Ghostly Women

Lee lived from 1856 to 1935, the golden age of supernatural fiction. In this period, a multitude of professional writers, most of them better known for their “serious” novels, regularly produced ghost stories for special Christmas annuals and magazines. For my seasonal binge this year I decided to read some of those stories but restrict myself to women authors whose work I didn’t already know and admire. Consequently, you will look in vain for a mention of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”—that key text of American feminism—or the ghost stories of E. Nesbit, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, or Elizabeth Bowen. If, by chance, you’ve never read them, you should.

Anthologies of English ghost stories frequently begin with Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852), in part because it provides a particularly apt example of what the Victorians liked in a tale of specters and revenants. Told in the first person, its eerie events take place at an isolated country house, concern multiple generations, hint at mysterious (or evil) events in the past, and build suspense with threats to the present generation, in this case a child.

Revered even now as a pioneering Egyptologist, Amelia B. Edwards produced at least a dozen fine ghost stories. “The Phantom Coach” (1864)—partly based on folklore—again sets its action in the past, with the narrator vouching for the truth of what happened to him on a snowy night 20 years earlier. Barrister James Murray had been out hunting and lost his way but, eventually, found a solitary house where he begged for food and shelter. There he discovered that his inhospitable host had withdrawn from the world to pursue theosophical studies.

In the course of their conversation, Murray—eager to return to his wife—learns that the night mail travels a road five miles away. If he hurries, he can flag down a ride just where that terrible accident happened. What accident? Some years previous, the coach pitched over a parapet into the valley below and six people died. Later, waiting nervously on the dark road, Murray finds himself growing confused and lightheaded from the extreme cold, but eventually sighs with relief when he hears the sound of approaching hooves.

I won’t reveal the conclusion of Edwards’s story—nor of any other, for that matter—but note that she sets up a climax that is liable to both a natural and a supernatural explanation. Murray had just been listening to occult speculations; he’d drunk some strong whisky; he was worn out with fatigue and cold. Perhaps what occurred was just an hallucination?

Many ghost stories build in a chink that would allow readers to rationalize apparently uncanny events. But the best, I think, offer no such comfort. “Nut Bush Farm,” by the prolific Charlotte Riddell (1832-1906), immediately introduces an ominous tone: “When I entered upon the tenancy of Nut Bush Farm almost the first piece of news which met me, in the shape of a whispered rumor, was that ‘something’ had been seen in the ‘long field.’ ” We soon learn that this “something” resembles Mr. Hascot, the former tenant of Nut Bush Farm who, one day, simply disappeared. What happened to him?

When the narrator starts to investigate, Riddell ratchets up the tension by the diverse reactions of several women, including the eccentric Mrs. Gostock, who actually owns the farm; the pale and delicate neighbor, Mrs. Waite; a beautiful servant girl; and even the narrator’s own sensible wife. In the end, Mr. Hascot’s spirit walks for a highly traditional reason: It can’t rest easy until its bones are found. Almost to the end, “Nut Bush Farm” could hardly be bettered, but then Riddell winds up the story in an idiotic, perfunctory manner.

After J. Sheridan Le Fanu—author of Carmilla, the classic novella about a lesbian vampire—Riddell may be the best, and most wide-ranging, high Victorian writer of ghost stories. “The Open Door” verges on comedy, as a clever young clerk tries to determine why a certain door in an empty country manor never stays closed, even when locked. “The Last of Squire Ennismore,” by contrast, is as lean and spare as a folktale: In it, an old reprobate first discovers a cask of superior brandy on the beach, then encounters a dark, silent man who walks with a peculiar ambling gait. The two take to playing cards and drinking steadily until, one night, the brandy is all gone.

In “Walnut-Tree House,” Edgar Stainton moves into a mansion that has been uninhabited for seven years. During his first night there he is approached by “a child with the saddest face mortal ever beheld.” But instead of being frightened away by this phantom, Stainton shows it kindness—and in so doing, learns the reason why Walnut-Tree House is haunted. He quickly resolves to make what amends he can for the crimes of the past. As must be obvious, this story—though effective—contains a considerable amount of sentimentality, the Victorian era’s fallback emotion.

One finds an extreme case of this in Margaret Oliphant’s 1880 short novel, A Beleaguered City. The citizens of a French town, given over to materialist values, are driven from their homes by the risen dead. The gates are then closed against the living, and Semur is shrouded in fog. Narrated largely by the town’s smug mayor, whose unconscious vanity is beautifully sustained, the story unfortunately grows tediously religiose and didactic. A similar slushiness mars Oliphant’s “The Open Door.” Something haunts the ruins near Brentwood, something that crawls and moans piteously near a broken-down doorway. The child of the estate’s new owner proves especially sensitive to these unearthly cries and longs to help the poor suffering creature.

While Oliphant builds up an impressive eeriness—so much so that a modern reader imagines some Lovecraftian lurker on the threshold—she ultimately opts for pathos rather than horror. I was pretty much ready to dismiss Oliphant as too moralistic for my taste—until I read “The Secret Chamber,” about an inescapable ancestral curse and a truly frightening vampiric immortal. It never flinches at the end. “The Library Window” is even better: An adolescent girl, recovering from an illness, is spending the summer with her aunt in the Scottish town of St. Rule’s. For the most part, she devotes her time to reverie, watching the people passing by or studying the old library across the street. For some reason, it seems unusually difficult to determine the number of its windows.

Rudely ignoring Lady Carnbee, Mr. Pitmilly, and her Aunt Mary, the narrator grows increasingly obsessed with one particular window. Sometimes it seems to disappear; at other times, she can actually see through its glass into a room. Gradually, she makes out more and more of the room’s furnishings, and eventually notices a young man seated at a desk, busily writing. Like Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” Oliphant’s “The Library Window” neatly tantalizes the reader with the undecidable and unresolved. For example, is Lady Carnbee a witch? “Maybe she once was,” says Aunt Mary. Like so much in this magnificent story, the answer is exquisitely evasive.

Do you need to be clever, then, to produce an effective eerie tale? Not necessarily. Sometimes a single strong image, or the creation of tender empathy for an endangered protagonist, will be enough. Take the stories of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915), author of the immensely popular sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret. In “The Cold Embrace,” a callous lover, who has caused the suicide of his fiancée, learns that he cannot escape the clutch of her spectral arms. In “Good Lady Ducayne,” a wizened aristocrat hires a vivacious young woman as her companion. But Bella soon begins to lose her bloom and energy. Could this languor have anything to do with the marks on her arms, caused (according to the sinister Dr. Parravicini) by a virulent species of mosquito?

For me, though, Braddon’s finest story is “Eveline’s Visitant.” Hector de Brissac kills his cousin André in a duel over a flirtatious court beauty. On the field of honor, the dying man pronounces a curse and vows revenge. Years later, Hector weds the innocent Eveline, who adores him. Yet once the couple settle at the family estate, Eveline, on her country walks, regularly glimpses a pale, handsome young man watching her: André has come back to haunt not Hector, but his wife. Braddon ends this story with a shocking confession.

In fact, sex—often represented by vampirism or submission to a powerful Other—crops up regularly in Victorian supernatural fiction. In Rhoda Broughton’s “The Man with the Nose” (1872), Elizabeth tells her fiancé that she was once hypnotized by a traveling mesmerist. It was just a lark, though she was made to do all sorts of “extraordinary” things and was very sick afterwards. Later, on their honeymoon in Germany, this bantering couple behave like the leads in a romantic comedy—until Elizabeth sees the hypnotist again. She recognizes him one night by his prominent nose as he stands (quite impossibly) in the newlyweds’ hotel room and wills her to leave her husband’s bed and come to him.

Just a nightmare, of course. In fact, the real nightmare is just beginning, and one hardly needs to be a Freudian to interpret Broughton’s symbolism.

Half-a-century later, May Sinclair’s “Where Their Fire is Not Quenched” (1922) carries sex into the afterlife. Having missed out on true love, Harriott, now in her thirties, finally yields to the advances of a married man whom she nonetheless finds mildly repulsive. They spend a week in Paris at a seedy hotel. After they both die, she and her paramour find that for them, Hell is the Hotel Saint Pierre:

In Sinclair’s equally unsettling “The Villa Désirée,” Mildred Eve finds herself assigned the bedroom of her new fiancé’s dead wife, later learning that the poor woman was frightened to death. But by whom—or by what? “The Villa Désirée” first appeared in 1926 as part of The Ghost Book, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith, who had commissioned “sixteen new stories of the uncanny” from her many literary friends. That astonishing volume includes such masterpieces as L. P. Hartley’s “A Visitor from Down Under,” D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” and Hugh Walpole’s “Mrs. Lunt,” as well as “The Corner Shop,” by C. L. Ray, a pseudonym for Asquith herself.

J. M. Barrie—for whom Asquith once worked as a secretary—would have loved that sentimental time-slip classic, but her other stories are much darker in tone. In “The Playfellow,” for example, Claud Halyard returns to his ancestral home in England with his American wife and daughter. Hyacinth soon seems perennially occupied and the reader quickly realizes that the little girl is playing with the ghost of her lookalike cousin Daphne, who died in a fire some years earlier. In due course, the past reaches out into the present with a vengeance.

By contrast, in Ann Bridge’s “The Buick Saloon,” the present reaches back into the past, though the end result proves equally heartbreaking. After recovering from a long illness, Mrs. Bowlby finally joins her banker husband, who has been posted for some time in Peking. There she purchases a used Buick saloon and, when inside it, occasionally hears a woman’s voice, murmuring words of love in French. Her curiosity aroused, Mrs. Bowlby tries to learn more about her car’s history, its former owner, and an obviously passionate love affair. Even when the reader begins to guess the truth, Bridge brings off the story’s climax brilliantly.

When I first started this project, I intended to chart some common elements or themes among all these women writers. Certainly, many of their stories are implicit cris de coeur, addressing marital or sexual tensions, thwarted love, and societal or patriarchal constraints suffered by wives and daughters. Others, as I’ve mentioned, display a didactic religiosity, and still others emphasize a cozy homeliness and domesticity undermined by an otherworldly intrusion.

One also detects a gradual shift from external to psychological horror. By the 1930s, Dorothy L. Sayers pertinently observed, “In the old days the wickedness always belongs to the haunter, whereas today it so often wells up from the soul of the haunted. .  .  . We have realized only too well that the kingdom of hell is within us.” True enough. And yet, many early stories also turn on spiritual terror. Consider Violet Hunt’s “The Prayer,” first published in 1895. Addressing the corpse of her husband, who has just been pronounced dead, a hysterical Mrs. Arne prays that “if there be a God in heaven, and if He ever answered a prayer, let Him .  .  . give you back to me.” Shortly afterward, an amazed doctor finds that the patient he had thought dead has somehow miraculously recovered. But as time goes by, it’s clear that there is something unsettling about Edward Arne, something that frightens people, including his once-adoring wife.

While clearly a variation of “The Monkey’s Paw,” Hunt’s story can also be interpreted as a study of marital estrangement. Helen R. Hull’s “Clay-Shuttered Doors” takes the same theme and gives it yet another twist. A pushing, vulgar businessman named Winchester Corson, about to complete a big merger that will make his fortune, crashes his car. His wife Thalia is, apparently, killed; but he cannot accept this—especially not now, not when his entire future is at stake. Corson holds Thalia’s inert body, and pleads with her to come back to him. In fact, it seems that Thalia might only have been knocked unconscious. Hull’s tale of a loyal wife’s devotion to an unworthy husband has become a feminist touchstone.

