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Ghosts
No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton's most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the genre. In fact, one of Wharton's final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937. In "The Lady's Maid's Bell," the earliest tale included here, a servant's dedication to her mistress continues beyond the grave, and in "All Souls'," the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter.
Wharton's great gift, in all her writing was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such world matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of one's own soul. These are stories to send "a cold shiver down one's spine," not to terrify. As Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter "the hard grind of modern speeding-up" by preserving that ineffable space of "silence and continuity," which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but - "for the fund of the shudder"-its delight.
Wharton's great gift, in all her writing was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such world matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of one's own soul. These are stories to send "a cold shiver down one's spine," not to terrify. As Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter "the hard grind of modern speeding-up" by preserving that ineffable space of "silence and continuity," which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but - "for the fund of the shudder"-its delight.
274 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1937
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About the author
Edith Wharton
1,460 books5,290 followersEdith Wharton emerged as one of America’s most insightful novelists, deftly exposing the tensions between societal expectation and personal desire through her vivid portrayals of upper-class life. Drawing from her deep familiarity with New York’s privileged “aristocracy,” she offered readers a keenly observed and piercingly honest vision of Gilded Age society.
Her work reached a milestone when she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence. This novel highlights the constraining rituals of 1870s New York society and remains a defining portrait of elegance laced with regret.
Wharton’s literary achievements span a wide canvas. The House of Mirth presents a tragic, vividly drawn character study of Lily Bart, navigating social expectations and the perils of genteel poverty in 1890s New York. In Ethan Frome, she explores rural hardship and emotional repression, contrasting sharply with her urban social dramas.
Her novella collection Old New York revisits the moral terrain of upper-class society, spanning decades and combining character studies with social commentary. Through these stories, she inevitably points back to themes and settings familiar from The Age of Innocence. Continuing her exploration of class and desire, The Glimpses of the Moon addresses marriage and social mobility in early 20th-century America. And in Summer, Wharton challenges societal norms with its rural setting and themes of sexual awakening and social inequality.
Beyond fiction, Wharton contributed compelling nonfiction and travel writing. The Decoration of Houses reflects her eye for design and architecture; Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort presents a compelling account of her wartime observations. As editor of The Book of the Homeless, she curated a moving, international collaboration in support of war refugees.
Wharton’s influence extended beyond writing. She designed her own country estate, The Mount, a testament to her architectural sensibility and aesthetic vision. The Mount now stands as an educational museum celebrating her legacy.
Throughout her career, Wharton maintained friendships and artistic exchanges with luminaries such as Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Theodore Roosevelt—reflecting her status as a respected and connected cultural figure.
Her literary legacy also includes multiple Nobel Prize nominations, underscoring her international recognition. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once.
In sum, Edith Wharton remains celebrated for her unflinching, elegant prose, her psychological acuity, and her capacity to illuminate the unspoken constraints of society—from the glittering ballrooms of New York to quieter, more remote settings. Her wide-ranging work—novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, travel writing, essays—offers cultural insight, enduring emotional depth, and a piercing critique of the customs she both inhabited and dissected.
Her work reached a milestone when she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence. This novel highlights the constraining rituals of 1870s New York society and remains a defining portrait of elegance laced with regret.
Wharton’s literary achievements span a wide canvas. The House of Mirth presents a tragic, vividly drawn character study of Lily Bart, navigating social expectations and the perils of genteel poverty in 1890s New York. In Ethan Frome, she explores rural hardship and emotional repression, contrasting sharply with her urban social dramas.
Her novella collection Old New York revisits the moral terrain of upper-class society, spanning decades and combining character studies with social commentary. Through these stories, she inevitably points back to themes and settings familiar from The Age of Innocence. Continuing her exploration of class and desire, The Glimpses of the Moon addresses marriage and social mobility in early 20th-century America. And in Summer, Wharton challenges societal norms with its rural setting and themes of sexual awakening and social inequality.
Beyond fiction, Wharton contributed compelling nonfiction and travel writing. The Decoration of Houses reflects her eye for design and architecture; Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort presents a compelling account of her wartime observations. As editor of The Book of the Homeless, she curated a moving, international collaboration in support of war refugees.
Wharton’s influence extended beyond writing. She designed her own country estate, The Mount, a testament to her architectural sensibility and aesthetic vision. The Mount now stands as an educational museum celebrating her legacy.
Throughout her career, Wharton maintained friendships and artistic exchanges with luminaries such as Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Theodore Roosevelt—reflecting her status as a respected and connected cultural figure.
Her literary legacy also includes multiple Nobel Prize nominations, underscoring her international recognition. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once.
In sum, Edith Wharton remains celebrated for her unflinching, elegant prose, her psychological acuity, and her capacity to illuminate the unspoken constraints of society—from the glittering ballrooms of New York to quieter, more remote settings. Her wide-ranging work—novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, travel writing, essays—offers cultural insight, enduring emotional depth, and a piercing critique of the customs she both inhabited and dissected.
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March 21, 2024i just love ghosts
October 31, 2022
Not long before her death in 1937, Edith Wharton gathered together a selection of her ghost stories, adding an introduction that reads more like a lament, focused on the impact of modern media and technologies on the traditions of supernatural fiction. There are some arresting pieces here, although I found them more tense and eerie than outright terrifying. I was struck too by Wharton’s tendency to focus on the haunted rather than the hauntings, as well as her obsession with emotional and bodily frailty: illness, loneliness, fear of death surface throughout.
Many of Wharton’s pieces draw on familiar, established conventions, framed as fireside tales swapped after dinner as in the bizarre “The Eyes” with its lightly-concealed queer subtext; or presented as puzzling accounts suddenly confided to sceptical friends or relatives as in the memorable, elegant “All Souls.” In a number of entries her settings are also fairly standard, wintry, icy, muffled landscapes that reinforce the sense of her characters’ isolation, people who are locked within the confines of creaky, ancient, rural mansions. But despite the outer trappings, Wharton’s approach is often quite unconventional, she frequently seems more interested in the form’s potential as a vehicle for exposing everyday domestic horrors, marriages founded on violence, control or deceit as in the gothic and unnerving “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” or “Afterward” - something critics have linked to her own experiences of a destructive marriage. But for Wharton domestic strife isn’t limited to obvious intimate relationships, there’s also an unexpected emphasis on power struggles between employers and their servants, a curious interdependency in which expectations of loyalty mingle with fear and mounting suspicion.
Wharton’s writing is strong throughout, packed with marvellous phrases and descriptive passages. Her plots are less consistently satisfying, some like “Mr Jones” have awkward, disappointing endings, too rushed or anti-climactic. Although sometimes, as with the Rebecca-like “Pomegranate Seed” lack of resolution is overshadowed by the steps leading up to it. Wharton also seems most sure-footed when imagining female protagonists, her men seem a bit too thinly sketched. And there were one or two entries that didn’t really work for me on any level: one example is “Bewitched” with its austere, superstitious community with its shades of Hawthorne; another the slightly befuddled “Miss Mary Pask.”
NYRB Classics edition
Rating: 3/3.5
Many of Wharton’s pieces draw on familiar, established conventions, framed as fireside tales swapped after dinner as in the bizarre “The Eyes” with its lightly-concealed queer subtext; or presented as puzzling accounts suddenly confided to sceptical friends or relatives as in the memorable, elegant “All Souls.” In a number of entries her settings are also fairly standard, wintry, icy, muffled landscapes that reinforce the sense of her characters’ isolation, people who are locked within the confines of creaky, ancient, rural mansions. But despite the outer trappings, Wharton’s approach is often quite unconventional, she frequently seems more interested in the form’s potential as a vehicle for exposing everyday domestic horrors, marriages founded on violence, control or deceit as in the gothic and unnerving “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” or “Afterward” - something critics have linked to her own experiences of a destructive marriage. But for Wharton domestic strife isn’t limited to obvious intimate relationships, there’s also an unexpected emphasis on power struggles between employers and their servants, a curious interdependency in which expectations of loyalty mingle with fear and mounting suspicion.
Wharton’s writing is strong throughout, packed with marvellous phrases and descriptive passages. Her plots are less consistently satisfying, some like “Mr Jones” have awkward, disappointing endings, too rushed or anti-climactic. Although sometimes, as with the Rebecca-like “Pomegranate Seed” lack of resolution is overshadowed by the steps leading up to it. Wharton also seems most sure-footed when imagining female protagonists, her men seem a bit too thinly sketched. And there were one or two entries that didn’t really work for me on any level: one example is “Bewitched” with its austere, superstitious community with its shades of Hawthorne; another the slightly befuddled “Miss Mary Pask.”
NYRB Classics edition
Rating: 3/3.5
October 16, 2023
Wharton's ghost stories are elegant and rich episodes that showcase her interest in certain strata of society but which also use the genre to make a subtle commentary on the tensions and anxieties that haunt both public and private life.
Don't expect full-blown horrors - these tend to the oblique and enigmatic, sometimes the open-ended, far more to my taste than anything too lurid and obvious. I'm now wondering if Wharton might have served as a model for Shirley Jackson whose own The Haunting of Hill House brilliantly utilises the haunted house trope to explore the psyche of Eleanor.
Some of these tales are well anthologised ('The Eyes', 'The Lady Maid's Bell', 'Afterward'), others I was reading for the first time and I especially liked 'The Pomegranate Seed' and 'The Triumph of Night'.
That said, if you read these straight through, they do become a little samey - or, at least, we tap into the likely directions Wharton's imagination will take thus reducing the suspense.
So if you're looking for ghost stories this is a helpful collection - but if you're more interested in Wharton's short stories, I'd recommend Muse's Tragedy, and Other Stories, which includes a handful of the ghost stories amidst a wider and more varied sampling of Wharton's short fiction.
3.5 stars rounded up.
Don't expect full-blown horrors - these tend to the oblique and enigmatic, sometimes the open-ended, far more to my taste than anything too lurid and obvious. I'm now wondering if Wharton might have served as a model for Shirley Jackson whose own The Haunting of Hill House brilliantly utilises the haunted house trope to explore the psyche of Eleanor.
Some of these tales are well anthologised ('The Eyes', 'The Lady Maid's Bell', 'Afterward'), others I was reading for the first time and I especially liked 'The Pomegranate Seed' and 'The Triumph of Night'.
That said, if you read these straight through, they do become a little samey - or, at least, we tap into the likely directions Wharton's imagination will take thus reducing the suspense.
So if you're looking for ghost stories this is a helpful collection - but if you're more interested in Wharton's short stories, I'd recommend Muse's Tragedy, and Other Stories, which includes a handful of the ghost stories amidst a wider and more varied sampling of Wharton's short fiction.
3.5 stars rounded up.
July 2, 2023
A fantastic collection of old-fashioned ghostly tales. A few of the endings made me go “huh?” (not necessarily the fault of Wharton since I often have this reaction with short stories), but overall this is one of the best classic ghost story collections that I've read so far. My favorite of the bunch was probably Miss Mary Pask, a rather lighthearted tale of an encounter with a “dead” elderly woman, but I can honestly say that there wasn't a single story that I didn't enjoy. I've never associated Edith Wharton with horror writing until now, but this collection is proof that she could have been a master of the genre.
November 1, 2022
3.5 stars
I have been reading this sporadically since Christmas, but Halloween was impetus to push ahead and read the last several stories in a couple of days. And I think the accelerated speed helped me appreciate them more.
Wharton's collection of ghost stories is one part intriguingly psychological, and one part old-fashioned. She seems to foresee this herself, commenting in the introduction that
[taste for ghosts] is being gradually atrophied by these two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema.
The cinema hasn't done away with ghost stories of course, far from it, but it has changed what we expect from them. Wharton's are quiet affairs, ghosts are often absences, or they ring bells or leave footprints, but they resolutely never jump out at you. This took a bit of getting used to... I expected the stories to have twists, as they would now, or to up the ante in some way, but many of them seem content to present the likelihood of a ghost as interest enough to the reader.
And generally, in Wharton's hands, it is. Because she is dealing with the human, regardless of the supernatural trappings. Where there are dark and rambling houses, they are backgrounds to stories of unhappy marriages, or ill-gotten fortunes, or illness or madness. Elsewhere there are slight departures from the ghost story mould -- a rural Gothic piece set among snowed-in farmers, a desert idyll of peaceful horizons and lingering stenches, an old lady left alone who realises that all her mod-cons won't save her from a final solitude.
Excellent writing and pacing. Plots are a bit uneven, but there are some standouts. I really enjoyed "The Pomegranate Seed" and particularly "All Soul's" which I reread, appropriately enough, as Halloween bled into All Souls Day.
I have been reading this sporadically since Christmas, but Halloween was impetus to push ahead and read the last several stories in a couple of days. And I think the accelerated speed helped me appreciate them more.
Wharton's collection of ghost stories is one part intriguingly psychological, and one part old-fashioned. She seems to foresee this herself, commenting in the introduction that
[taste for ghosts] is being gradually atrophied by these two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema.
The cinema hasn't done away with ghost stories of course, far from it, but it has changed what we expect from them. Wharton's are quiet affairs, ghosts are often absences, or they ring bells or leave footprints, but they resolutely never jump out at you. This took a bit of getting used to... I expected the stories to have twists, as they would now, or to up the ante in some way, but many of them seem content to present the likelihood of a ghost as interest enough to the reader.
And generally, in Wharton's hands, it is. Because she is dealing with the human, regardless of the supernatural trappings. Where there are dark and rambling houses, they are backgrounds to stories of unhappy marriages, or ill-gotten fortunes, or illness or madness. Elsewhere there are slight departures from the ghost story mould -- a rural Gothic piece set among snowed-in farmers, a desert idyll of peaceful horizons and lingering stenches, an old lady left alone who realises that all her mod-cons won't save her from a final solitude.
Excellent writing and pacing. Plots are a bit uneven, but there are some standouts. I really enjoyed "The Pomegranate Seed" and particularly "All Soul's" which I reread, appropriately enough, as Halloween bled into All Souls Day.
July 26, 2023
“Oh, ce n’è uno, certo, ma non lo riconoscerete.”
L’affermazione, lanciata tra le risa sei mesi prima in un giardino luminoso di giugno, tornò in mente a Mary Boyne con una nuova percezione del suo significato mentre nel crepuscolo di dicembre aspettava che le lampade fossero portate in biblioteca.
I fantasmi spesso non si riconoscono al primo incontro e a volte rimane il dubbio che siano veramente dei fantasmi. Di sicuro fanno paura e rivelano i veri temi di questi undici racconti: ad esempio, i segreti che il marito non ha mai rivelato alla moglie; l’odio di un ricco benefattore per il proprio nipote; gli impulsi negati per tutta la vita; l’oppressione e la sofferenza di una donna sposata; la solitudine e i desideri di una donna non sposata.
E se fosse stato un fantasma la donna con cui avevo parlato e non una semplice proiezione della mia febbre? E se qualcosa di Mary Pask fosse sopravvissuto quanto bastava da gridarmi la silenziosa solitudine di una vita, da esprimere finalmente ciò che la donna in carne e ossa aveva sempre tenuto nascosto? Il pensiero curiosamente mi commosse: debole com’ero, piansi sdraiato nel mio letto. Un’infinità di donne era così, immaginai.
Lode a Neri Pozza che ha ripubblicato, con una nuova traduzione, questi racconti fuori catalogo da parecchi anni. Scrittura eccelsa, alta tensione nei dialoghi, non una parola fuori posto: Edith Wharton si conferma una delle mie scrittrici preferite.
Medford si sedette sul letto in preda a una grande agitazione. C’era qualcuno nella sua stanza. La cosa gli era chiara non grazie alla vista o all’udito – perché la luna era tramontata e il silenzio della notte era assoluto – ma per una strana debole perturbazione delle correnti invisibili che ci circondano.
L’affermazione, lanciata tra le risa sei mesi prima in un giardino luminoso di giugno, tornò in mente a Mary Boyne con una nuova percezione del suo significato mentre nel crepuscolo di dicembre aspettava che le lampade fossero portate in biblioteca.
I fantasmi spesso non si riconoscono al primo incontro e a volte rimane il dubbio che siano veramente dei fantasmi. Di sicuro fanno paura e rivelano i veri temi di questi undici racconti: ad esempio, i segreti che il marito non ha mai rivelato alla moglie; l’odio di un ricco benefattore per il proprio nipote; gli impulsi negati per tutta la vita; l’oppressione e la sofferenza di una donna sposata; la solitudine e i desideri di una donna non sposata.
