Book Review

Victorian Ghost Stories By Eminent Women Writers: Edited by Richard Dalby

C

Genre: Classic, Horror

Theme: Anthology

Victorian Ghost Stories by Eminent Women Writers is an anthology that contains twenty-one stories of crypts, brain fevers, meditations on the meaning of God, enormous crumbling houses, obsessive artists, creepy children, and moors. So, you know, pretty much everything I cherish in life. While most of the stories were published firmly within the Victorian Era, a few were published just before or just after it.

As is, unfortunately, often the case with older books, I have to issue a trigger warning for racism and anti-Semitism. You can skip the story “The Story of Salome” entirely – it’s about a Jewish woman who secretly converts to Christianity but is buried in a Jewish cemetery and cannot rest because she hasn’t had a Christian burial. It’s terrible on many levels, including the instant obsession of the narrator and the disgust displayed towards Jewish people.

Meanwhile, the story “The Affair at Grover Station” by Willa Cather, relies almost entirely on a bizarre combination of prejudice against Chinese people and Jewish people. I don’t think of Cather as a Victorian writer, but this story is one of the first that she published (it was first published in 1900 so it made it into the collection by a smidge).

Overall, I was disappointed by the stories, which were not so much frightening as perplexing. I suspect that a great deal of this has to do with the changing culture and shifts in what people feared and wanted to explore. These stories are frequently moralistic, often feel incomplete, and rely on very specific and punitive ideas about religion and justice. They are also oddly constructed, often seeming either too drawn out or too cut off, with a lot of obsession at first sight.

Victorian horror can still terrify the modern reader. As evidence, I give you Dracula’s methodical elimination of the crew of the Demeter in Dracula, Carmilla standing, covered in blood, at the foot of Laura’s bed in Carmilla, the frantic desperation of Dr. Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and of course almost everything by Edgar Allan Poe. However, the stories in this anthology trade in different kinds of fears, and as a reader I was often perplexed as to why characters were so panicked. I could imagine that seeing a ghost would be scary, but the number of people who fall into fits, are driven mad, succumb instantly to brain fever, or simply drop dead after a single sighting seemed not so much scary as silly. My reaction to most of the stories was less “eek!” and more “Huh?”

I did like the following stories:

“The Open Door” by Margaret Oliphant: This is one of the longer works, and it is elegant, spooky, and touching. It involves a man whose son is stricken by brain fever (those wacky Victorians and their wacky brain fevers) after seeing a ghost. The son is stricken more by pity than by fear, and he begs his father to help the ghost, who keeps calling, “Oh, mother, let me in!” The father teams up with the local skeptic and the local minister to solve the mystery of the ghost. The story is truly creepy with a “Hound of the Baskervilles” feel to it. But it’s also grounded in a very sweet theme of compassion and forgiveness. Does it make sense? No, it does not. But it is actually creepy, and it presents the idea of a merciful God instead of suggesting that if no one gives you a Christian burial you’ll have to haunt your heathen grave forever (Thanks, Salome, for that theological horror).

“Cecilia de Noel” by Lanoe Falconer (the pen name of Mary Elizabeth Hawker): This story is about a group of people who either have encounters with a ghost or who hear about these encounters. To each person, the ghost means something different. The atheist thinks that the ghost sightings are psychological in nature (i.e., a person who is told there is a ghost in a mansion will probably encounter a flapping sheet or a draught of air in the dead of night and assume that it’s the ghost). The doctor thinks the ghost is a symptom of an illness or preoccupation. Other characters think that the ghost is a warning, or a sign from God, or a reminder of the mysteries of life and death. Only the title character sees the ghost as a being in pain. Like “The Open Door,” this story has an element of compassion that I loved, although it’s unfortunately also intensely preachy.  It’s also a very funny story, particularly when Atherley (the renter of the allegedly haunted house), his wife, his two sons, and their dog are on the page.

