Featuring stories by A.S. Byatt - Angela Carter - Lisa St Aubin de Teran - May Sinclair - Joan Aiken - Stella Gibbons - Edith Wharton - E.M. Delafield - Elizabeth Bowen - Ruth Rendell - and many more.
This collection gathers together deliciously chilling tales from the three highly acclaimed volumes of Virago ghost stories. Here lost loves, past enmities and unwanted memories mingle with the inexplicable as unquiet souls return to repay kindnesses, settle scores and haunt the imagination. All of the writers demonstrate a subtle power to delight and chill at the same time as they explore the ghostly margins of the supernatural.
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Richard Dalby is a literary biographer and researcher. He has edited books including The Sorceress in Stained Glass, The Best Ghost Stories of H Russell Wakefield; Dracula's Blood; Ghosts and Scholars and well as the previous three volumes of Virago ghost stories.
The British anthologist gathers savory tales of the supernatural by 34 first-rate female authors, ranging chronologically from Edith Wharton and E. Nesbit to Fay Weldon and Angela Carter. Nearly every entry captivates, whether comfortably old-fashioned weavings of classic foggy nights, lonely governesses and tragic romances, or sophisticated psychological studies of alienation, grief and passion. From the collection as a whole emerge distinctly female uses of the supernatural. Ghosts function as the disembodied anger of the powerless: the spirits of wronged wives and lovers return to avenge old injustices. The greatest terror is that of lossthe death of a child, the parting from a sister, the defection of a lover. And women's sensitivity to such abandonment isolates them still furtherthe heroines of these pieces are thought to be mad when they report sightings of ghosts. Several contemporary stories are more explicitly feminist: the spirits of one dilapidated house possess a tenant and drive her to forsake writing for cleaning; another abode wreaks havoc on a bullying husband's too dearly cherished belongings. BOMC/Mystery Book Club selection.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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