Grim Tales (Paperback or Softback)

Grim Tales (1893) is a collection of seven horror stories by English writer Edith Nesbit. Noted for her work as an author of children’s novels and stories―especially her beloved Bastable and Psammead Trilogies―Edith Nesbit crafts tales of wonder, mystery, and terror for children and adults alike. Grim Tales, one of the author’s early works, is a collection of tales of horror aimed at an adult audience.

In “The Ebony Frame,” an impoverished journalist receives an unexpected inheritance from his Aunt Dorcas, a wealthy widow. With a sizeable fortune and a furnished home in Chelsea, he settles into a life of comfort. Early in his stay, however, he discovers on the wall a mysterious frame, which he had never seen before in his frequent visits. Jane, his aunt’s housemaid, informs him of the frame’s recent purchase, and sends him searching for its original contents in the house’s attic. He finds a strange set of portraits. In one, he quickly recognizes his own face. From the other, a beautiful woman stares out, her eyes strangely familiar. In “John Charrington’s Wedding,” a best man describes the mysterious events leading up to his friend’s day of marriage. After witnessing John promise to his fiancé May that, if necessary, he would return from the grave just to marry her, the narrator is filled with a sense of dread about the approaching wedding. As the day approaches, and as John mysteriously disappears, his best man wonders if the promise he witnessed was not, in fact, a prophecy too terrible to imagine.

This edition of Edith Nesbit’s Grim Tales is a classic of English literature and horror fiction reimagined for modern readers.

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With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) was an English writer of children’s literature. Born in Kennington, Nesbit was raised by her mother following the death of her father―a prominent chemist―when she was only four years old. Due to her sister Mary’s struggle with tuberculosis, the family travelled throughout England, France, Spain, and Germany for years. After Mary passed, Edith and her mother returned to England for good, eventually settling in London where, at eighteen, Edith met her future husband, a bank clerk named Hubert Bland. The two―who became prominent socialists and were founding members of the Fabian Society―had a famously difficult marriage, and both had numerous affairs. Nesbit began her career as a poet, eventually turning to children’s literature and publishing around forty novels, story collections, and picture books. A contemporary of such figures of Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Nesbit was notable as a writer who pioneered the children’s adventure story in fiction. Among her most popular works are The Railway Children (1906) and The Story of the Amulet (1906), the former of which was adapted into a 1970 film, and the latter of which served as a profound influence on C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series. A friend and mentor to George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, Nesbit’s work has inspired and entertained generations of children and adults, including such authors as J.K. Rowling, Noël Coward, and P.L. Travers.