“The Prayer” by Violet Hunt: In terms of theology, this story is awful, just awful. But in terms of horror, it’s wonderful – not scary but psychologically horrifying. This is a “be careful what you wish for” story that is depressing as hell – but if you are looking for LOLs then you probably shouldn’t be reading Victorian ghost stories anyway. I can’t tell you the plot without ruining the story but it involves grief and the importance of letting the past go.

I would only recommend this book to people who have a specific and passionate interest in Victorian literature and/or forgotten women writers. To me, the most interesting thing about the collection was the introduction, which gives a good historical context for the stories, and the exposure to so many writers that I hadn’t heard of previously. It makes for fun Halloween reading, or, if you want to be Victorian about it, Christmas reading (the Victorians loved telling ghost stories during the Christmas Season which suggests that we are not the first era to find all that merrymaking to be stressful).  Me, I’m gonna go re-read some Poe. That dude was MESSED UP.

 

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  1. Patricia says:

    I think I’m with you on just sticking with Poe and Agatha Christie to scare the crap out of me for the next three months

  2. jimthered says:

    It’s not Victorian, but for great horror I absolutely recommend THE BEST OF H.P. LOVECRAFT: BLOODCURDLING TALES OF HORROR AND THE MACABRE by, well, H.P. Lovecraft. While Lovecraft did have an unfortunate tendency towards racism, his stories have created an atmosphere of creeping terror and a mythos that is still going strong to this day. (Just do an eBay search for “plush Cthulhu” to see what I mean.) My review of this book is at http://thearmchaircritic.blogspot.com/2011/09/best-of-hp-lovecraft.html

  3. kkw says:

    Horror is the only genre I try to avoid as I am completely chicken shit. I have steered clear of Poe and Lovecraft for decades and they still give me nightmares. But weird Victorian brain feverish stories by largely forgotten women authors is just the sort of thing I can’t resist.
    Am I the only one who finds ye olde timey racist authors unexpectedly encouraging? It’s easy to look around and only see how horrible things are and how far we have to go, and historical texts are a reminder that things could always be worse, and have been. Plus I suspect it’s as close as I can get to enjoying the frisson of terror, since I’m inevitably too scared by scary things to find them fun. Absurd Victorian justifications of, say, anti-Semitism are like a ghost story for me.

  4. Caitlin says:

    aw man. It’s such a bummer that this anthology sucked—I adore bizarre Victorian ghost stories/horror. I guess I’ll go back to Gaskell and maybe Wharton instead of trying this one out. Thank goodness for them——and for Poe!

  5. Vasha says:

    For a good 19th-century supernatural story by a woman, I can suggest “Luella Miller” by Mary Wilkins-Freeman. It’s ambiguous, original, low-key, quite scary, and compassionate. There must be other good ones; “The Open Door” was the other one I could have suggested.

    I’m looking through my anthologies, and spy a few others, but since I don’t recall them, I must not have liked them enough to re-read them. Well, “Amour dure” by Vernon Lee is kind of memorable although it’s of the instant-obsession type.

  6. harthad says:

    Instant obsession is a big thing in Poe too. I just re-read “Berenice” in which the narrator’s weirdly fetishy obsession centers on a dying woman’s teeth. Messed up, indeed.

  7. KSwan says:

    To characterize “The Story of Salome” as racist and anti-Semitic is a superficial, 2016 politically-correct-oriented judgment. I find no evidence of disgust displayed towards Jewish people in this story, written in 1873. There are hints of the ethnic/social/religious attitudes that existed at that time, but there is a difference between historical anecdotes of casual social racism, and active, malignant racism by an author.

    The author of Salome writes of the interaction between Christian and Jewish characters with sympathy rather than malignancy. When the narrating character makes the decision to respond to the entreaty of the ghost, he shows a sensitivity of understanding about what his action (sacrilege) would mean to the Jewish community.

    “The Jewish cemetery! The ghetto of the dead! I remembered now to have read or heard long since how the Venetian Jews, cut off in death as in life from the neighborhood of their Christian rulers, had been buried from immemorial time upon this desolate waste.”

    “The Jews, he said, were rich and powerful; no longer an oppressed people; no longer to be insulted even in Venice with impunity. To cut a Christian cross upon a Jews headstone in the Jewish Cemetery, would be ‘a sort of sacrilege’, and punishable, no doubt, by the law. This sounded like truth; so … I prevailed upon the stonemason to sell me a small mallet and a couple of chisels, and made up my mind to commit the sacrilege myself.”

    “Salome” would barely be considered horror by today’s standards. A ghost sighting and message from the unhappy dead padded out with an atmospheric description of antique Venice will not scare today’s readers. If it is at all terrible, it is because the story is fundamentally about a loss of self and identity. Just because the conflict arises due to a religious conversion doesn’t automatically make it either racist or anti-Semitic.

    If a Muslim woman converted to Catholicism, and her ghost appeared to protest her funerary arrangements and ask for a funeral Mass, would you say the story was anti-Muslim?

    One of the most horrifying themes in fantastic literature is the erosion, alteration, or loss of self and identity.

    I have read science fiction and speculative literature since I could pick up a book by myself. Nearly 60 years now. There are worlds of imagination that build places where a person’s birth is the beginning of a personal journey during which sex, gender, religion, philosophy, vocation and personal relationships are defined by choices each person makes for themselves. The horror of Salome lies in the story of a woman who made a choice that went against her cultural norm, and had that choice disregarded by her family and community.

    “Salome” may be an antique read, but it presents a snapshot of a time and place and conflict between family, culture, religion and personal choice that is worth thinking about today.

  8. Rebecca says:

    @KSwan – Ok, you convinced me to read the story. The TL;DR version of my thoughts: it’s not actively anti-Semitic in the sense that the author thought she was making Jews villains, but it’s saturated in a casual set of un-examined assumptions and cliches that form the basis of systemic anti-Semitism. (This is the difference between personal and systemic racism. The best definition I’ve run across is that racism is not “a bad feeling in your heart” but rather a SYSTEM which systematically offers advantages to one group of people and disadvantages to another group. No one has to be actively a bad person for the system to perpetuate itself.)

    If you don’t mind a slightly longer explanation: the entire premise of the story, and the implied pathos that you mention about a woman whose “personal journey” is “disregarded by her family and community” rests on the assumption that Salome is powerless to convert to Christianity. Thus, her father and her rabbi essentially are keeping her prisoner within her community. You’re right that they’re not presented as malicious; it’s implied that they do the wrong thing for the right reasons, because they love her and are unable to accept her rejection of their faith.

    BUT here’s the problem: the idea that a Jewish woman in late 19th C Venice would be forced to be a “secret” Christian is nonsense. Take a look at the Edgardo Mortara kidnapping case (from 1858) when a six year old was forcibly removed from a wealthy middle class home by police and never returned to his heartbroken parents because he had been secretly baptized and was thus a Christian and unable to live with Jewish guardians by law. If a young woman like Salome had any sort of doubts, all she’d have to do was walk into the nearest Church (never very far in Venice) and say “I want to be a Christian” and she would have had police and city officials willing to literally stand between her and her father or any of the rest of her community. Vandalizing Jewish graves may have been frowned on in Venice (which the story suggests is kind of a shame), but Jews – no matter how rich and respected – were still at the mercy of laws that could tear children from their parents and deny them all further contact with family members if those children were legally deemed “Christians.”

    In that context, suggesting that the Christian narrator somehow “saves” Salome from her father and rabbi, and that they were somehow holding her prisoner and “disregarding her choice” IS offensive. In general, the idea of “secret Christians” is kind of offensive, because it’s rather like modern charges of “reverse racism.” There were secret JEWS, because forced conversion to Christianity has a long history in Europe. But the idea of “secret Christians” in Italy suggests that Christianity is some kind of oppressed minority rather than being the official religion and the faith of 90% of the population. (NB: Secret Christians in Nagasaki are a different matter. But the state religion of most European countries was and remains some form of Christianity.) Suggesting that secret Jews and secret Christians are somehow “equal” is a false equivalence. So following the same thinking about Christianity being definitely the dominant religion in Europe, yes, I would say the same thing about a story where the heroine was Muslim, for the same reasons.

    As a side-note, the author is unconsciously both insulting and somewhat hilariously oblivious to the fact that most Venetians would NOT consider an Anglican clergyman to be a Christian, as he is a Protestant. Salome’s ghost is very obligingly non-denominational, but it’s an amazing coincidence that she’s ok with Anglican rites when any significant contact with Christians she would have had would have been with Anglicans. Given the English cemeteries that dot Italy, most English ghosts probably wouldn’t be so blithe about the distinction. The cheerful “any kind of Christian prayer will do” attitude is also a bit odd theologically.

    Finally, I’d say “The Story of Salome” is a bit cringe-worthy simply because it recycles so many of the “beautiful convert” narratives going back at least as far as “The Merchant of Venice” (which it references multiple times). The idea of the pretty girl from the minority who it turns out really WANTS the handsome hero who belongs to the dominant group to “rescue” her from her friends and family is always a bit unnerving, since in real life men from the dominant group have always been able to take and abuse women from minority groups as they pleased, and minority fathers, brothers, and husbands have traditionally been helpless to protect their daughters, sisters, and wives. “Rescuing the beautiful convert” is a convenient fantasy for men who like to feel that they’re doing women they’re interested in a favor rather than exploiting a power differential.

  9. kateswan says:

    @Rebecca – I didn’t say “Salome” was a good story, only that it shouldn’t be judged to be actively anti-Semitic when viewed through 21st century spectacles.

    Your historical insights are interesting. Most people reading antique literature have to take the story without the annotations. If you would like to spend some time railing against Old Bill S. for the extremely common Shylock references in every year since the performance of Merchant of Venice, have at it. If you want to note the implication of “secret” Christianism at this time period has some accuracy issues, have at it.

    Even today, stories written as occurring in the 19th-20th-21st century may have nitpicky details that historians can squabble over. Again, have at it. While you are squabbling, remember that many great stories have been written while ignoring the nitpicky historical details.

    That chick wasn’t hanging around her tombstone waiting for a handsome European to rescue her. She was disturbed that a significant choice during her lifetime was not recognized. Again, you’re reading with those 21st century spectacles.

  10. CarrieS says:

    Stories do not take place in a vacumn. Salome was written as part of a long literary and historical tradition of glorifying the conversion of Jews to Christianity (it is, as Recca points out, also part of a historical pattern of forced conversions). It is a story that may be fairly described as “a product of its time.” However, the fact that it is no more antisemetic than the long string of stories that precedes it does not absolve it of being antisemitc – it simply means that it is part of a cultural and social environment which makes (and had made for hundreds of years) the assumption that to be Christian is “good.” Of course a Jewsish person should be able to convert to Christianity if she so desires, and vice versa. But stories don’t occur in isolation, and there was no corresponding pattern of stories in which beautiful, “pure” women and children convert to Judaism from Christianity as an expression of the innner purity which “raises” them above their “tainted” origins (I am abusing quotes here simply to make it clear that the antisemetic attitudes are not my own).

    To elaborate – one portrayal of, say, a lazy black man may be a description of a person who happens to be lazy. But if, as was the case during a period of time, all black men are described as lazy, that’s racism. That’s stereotyping. Salome was neither the first nor the last story in which an angelic woman converts to Christianity, with no representation of the reverse.

  11. kateswan says:

    Too bad you don’t have that time machine enabling you to go back and impart your 21st century sensibility to writers in other centuries.

    Wait. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We learn. We progress. We reason. One story should not be held to some kind of “corresponding pattern” when it’s being slammed for its 21st century shortcomings.

    One story. One theme. Do not judge the tale on your extended catalogue of requirements for 21st century inclusion-ism.

    Savvy readers today might look beyond the religious labels, and concentrate on the woman’s right to choose what will define her life and death. And religion.

    Your mileage (obviously) may vary.

  12. SB Sarah says:

    Kate, your opinion and disagreement are welcome, but your comments cannot be wrapped in passive aggressive insults. Please stop.

  13. Elyse says:

    @kateswan You may be new to the site, but we frequently read and identify what we find troubling and no longer acceptable in fiction from various time periods. We’ve had lengthy discussions regarding the use of rape in romance novels from the 1970’s and 80’s, and while we do understand that in the time it was written, these themes were more socially acceptable, we also believe that our analysis of them now is part of what of changes the conversation and leads to the progress you cite above. Further, the purpose of sites like this is to give readers the space to have a dialogue regarding the fiction they read–whether it’s a spirited debate or just a mutual squee party.

    There’s no place for passive aggressive insults in that discussion. Carrie’s interpretation of the story is valid, as is yours, as is Rebecca’s. We welcome a thoughtful conversation regarding reviews; sniping because you disagree with another’s readers comments is not useful or interesting and will not be tolerated.

  14. Elyse says:

    Also if Carrie had a time machine, she wouldn’t use it to impart her 21st century sensibilities on anyone. She’d use it to travel back in time and punch Lord Byron in the face.

  15. HannahS says:

    I also think it’s worth noting, Kate, that while you keep repeating that we’re all reading it with “2016” eyes, your period-correct glasses posit the reader as majority, white Christian. Like, the whole idea of “we shouldn’t judge the past by the standards of today” ignores the fact that there definitely Jews in that period who did judge their contemporaries and found them racist. It’s not like they weren’t aware of their own oppression. Jews one-two-three-five hundred years ago found stories like this anti-Semitic, and we continue to do so now.

  16. Betsydub says:

    If I may drag the level of discourse way, way down for a moment –
    Did anyone else initially read the subject line as
    “Victorian Ghost Stories” by EMINEM?

  17. Rebecca says:

    @Elyse and Betsydub – can we please start working on a project to build a time machine to send Eminem back in time to the Villa Diodati to participate in the famous ghost story contest in verse. And THEN to punch both Byron and Shelley in the face?

    @KateSwan – I’m glad you found the historical details interesting. But I didn’t mention them just to nitpick about whether the story was historically accurate, because it wasn’t written as historical fiction, but rather as CONTEMPORARY fiction, and thus a reflection of a contemporary reality in 1873. I was trying (perhaps clumsily) to agree with you that we in 2016 read stories quite differently from their original audience, and to provide some context for how readers in 1873 might have read the story.

    As you say, “readers today might look beyond the religious labels, and concentrate on the woman’s right to choose what will define her life and death. And religion.” That is quite true of readers TODAY, precisely because as you correctly point out “most people reading antique literature have to take the story without the annotations.” But for Edwards’s original readers the stuff I mentioned wasn’t an “annotation” or a “nitpicky historical detail” anymore than we would consider a reference to the war in Syria in a contemporary short story to be a “nitpicky historical detail.” It was near current events, as recent (for example) as the terrorist attacks on Sept 11, 2001.

    Most people today haven’t heard of Edgardo Mortara and know next to nothing or about the general situation of Jews in 19th C Europe, so the story has no particular resonance for them. But the Mortara case made headlines across Europe and the US at the time, and became a flash point about the power of the papal states in Italy, and the treatment of religious minorities in general. According to Wikipedia “In Britain, The Spectator presented the Mortara case as evidence that the Papal States had “the worst government in the world—the most insolvent and the most arrogant, the cruelest and the meanest”…The pro-Church articles often took on an overtly anti-Semitic character, charging for example that if coverage in Britain, France or Germany was critical this was hardly a surprise “since currently the newspapers of Europe are in good part in the hands of the Jews”.” In short, the controversy around attitudes toward Jews’ conversion in Italy in the late nineteenth century is in some ways a parallel to the controversy over Muslim women wearing hijab in France today; it was a gigantic political debate and most literate people had a position. So it’s actually only the distance that 150 years gives us that lets us as readers sit back and enjoy Salome’s story as “just” about individual choices. Readers in the 1870s would have been far MORE aware of debates around treatment of Jews than most of us are today, because it was a much more live issue.

    Conversely, we in 2016 tend to automatically assume that we are supposed to root for women making autonomous choices and standing up to their communities in fiction. But when this story came out the ink was barely dry on the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 which allowed women to inherit property and legally own their own wages if they worked. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 was still in the future. Presumably Amelia Edwards, as a female writer, had some personal opinions about women as wage earners, but by the same token she had to be aware of her public, and a significant portion of late Victorian readers (women as well as men) would have been quite disgusted by the general idea of a young woman rebelling against her family and community. ONLY the fact that Salome is “a Jewess” would make such an exercise of personal choice acceptable.

    In short, I was in fact attempting to read NOT as a reader in 2016 but as a reader in the 1870s, by thinking about what issues would have been paramount at the time. That’s always a risky enterprise, and obviously we can’t know for certain what every reader thought, since reactions doubtless varied widely among individuals, then as now. But with all due respect, I think you are the one who is reading with 21st century spectacles, which perhaps blur some of the original meanings of the story.

  18. Linda says:

    I clicked to come here and praise Carrie for the lovely and articulate review, but clearly I missed a fight. Thanks for this review though and all the comments.

  19. SB Sarah says:

    I think when we build this time machine, it’s going to need a LOT of seats. I want to be near the front row for the Byronic beatdown. (Not too close, though. Carrie is going to stomp him.)

  20. Heather T says:

    And I will hold Carrie’s coat while she does it!

  21. Linn says:

    Like Lovecraft, these are not Victorian, but slightly younger: anything by M.R. James. As far as warnings go, he was the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, then of Eton College, and never married. So very conservative and, according to some, a bit of a misogynist.

    But his stories are so wonderful! Creepy and unsettling and beautifully written. I really recommend Christopher Lee’s readings of four stories for BBC’s “A Ghost Story for Christmas” which can be found on youtube. There’s also a great series of podcasts called “A Podcast to the Curious”, which I have been enjoying lately.

  22. Rebecca says:

    I still think Shelley needs to be punched more than Byron. Byron was deeply screwed up, knew it, and proclaimed it to the whole world. He also wrote poetry with some self awareness and sense of humor.

    Shelley was the one who kept trading in the love of his life for a new 16 year old and claiming that he was searching for Ideal Beauty and that this was some kind of revolutionary principled free love, rather than just admitting he was a jerk. Also, no sense of humor.

    Byron would just laugh about getting punched and say he deserved it. Shelley would pontificate about how he was a misunderstood genius. Just because Mary Godwin fell for his shtick and enabled him doesn’t mean he wasn’t more punch-worthy than Byron.

  23. Caitlin says:

    Totally agree with Rebecca that Shelley is more deserving of a punchfest than Byron. I mean, if Byron got punched he’d write some totally hilarious poem about it, so there’s that, I guess. Can’t stand Shelley—so self-important.

    Also, just gonna point out that the past was like always more diverse than we often think, and there would definitely have been Jewish people reading Salomé (just like they once read Merchant of Venice) and recognizing it as anti-Semitic. And, for that matter, whenever I read historic stories doing similar things with Muslim women (and I do read them, since I have an MA in Spanish lit and focused on colonial/Siglo de Oro literatures), I am just as uneasy/aware of the ugly historical precedents. They really can’t be pushed aside.

  24. KateB says:

    Yeah, but Byron put his five year-old daughter in a convent school, she died there, he didn’t tell anyone for months, even after the girl’s mother, Claire Clairmont, wrote letters begging for news, and finally, when Percy and Mary went to Byron himself and discovered the truth, Byron left it to THEM to tell Claire the truth!

    Screw Byron, man.

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