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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 11, 2010 17:25:03 GMT
Edith Wharton - Ghost Stories Wordsworth 2009This book is selected & introduced by David Stuart Davies. Traumatised by ghost stories in her youth, Pulitzer Prize winning author Edith Wharton (1862 -1937) channelled her fear and obsession into creating a series of spine-tingling tales filled with spirits beyond the grave and other supernatural phenomena. While claiming not to believe in ghosts, paradoxically she did confess that she was frightened of them. Wharton imbues this potent irrational and imaginative fear into her ghostly fiction to great effect. In this unique collection of finely wrought tales Wharton demonstrates her mastery of the ghost story genre. Amongst the many supernatural treats within these pages you will encounter a married farmer bewitched by a dead girl; a ghostly bell which saves a woman's reputation; the weird spectral eyes which terrorise the midnight hours of an elderly aesthete; the haunted man who receives letters from his dead wife; and the frightening power of a doppelganger which foreshadows a terrible tragedy. Compelling, rich and strange, the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, like vintage wine, have matured and grown more potent with the passing years. Contents (in no particular order!) The Lady's Maid's Bell The Eyes Afterward Kerfol The Triumph of Night Miss Mary Pask Bewitched Mr. Jones Pomegranate Seed The Looking Glass All Souls The Duchess at Prayer The Fulness of Life A Journey A Bottle of Perrier
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jul 11, 2010 17:49:01 GMT
The Wordsworth volume additionally contains
"The Duchess at Prayer," "The Fulness of Life," "A Journey,"
and the excellent
"A Bottle of Perrier."
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 12, 2010 14:19:30 GMT
Thanks Mr Lapin X - I've modified the contents list. I figured the Wordsworth wouldn't have exactly the same contents as the Tartarus edition but it looks as if it does!
Anyway, on with the reviews (in no particular order):
The Duchess at Prayer: A lot like Honore de Balzac's La Grande Breteche told from the woman's point of view. The Duke's a bit of a rotter, really, and leaves his young wife along for long periods, during which she attracts the attentions of our Robin Askwith-style lover who disguises himself as a chaplain and tends to hide in the chapel crypt when there's a chance hubbie might be around. Eventually the duke, who may be a rotter but isn't stupid, comes home with a great big statue of his wife that he thinks would look perfect placed over the entrance to the crypt, which of course is never used anyway...
Kerfol: Another rotten aristocratic husband, another neglected wife, who this time has a lover and a small dog, which her husband strangles. So she gets another one. Which he strangles, and so the story goes etc etc ad nauseam or rather until the massed ghosts of the strangled doggies decide to tear him apart.
The Eyes: Our aging male protagonist has an eye for the younger generation of man, and keeps seeing a pair of ugly eyes staring at him from the end of the bed. By the end of the story he's older, uglier and...oh my goodness who's eyes are those staring back at him from the mirror?
Afterward: A fairly lengthy, subtle ghost story that I've re-read since others liked it more than I did when I read it in the Fontana Ghost story collection. I must say I still don't think it's that out of the ordinary, and certainly I've enjoyed other stories in this collection a lot more.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 13, 2010 13:26:06 GMT
Bewitched - Another affair, only this time it's between a married farmer(who's starting to look decidedly anaemic) and a dead girl. His wife gets three local men together (one of whom is the girl's father) to go and despatch the monster, but at the end it's the girl's living sister whose funeral everyone attends.
I'm starting to get to grips with Ms Wharton's style now and I have to say I'm begining to like these stories and their often inconclusive work-it-out-for-yourself endings. I can certainly recommend this one as a 'way in' to her fiction and while I quite literally can't say what happens at the end I have a few ideas, which makes this tale all the more fun. Really good stuff.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 14, 2010 8:51:47 GMT
Miss Mary Pask - Our delicate young male protagonist has promised to look up the title character if he's ever in her home land of Brittany. It's only when he gets there when he remembers that she's dead. Which is odd because there she is to say hello to him. There's an entirely reasonable twist to this one but the protagonist's convenient lapses in memory, along with the convenient missing out of various important bits of information, make this one a bit hard to believe.
The Fulness of Life - An interesting, and very female take I should imagine, on the afterlife and how it should be spent. I'll be interested to see what Lady P thinks of this one
The Lady's Maid's Bell - Thanks to Barbara Roden I now have a better idea of what this one's about, and as an old-fashioned ghost story it works well. There are an awful lot of unfaithful characters in this collection of stories, though!
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Post by David A. Riley on Jul 14, 2010 9:30:36 GMT
I just looked her up on Wikepedia and was surprised just how successful a novelist she was. Her house in Massachusetts is stunningly impressive.
"There are an awful lot of unfaithful characters in this collection of stories, though!"
She did have an affair for five years before she divorced her husband, who'd been diagnosed as incurably bonkers. (This is my PC mode)
David
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Post by dem bones on Jul 15, 2010 7:51:27 GMT
Peter Haining (ed.) - The Ghost Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural by Edith Wharton (Peter Owen, Dufour 1996) Thomi Wroblewski Introduction: Peter Haining
The Duchess at Prayer The Fullness of Life A Journey The Lady’s Maid’s Bell Afterward The Triumph of Night Bewitched A Bottle of Perrier The Looking GlassHere's one the late, great Peter Haining made earlier, quite pointless of me to post it save to illustrate that the Wordsworth is excellent value for money.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 17, 2010 9:27:36 GMT
The Ghost Feeler would probably be had up in court before he could do any haunting these days A Bottle of Perrier - It's not just Charles Birkin who could do high quality nasty. Our hero goes to visit his chum at his elegant retreat in the desert. Only he's not there. His manservant insists he'll be back soon and offers wine which is refused as there's obviously been a bit of alcoholic misbehaviour in the past that means our man is now strictly teetotal. Perrier will do, only they've run out, which leaves only the water from the well... Hopeless reader that I sometimes am I thought this tale terribly ordinary until the last couple of paragraphs where everything is rendered so beautifully and so horribly that the rest of the story becomes properly horrible too. Well done Miss Wharton.
