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From Another World and Other Ghost Stories
Although Rosemary Timperley was an enormously prolific novelist and short story writer, she always combined quantity with undeniable quality, much appreciated by countless readers and admirers of her work. Her work is certainly overdue for rediscovery today.
This new selection contains twenty-two of Timperley's best stories.
This new selection contains twenty-two of Timperley's best stories.
- GenresHorror
271 pages, Hardcover
Published April 1, 2016
1 person is currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Rosemary Timperley
130 books22 followersRosemary Timperley (20 March 1920 - 9 November 1988) was a British novelist, short story writer and screenwriter. She wrote a wide range of fiction, publishing 66 novels in 33 years, and several hundred short stories, but is best remembered for her ghost stories which appear in many anthologies. She also edited several volumes of ghost stories. Born in Crouch End, North London on 20 March 1920 to architect George Kenyon Timperley and teacher Emily Mary (née Lethem), she went to Hornsey High School, and before studying for a Bachelor of Arts degree in History at King's College, London, graduating in 1941. She then taught English and History at South-East Essex County Technical School in Dagenham, Essex, and also worked at Kensington Citizen's Advice Bureau during World War II. In the mid-1940s, while still working as a teacher, she started submitting short stories to magazines and newspapers, with the first, "Hot Air - and Penelope", being published in Illustrated 10 August 1946. Still writing, she left her job as a teacher to become a staff writer for Reveille magazine in 1949, editing the personal advice column (under the pen name Jane Blythe), readers' letters and writing a number of stories, feature articles and book reviews. She married Physics teacher James McInnes Cameron in 1952, and they lived together in Essex. After writing a number of novels (starting with A Dread of Burning in 1956), she left Reveille to become a freelance writer, going on to write a number of radio and television scripts. By the early 1960s she had separated from her husband, who died in 1968, but she continued writing novels, short stories and scripts until her death on 9 November 1988.[1] source: Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 1, 2018
Rosemary Timperley is one of those authors who was incredibly prolific, churning out around 2 full length novels a year starting in the 1950s and writing well into the 1980s as well as contributing countless short stories to newspapers and magazines. These are literally countless - in fact, she wrote so many short stories that some of them have just been lost. Her novels are all mysteries with a supernatural flavour and she also edited the popular Pan Book of Horror Stories series and the Armada Ghost Stories collections, featuring her own stories in with these. She was incredibly popular during her day and yet today she has all but disappeared. Her books are all really rare and hard to find (and if you do find them, very expensive to buy). All of the books I own by her are library ex-stock and she must have been hugely popular amongst library readers. This book is a new collection from Sundial Supernatural of some of her most spooky ghost stories - a collection which is long overdue for surely this writer doesn't deserve to be forgotten in the way she has been.
The stories span between 1952 and up to what must have been a posthumously published story in 1989 (she died in 1988, so unless art is imitating reality and her ghost has returned in order to tell one last story - which would be a very Timperley thing to do as her stories go). Within all of these stories, the ghosts are creatures who are strangely malevolent, interfering in the lives of the living and tempting them to either give up their own existence and exchange it so that the ghost can live their lives for them, tricking them into early graves, or ones who won't abandon the living and - again- hound the living to an early grave. She has an obsession with shadow people who are only seen by those who have special abilities (and usually pay a high price for this 'gift').
The stories are rather wonderful - not just for fans of supernatural tales - but for what they tell us about the times Timperley was living in. This was a time when women stayed at home and looked after their husbands. If anything happened to those wives (if, say, they had to do battle with the fiendish incarnation of a devilish street musician who was hellbent on luring the woman's daughter to an early grave, for example, and ended up in hospital because of this), then there was a good chance that the woman's husband would end up starving to death because he was unable to feed himself in the suddenly unwomaned kitchen. He would have to be sternly reminded by said wife (from her hospital bed) to go to a café to get fed, and not just hang uselessly around the kitchen unable to work out how to function the gas oven and make it magically produce food for him. As Queenie Leavis once wrote, 'popular fiction is a good, and sometimes the only way, to learn about social history.' There's plenty of social history recorded here about how life was for women in the 50s and 60s. The other great thing about Timperley's work is that the women who are so often the chief protagonists in these tales are often elderly spinsters (women, in other words, who society doesn't care about and often doesn't even see - shadow women in themselves). These women seem to have an uncanny window into the shadowland of supernatural existence, perhaps because they only exist on the margins themselves. She gives a voice to the dispossessed: the mad, the lonely, the elderly. Many of her novels feature the same 'heroines' (her superbly spooky novel 'Suspicion' (1978) features a spinster librarian as the prime force in the story.) Nowhere else will you find stories like these ones - and they're just superb. I really would recommend this author - she must be due for rediscovery soon. It's a terrible shame that she's been lost from the canons of great ghost stories, because she really did know how to pen a spooky story.
