s Bell, one of the most unnerving tales in this excellent collection. Narrated by the maid herself, it is a classic ghost story in which the protagonist is haunted by the appearance of a spectre, the identity of which becomes clear as the story unfolds. There are several familiar elements here: a dark gloomy house; a feverish young lady of the manor; servants who refuse to speak of the maid’s predecessor; and a ghostly image that only the protagonist herself is able to detect. However, perhaps the most frightening element of the story is Wharton’s use of sound – the terrifying ring of the maid’s bell after hours, piercing the intense silence of the house as it rests at night.
Silence also plays a key role in All Souls, another highlight and possibly the most terrifying story in the collection. It tells the tale of a widow, Sara Clayborn, who believes she has spent a horrific weekend at her home, Whitegates, a lonely, remote house in the wilds of Connecticut. Having spotted an unknown woman heading towards her house, Sara breaks her ankle and is confined to bed for the night. On waking she discovers that the servants are nowhere to be found. The house appears to be deserted; an eerie silence having replaced the normal bustle of activity during the day. In this story, it is not the unexplained creaks and groans that strikes terror into the heart of the protagonist; rather, it is the ominous lack of any sound at all, especially as the house appears to be completely deserted.
To read the rest of my review, please visit:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2021... -
4.5
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I loved these stories.
Not too scary more of was that a ghost or a real person!
Beautifully written. -
[EDIT: Note, if this pops back up in my feed as some new thing...Goodreads seems to be having issues with multiple editions of a book and somehow marked both the paperback and kindle versions of read at the same time (which is, technically, true) and I was trying to not cheat on the "challenge" so I've been trying to get it to combine my reading, and it was glitchy, so I had to sort of delete one instance of the review so the other one could stand alone...and who knows what will happen next]
I'm not sure if there is a best way to approach this book. Which is quite good, by the way. Not the best ghost stories, but good stories generally written with skill and great pacing and at least a couple manage to hit something like true spookiness. She admits, in her preface, that what triggers one person vis-à-vis a ghost story might leave another unaffected, but even in that regard one should not be mining these for pure spookums (if one tries, they will be a bit disappointed). She is slightly playing with the slowburn ghost story the same way some musicians play with jazz while also playing jazz, if that makes sense. The overall impression is stories from a transitional era: between the traditional ghost story and the more modern type (which is a misnomer, really, since a lot of ghost stories written nowadays are more traditional than, say, something Henry James or later M.R. James or definitely something Oliver Onions or Robert Aickman might write). Her voice is not unique, per se, but it is also personal to her and her writing. Few to none of the games she plays are utterly groundbreaking, even for the era, but they are more to the front of development than behind the curve.
Like I said, no one best way to appreciate this. Mostly, read it for what it is: Edith Wharton's contribution to a somewhat full body of ghostly works, and one that stands out from the vast majority in terms of quality and spirit (no pun intended, but also pun intended).
I first found this book some years ago (maybe 12ish?) and read "Pomegranate Seed" and that gave me a mixed impression of the book. Upon reread, I found elements of that story quite effective and the sort of punch at the end all the better because how faint it is (read her preface afterwards for something of a humorous anecdote relating to readers' reactions to the mechanics of the story). At the time, though, I was three knuckles deep in the more Leisure Horror flavor of horror and so subtlety was not necessarily what I was looking for in my horror reading (though Leisure did help to catapult my reading interests more firmly towards Ramsey Campbell and some others, like Douglas Clegg, that eventually set me on a path to preferring more careful spooks over loud ones). When I first read it, I had the impression of, "She's just retreading old stories, meh," and somewhat that is right. Few of her horror tropes are exceptionally different than other, previous horror trope - someone comes to a house and has a visitation or some folks sit around a fireplace and tell about their experiences or someone has a strange encounter and reads some old papers explaining it - and you would be possibly right to suggest that her command of the tropes is lesser than other authors. In that regard, if you approach it as such, you might find it lackluster and overlong for the stories it is telling, for Wharton tells no tale in eight pages when she can instead tell it in thirty (or more).
However, working through this over a month and mostly giving myself downtime between stories to think about them, and now with more of a mindset to read more subtle stories and to pluck out elements in-between the spooks, I find myself appreciating her style much more. Take the first one as an example. On the surface, it is a perfectly boilerplate story about a new servant in an old house seeing some questionable stuff - sickly wife, neglectful (and abusive) husband, an attempt at a tryst, and a ghost - and eventually there's some death and some interacting with the ghost and nothing groundbreaking. And while it is the weakest story in the collection (though "All Souls'" tries to tie it by having a...twist of an ending that sours the moody set up that preceded) you still get more out of it by thinking through why certain folks, including the ghost, acted they way they did. Other stories are even more interesting when it comes to plucking out those details.
In some, like "Afterward" or "Pomegranate Seed", all the details and motivations are given, but there are still elements the reader must co-create with Wharton (a fact she hints at in the preface) to understand the precise outcome more fully. Even in those like "Mr. Jones" or "The Looking Glass" (the latter being one of two or three stories that might be perfectly non-ghostly in a basic reading), where motivations and outcome are both given, there is enjoyment to be had in Wharton's characterization and prose and restraint.
This is a book in which there are delights to being a more active participant. Like I said, it is good. Quite so. Full of great little moments. I doubt Wharton will ever be considered one of the true greats in the genre, but she deserves more recognition. One does long for stories to be a little more compact, here or there, and maybe a tad more adventurous, but she has still taken a few trite ideas and made something interesting out of them.