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Post by jonathan122 on Jul 17, 2010 22:02:49 GMT
Here's one the late, great Peter Haining made earlier, quite pointless of me to post it save to illustrate that the Wordsworth is excellent value for money. I've got the follow-up volume that Haining edited: The Demanding Dead - (Peter Owen, 2007) The Moving Finger The Eyes Kerfol Miss Mary Pask Mr. Jones Pomegranate Seed Roman Fever All Souls' Beatrice Palmato (fragment)I'm not sure what "Roman Fever" is doing in there, as it's about as far from being a ghost story as anything I've ever read, but I think "The Moving Finger" should probably have been included in the Wordsworth edition. "Beatrice Palmato" is apparently a story that Wharton was working on before her death, dealing with the cheery topics of child abuse,suicide and incest. The fragment that actually exists is a frankly rather eye-popping sex scene between father and daughter. Now, if only someone could unearth that bestiality novel that Henry James was working on...
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Post by jonathan122 on Jul 17, 2010 23:23:31 GMT
Miss Mary Pask - Our delicate young male protagonist has promised to look up the title character if he's ever in her home land of Brittany. It's only when he gets there when he remembers that she's dead. Which is odd because there she is to say hello to him. There's an entirely reasonable twist to this one but the protagonist's convenient lapses in memory, along with the convenient missing out of various important bits of information, make this one a bit hard to believe. I think a couple of Wharton's stories suffer from some pretty clunky plot mechanics - both this one and "Afterwards" have the same problem with characters inexplicably forgetting things, whilst in both "Mr. Jones" and "Pomegranate Seed", the "twist" endings are blatantly obvious from the start. Then there's "All Souls'", which ends with a "rationalisation" for the strange events of the story which is downright peculiar, making it feel a bit like a Robert Aickman story being solved by Sherlock Holmes. Most of the time Wharton is good enough to allow the reader to overlook these problems, but personally I feel that "Afterwards" is an example of a story which is sunk by its plot contrivances.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 18, 2010 7:30:55 GMT
Mr Jones - I've just read this & I agree entirely with you, Jonathan. The ending was obvious pretty much from the start and sadly with a story of that length I tend to feel even greater disappointment if the story doesn't do something a little more unexpected. This is doubly the case with Afterwards:
You've actually summed up why I didn't like Afterwards over on the Fontana 2 thread better than I did! It was the contrivances that spoiled the story for me more than anything else
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 18, 2010 14:06:54 GMT
The Looking Glass - Terribly sweet story, actually, of a medium who lies to an old lady about the messages she's receiving to keep the old girl happy.
Pomegranate Seed - More affair-based stuff, this time told from the point of view of a girl who's been married for a year. Her husband keeps receiving letters addressed in girly handwriting and they make him go 'quite pale'. He won't tell her anything and Ms Wharton doesn't tell us much either. It's probably the ghost of his first wife but as to where he disappears to and why isn't explained and the story finishes in such an inconclusive way it made me think the last page of it had got missed off by the printers.
All Souls - Slightly weird story of Sara Clayburn who meets a strange woman walking up to her house on All Souls. Sara twists her ankle and then spends 36 hours in the limbo of her deserted house, bereft of servants and with no electricity. When everything goes back to normal everyone denies the occurrence. A year later Sara sees the woman again and runs to the doctor who's narrating the tale. He then goes all Dennis Wheatley on us with a po-faced explanation of witches' covens that dispels every drop of atmosphere wrought by the first 20 pages of the story.
And on that odd note it's goodbye to Ms Wharton. It's not a bad book at all and there are a few choice items in there, but in my opinion I don't think I'd have really missed out if I'd never come across these, and I'd probably have been grateful to avoid the seriously confusing ones. (Sorry Edith)
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Post by ripper on Jun 15, 2018 14:47:16 GMT
I came upon All Souls many years ago in an anthology edited by, I think, Susan Hill. It was the final story, if memory serves, and I was having a pretty good time with the collection and story until the last part. Lord JP summed it up very nicely as the excellent atmosphere Wharton had built up being drained. A great pity, as I thought the scenes of the heroine alone and invalided in the house were effectively suspenseful.
I am still a bit baffled by the ending of The Lady's Maid's Bell, even though it is probably my favourite Wharton story.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jul 22, 2020 20:57:26 GMT
Miss Mary Pask - Our delicate young male protagonist has promised to look up the title character if he's ever in her home land of Brittany. It's only when he gets there when he remembers that she's dead. Which is odd because there she is to say hello to him. There's an entirely reasonable twist to this one but the protagonist's convenient lapses in memory, along with the convenient missing out of various important bits of information, make this one a bit hard to believe. I think a couple of Wharton's stories suffer from some pretty clunky plot mechanics - both this one and "Afterwards" have the same problem with characters inexplicably forgetting things, whilst in both "Mr. Jones" and "Pomegranate Seed", the "twist" endings are blatantly obvious from the start. Then there's "All Souls'", which ends with a "rationalisation" for the strange events of the story which is downright peculiar, making it feel a bit like a Robert Aickman story being solved by Sherlock Holmes. Most of the time Wharton is good enough to allow the reader to overlook these problems, but personally I feel that "Afterwards" is an example of a story which is sunk by its plot contrivances. "Mr. Jones" satisfied me.
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