The stories span between 1952 and up to what must have been a posthumously published story in 1989 (she died in 1988, so unless art is imitating reality and her ghost has returned in order to tell one last story - which would be a very Timperley thing to do as her stories go). Within all of these stories, the ghosts are creatures who are strangely malevolent, interfering in the lives of the living and tempting them to either give up their own existence and exchange it so that the ghost can live their lives for them, tricking them into early graves, or ones who won't abandon the living and - again- hound the living to an early grave. She has an obsession with shadow people who are only seen by those who have special abilities (and usually pay a high price for this 'gift').
The stories are rather wonderful - not just for fans of supernatural tales - but for what they tell us about the times Timperley was living in. This was a time when women stayed at home and looked after their husbands. If anything happened to those wives (if, say, they had to do battle with the fiendish incarnation of a devilish street musician who was hellbent on luring the woman's daughter to an early grave, for example, and ended up in hospital because of this), then there was a good chance that the woman's husband would end up starving to death because he was unable to feed himself in the suddenly unwomaned kitchen. He would have to be sternly reminded by said wife (from her hospital bed) to go to a café to get fed, and not just hang uselessly around the kitchen unable to work out how to function the gas oven and make it magically produce food for him. As Queenie Leavis once wrote, 'popular fiction is a good, and sometimes the only way, to learn about social history.' There's plenty of social history recorded here about how life was for women in the 50s and 60s. The other great thing about Timperley's work is that the women who are so often the chief protagonists in these tales are often elderly spinsters (women, in other words, who society doesn't care about and often doesn't even see - shadow women in themselves). These women seem to have an uncanny window into the shadowland of supernatural existence, perhaps because they only exist on the margins themselves. She gives a voice to the dispossessed: the mad, the lonely, the elderly. Many of her novels feature the same 'heroines' (her superbly spooky novel 'Suspicion' (1978) features a spinster librarian as the prime force in the story.) Nowhere else will you find stories like these ones - and they're just superb. I really would recommend this author - she must be due for rediscovery soon. It's a terrible shame that she's been lost from the canons of great ghost stories, because she really did know how to pen a spooky story.
February 25, 2022
Magnificent collection of ghostly tales. I treasure this book.
February 21, 2023
Timperley, Rosemary - From Another World
Solid collection of classic ghost stories.
Ms Timperley died in 1988, so readers of a certain age may well recall her.
From wandering children, to a mischievous office secretary playing havoc with her boss.
Several stories are of “the other,” desirous of the corporeal vessel.
By other, meaning the reflection in the looking glass, the face in the flame, the resistant shadow.
These become a struggle, and the vanquished becomes little more than a fetch.
Not all are malicious, however. A few breathe encouragement to the weakening flesh.
The longest story by far is “The Listening Child.” A young girl catches an elusive melody and is soon bewitched.
This Sundial Press collection was published in 2017, and all but one of the stories were selected by Richard Dalby. Not a poor story in the bunch, either.
I wonder if this was one of his late projects.
Solid collection of classic ghost stories.
Ms Timperley died in 1988, so readers of a certain age may well recall her.
From wandering children, to a mischievous office secretary playing havoc with her boss.
Several stories are of “the other,” desirous of the corporeal vessel.
By other, meaning the reflection in the looking glass, the face in the flame, the resistant shadow.
These become a struggle, and the vanquished becomes little more than a fetch.
Not all are malicious, however. A few breathe encouragement to the weakening flesh.
The longest story by far is “The Listening Child.” A young girl catches an elusive melody and is soon bewitched.
This Sundial Press collection was published in 2017, and all but one of the stories were selected by Richard Dalby. Not a poor story in the bunch, either.
I wonder if this was one of his late projects.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews