Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories

[j d worthington]

Oh, look. Here's an interesting speculative essay about the identity of Count Magnus! Who was Count Magnus

Very neat! Thanks for bringing that one in -- I'll have to find some time to actually read the thing this weekend *wanders off muttering about "blasted tight schedules"*....

I am interested in exploring the Victorian ghostly tale further. I have several multiple-author collections, but what specific authors would people suggest I focus on?

Oof! That's something of a tall order. Yes, this was the "Golden Age" of the ghost story, in many ways, and there are a number of writers well worth looking into between the Victorians and Edwardians. Here are a few:

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (of course, but you knew about that one)
Vernon Lee (pen name of Violet Paget)
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
E. F. Benson, A. C. Benson, and R. H. Benson (E. F. being the best of the three, but all are worth reading)
Rhoda Broughton (middle-range, but sometimes very good)
A. M. Burrage (a.k.a. Ex-Private X)
Bernard Capes
A. E. Coppard (simply a wonderful writer of short stories, period)
Ralph Adams Cram (look for his collection, Black Spirits and White, which can sometimes be found in a Books for Libraries reprint edition for very little money...)
F. Marion Crawford ("The Upper Berth", "The Dead Smile", "The Screaming Skull", "Man Overboard", "For the Blood is the Life"... need I say more?)
Amelia B. Edwards
Edward Lucas White
Herbert Russell Wakefield (see the link to "The Red Lodge" for a taste)
W. W. Jacobs
Walter de la Mare
Amyas Northcote
Mrs. Margaret Olifant
Oliver Onions (his "The Beckoning Fair One" may well be the best ghost story in the English language)
Elizabeth Gaskell
John Buchan
W. F. Harvey
Robert S. Hitchens ("How Love Came to Professor Guildea" -- certainly one of the most chilling tales -- is in many anthologies, but he also wrote a fair number of other worthy forays into the genre)
Marjorie Bowen
W. C. Morrow
Perceval Landon
Charlotte Riddell
Sarah Orne Jewett
Edith Wharton
Richard Marsh
Lafcadio Hearn
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (not only for his own entries in the field, but also for his abilities as an editor of anthologies of ballads and verse, which often brought together some superb examples of the form)....

The list goes on and on.

Here's a site which gives an extensive listing, as well as some suggestions for each writer named:

Ghost Story Writers

Some of these are a little hard to track down, but (fortunately) many of them have been brought back into print in recent years, with the upsurge of interest in this genre.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Re: M.R James

Thanks. I've read many of these authors in collections, but a single-author collection helps to understand an author's style, technique and themes better and can add richness to each individual story.

I have the Wordsworth F Marion Crawford collection. Several of the short stories are classics that I've encountered before, a couple of them are fairly slight. The novella, The Witch Of Prague had some interesting ideas at its heart, but was draped in so much melodrama that I found it tedious going much of the time. I love Lafcadio Hearn's Oriental ghost stories - interestingly I've encountered some of them as urban legend ghost-stories told about my own city.

I wasn't aware Buchan tried his hand at the ghost story as well. Wilkie Collins also write several effective supernatural tales, as did Charles Dickens. Is there a thread on Victorian/Edwardian ghost stories or should we split these posts off into one?

 

[j d worthington]

Re: M.R James

I don't recall there being one specifically devoted to such, no. (Of course, that could be my failing memory again....)

Very well... Would you like to do the honors...?

 

[blacknorth]

Off the back of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes I've been reading William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki - The Ghost Finder. It's usually classed under detective fiction and, sure enough, many of the cases he invesigates are man-made frauds, but there are genuine tales of the supernatural where Carnacki often retires in confusion before resorting to Crowley-like mumbo-jumbo - this latter interests me a great deal, with its set a mystery to lay a mystery possibilities.

I think the ghost story is at its spookiest in a late Victorian setting - the mind's eye conjures images of early technology, early and easily scary photography, eerie forensics...

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I think the ghost story is at its spookiest in a late Victorian setting - the mind's eye conjures images of early technology, early and easily scary photography, eerie forensics...

Yes, exactly!

The Carnacki stories are quite varied, I think a couple of them are very good such as 'The Whistling Room' but Hodgson's prose can be a tough going at times.

 

[GOLLUM]

All I can say is that as I have all of the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural that I was interested in (which is the majority published) to date, the end of next week cannot come quickly enough, when I have a Christmas/New Year break.

I'm hoping to read the bulk of these over the holiday period. Everyone talking about the series has got me even more eager to dive in!

@JP: On a slightly unrelated note I can recommend ALL of the Del Rey Howard publications. I have them all and they are all very well presented ala Cosmicomics. Great publications that are affordable with many IMO marvelous illustrations, although some members have found them distracting. Being a big fan of Howard I've been remiss in not reading or getting to all of these yet, something else for me to look forward to over the next couple of months.

 

[j d worthington]

Looking over my earlier post, I realized that the link I'd intended to include hadn't made it in. Therefore, here's the link to H. Russell Wakefield's "The Red Lodge" (link courtesy of Lobolover):

A Place on the River

 

[blacknorth]

I read The Beckoning Fair One yesterday and was impressed - a little disturbed that the climax should seek to be so modern and mundane, but, yes, it was perfectly pitched and executed.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Was this split off from another thread?

I know I've read stories by most of the authors you list at the beginning, JD, and possibly others in collections without making note of their names. Many are quite familiar to me, and indeed favorites.

Of those mentioned, Vernon Lee is by far the one I love the most. Her stories are so beautifully written and evocative. They aren't easy to find in print, although they are available online -- as are stories by some of the other authors whose works are otherwise difficult to get. :: Munseys : Over 20,000 rare and hard to find titles in 10 formats! is one place to find a great many of them. Unfortunately, it's hard to locate what you want there. When it was Blackmask it was better organized.

I've probably read more ghost stories by LeFanu than any of the rest, and I do admire them, although his Gothic novel Uncle Silas is, in its own way, spookier and more chilling than any of the ghost stories.

I suppose you haven't included Algernon Blackwood because his career extended beyond the Edwardian era (although some of his best work was done during that period)?

The novella, The Witch Of Prague had some interesting ideas at its heart, but was draped in so much melodrama that I found it tedious going much of the time.

Tried slogging through that one a couple of years ago, and finally gave up somewhere in the second half. But surely it's a novel? Or did he write it first at novella length?

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I hastily assumed that it was a novella because it was bundled into the second half of a collection that contained a selection of his short supernatural stories in the first half; it may well be a novel. It's a strange thing, with some genuinely interesting and eerie ideas and motifs and a lot of melodramatic claptrap.

We tend to view the literature of the past through rose-tinted lenses (or at least, I do), being exposed largely to the choice classics that have earned a lasting acclaim; it's instructive to occasionally read a middling potboiler from an earlier era. Sometimes I trawl through Project Gutenburg for such things, just to experience for myself how taste has not necessarily declined terribly over time.

I agree that Blackwood largely fits into this category.

 

[j d worthington]

Blackwood, of course, was terrifically prolific; though I'm not that keen on a lot of his later work (less censorious of it than Joshi, though).

The Witch of Prague is indeed a novel, and one of those which lands about midway as far as Crawford's abilities. As JP says, it has some very good things to it, and a great deal of "melodramatic claptrap" -- though it is, at least, worlds above things like G. W. M. Reynolds' work.

There have been a few collections of Vernon Lee's work in the last several years, as there has been something of a mild resurgence of interest in her as one of the shining exemplars of the period and genre. Supernatural Tales is one such; a reprinting of Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales is another. Definitely worth searching out.

You might also want, if you don't have it already, to find to a copy of Montague Summers' Supernatural Omnibus, which is quite a rich compendium of such tales. That could also help guide you in finding writers you might be interested in, as would Edward Wangeknecht's Fireside Book of Ghost Stories -- both of these are of the first rank. (For that matter if you can find copies, go for Boris Karloff's Tales of Terror and And the Darkness Falls; these go a bit beyond the Edwardian period, but are really excellent anthologies as well.)

Again, this isn't quite what you were looking for, but they are all good source-books to try out writers to see which appeal....

 

[Riselka]

tripthicket,

Your post has been moved to its own thread in the Book Search section:

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/525769-looking-for-a-ghost-story.html

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Crossposting this here as it relates to this topic:

Also reading The Beast With Five Fingers by WF Harvey. Although the title story is a rather horrific tale of a supernatural possession, many of these stories are psychological rather than supernatural. One such, The Dabblers, is a rather nice little creepy-tale about schoolboy-lore which is a clear tribute to MR James, including a reference to a Rev. Montague Cuttler, a former teacher and an antiquarian and a strong debt in theme and structure to James's A School Story. Very good stuff so far, with a clear engaging style and some rather witty thumbnail sketches of various characters, some nicely droll little lines ('I've no objection to people improving their looks; on the contrary I'm grateful to them') and a sharp eye for the darker side of human nature, although it remains to be seen if there will be more supernatural tales after the title tale.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Crossposted again:

The Beast With Five Fingers is a rather indiscriminate collection for a 'Mystery & Supernatural' imprint, with only a third of the tales qualifying as horror (several of which are psychological rather than supernatural) and only one real mystery tale. The remainder consists of droll little vignettes of human nature, quasi-moralistic slices of life and so forth. These are not without interest, but they are generally very slight.

Of the horror tales (or rather, the tales of unease - horror is generally too equivocal a term to use here) the title tale is something of an anomaly, being both the most famous and the most atypical tale by WF Harvey. It's an unsubtle sort of affair, in its key concept, and subtly chilling concepts are a keynote of Harvey's more effective tales. These include the superb The Dabblers, a tale which contains its own critique in the form of a cynical listener dismissing the narrator's tale, and then overcomes the critique with a chilling little coda. August Heat is another very effective and uncanny tale. These are both frequently anthologised stories, as is the title story. A few stories that barely offer more than the cliched ghost story of the Victorian/Edwardian era have been included, as have several variations on recurring themes, where everyone concerned would have been better served by only including only the very best example of the type.

There are nevertheless several good tales here, and one wishes the editor has seen fit instead to assemble a slimmer but more effective volume of about 12 to 15 short stories.