Of course, the more stories I read last fall, the more new writers I kept discovering. To name only a few, and just one story by each, there was Eleanor Scott, whose “Randalls Round” depicts a Cotswold village’s monstrous ancient ritual; H. D. Everett, whose “The Death Mask” recalls one of M. R. James’s most celebrated horrors; and Alice Perrin, whose “Caulfield’s Crime” shows what may happen if you shoot an Indian fakin. Lady Eleanor Smith’s “No Ships Pass”—about castaways on an island out of time—could be a lost episode from The Twilight Zone. In “The Shell of Sense,” Olivia Howard Dunbar represents a ghost’s thoughts as it gradually transcends human pettiness. At times, Harriet Prescott Spofford resembles her contemporary Poe, especially in her phantasmagoric prose poem about an eerie arctic voyage, “The Moonstone Mass,” or her bizarre conte cruel (albeit with a happy O. Henry ending) “Circumstance.”

While Edith Wharton stands preeminent among American women writers of ghost stories, two of her contemporaries are nearly her equal. Of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s weird tales—most, but not all, collected in The Wind in the Rose-Bush (1903)—no praise is adequate. In “Luella Miller,” a helpless New England beauty enchants the people around her into working themselves to death on her behalf. In “The Hall Bedroom,” a woman rents a room that somehow seems to grow larger at night. Could the painted landscape hanging on the wall be a portal into another world?

Some years ago, a famous list of the 13 most terrifying horror stories of all time included Gertrude Atherton’s “The Striding Place.” I’m not sure I agree; but Atherton’s “Death and the Woman” remains a true tour-de-force, presenting the stream-of-consciousness hysteria of a wife as she passes the night by the side of her wasted, dying husband. My own favorite Atherton, though, is “The Bell in the Fog” (1905), in which an American writer, much like Henry James, buys an English country house and slowly grows obsessed with the portraits of two children, a boy and a girl. One day, on a walk through the nearby woods, he encounters a little girl who is the image of the one in the painting. Did the Master ever see this homage to his own ghostly fiction?

And finally, I can’t overlook the genre’s finest British woman writer of the early-20th-century, Marjorie Bowen (1885-1952). Julia Roseingrave, in particular, ranks among the best short novels of the uncanny, with George Eliot’s superb The Lifted Veil—in which the narrator can read the minds of everyone around him except that of the calculating femme fatale he marries—and Lanoe Falconer’s Cecilia de Noël, which explores the reactions of a skeptic, a doctor, a clergyman, and others to what seems to be a ghost.

Bowen’s novel opens on a dark night at a lonely country manor when the Devil knocks at the gate and demands a room. The frightened servants quickly send for Julia Roseingrave, a poor but beautiful young woman who lives nearby and cares for her idiot sister and sickly, bedridden mother. She, they believe, will know what to do. As it turns out, she does—though things aren’t quite what they initially appear, nor is Julia. Before long, in an orchestrated campaign to capture his heart, Julia is bathing in a supposedly enchanted pool, deliberately exciting a visiting London nobleman with her nakedness. As the novel proceeds, its plot hints at the occult and alchemical, then gradually thickens to include such sensational elements as an abandoned wife, blackmail, an incriminating letter, even the prospect of coldly calculated murder. Some of these same dark themes are taken up by Bowen in other famous short stories such as “Scoured Silk,” “The Avenging of Ann Leete,” “The Crown Derby Plate,” and “They Found My Grave.”

Most of the stories I’ve described here are available as public domain e-texts. Some have also been gathered together in individual author collections. The vast majority, however, crop up regularly in anthologies of classic supernatural fiction or may be found in thematic volumes such as Richard Dalby’s Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers, Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s What Did Miss Darrington See?, S. T. Joshi’s The Cold Embrace: Weird Stories by Women, Mike Ashley’s The Darker Sex, and A. Susan Williams’s The Lifted Veil.

To modern sensibilities, of course, only a few of these 19th- and early-20th-century stories are likely to truly shock or surprise. Instead, the reader’s pleasure typically derives from their often-leisurely exposition, the deft characterization of even minor figures, the creation of an air of spookiness, and the conscious use of symbolism. Enjoy these tales, partly, for their scary touches, but mostly for the accomplished manner of their telling.

Michael Dirda is the author, most recently, of Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books.