E se fosse stato un fantasma la donna con cui avevo parlato e non una semplice proiezione della mia febbre? E se qualcosa di Mary Pask fosse sopravvissuto quanto bastava da gridarmi la silenziosa solitudine di una vita, da esprimere finalmente ciò che la donna in carne e ossa aveva sempre tenuto nascosto? Il pensiero curiosamente mi commosse: debole com’ero, piansi sdraiato nel mio letto. Un’infinità di donne era così, immaginai.
Lode a Neri Pozza che ha ripubblicato, con una nuova traduzione, questi racconti fuori catalogo da parecchi anni. Scrittura eccelsa, alta tensione nei dialoghi, non una parola fuori posto: Edith Wharton si conferma una delle mie scrittrici preferite.
Medford si sedette sul letto in preda a una grande agitazione. C’era qualcuno nella sua stanza. La cosa gli era chiara non grazie alla vista o all’udito – perché la luna era tramontata e il silenzio della notte era assoluto – ma per una strana debole perturbazione delle correnti invisibili che ci circondano.
November 4, 2025
Pensavo che alla lunga mi sarei stancata, invece ogni storia è unica, reinterpretazioni molto diverse tra loro del concetto di fantasma. A prova di fifoni.
October 24, 2022
To date, I have not read many of Edith Wharton's books, but after the stories in Ghosts, I am about to change my mind. There are eleven stories in all in this collection which was not only written by the author but selected by her. Fully half of them are among the best supernatural fiction I have encountered.
Particularly excellent are "Miss Mary Pask" about a strange visit with a deceased old lady; "Bewitched" about a young woman who won't stay buried; and "Pomegranate Seed" about some mysterious letters that destroy a marriage.
Until I saw this NYRB edition, I didn't even know that Edith Wharton wrote ghosts stories, but now I stand corrected.
Particularly excellent are "Miss Mary Pask" about a strange visit with a deceased old lady; "Bewitched" about a young woman who won't stay buried; and "Pomegranate Seed" about some mysterious letters that destroy a marriage.
Until I saw this NYRB edition, I didn't even know that Edith Wharton wrote ghosts stories, but now I stand corrected.
October 26, 2022
Uh-oh. Another insomnia night so I'm half dead at the moment and will be back shortly with my thoughts. For now: absolutely not to be missed -- as with all of Wharton's writings, there's often much more than meets the eye going on beneath the surface of these stories.
back soon after some sleep
back soon after some sleep
December 13, 2023
It's December in North America and the nights are getting long and dark. This put me in exactly the right mood for these coolly cerebral gothic ghost stories from Edith Wharton. There are certainly no jump-scares here, lots of ambiguity, but I can see myself returning to these in future winters. Some favorites from the collection:
The Eyes
Kerfol
The Lady's Maid's Bell
Bewitched
The Eyes
Kerfol
The Lady's Maid's Bell
Bewitched
April 2, 2022
So how do I rate this. The first half was a strong for but the second half a five. So 4.5 but I can only do 4 or 5. So I'll mark it 5. Really great stories.
September 14, 2024
Edith Wharton put this together shortly before her death, collecting ghost stories that she had written over a number of years. Perhaps ghost stories is a misnomer. Not all feature ghosts in the truest sense. Macabre might be more accurate. Strange things happen, people disappear, and, very occasionally, a ghost is seen. The last story, "A Bottle of Perrier," is not really a ghost story at all, but certainly is disquieting with a shocking end. Wharton's style is the stories chief attraction.
The settings are drawn from Wharton's own experience: country houses of the well to do in New York/New England, England, Brittany. One is set in a townhouse in NYC; another something of an outlier, in an old Crusader castle in an unspecified Middle Eastern location. Many feature people on the edge of society--a private secretary, a lady's maid, an old maid sister--and their travails.
Wharton excels at describing a scene and creating an atmosphere:
"I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol--I was new to Brittany, and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before--but one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only that sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a majesty to all old houses."
(one of the best description of the feeling of old houses that I have read)
"The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape."
(reminds of waiting for an evening bus in the blizzards of '77 and '78)
Narrative, however, is not Wharton's strength. Some of the longer stories drag a bit (which undermines the suspense). Endings are sometimes lame; "Mr Jones" has good build up, but the end is a model of irresolution. I started to give this four stars, but decided that in the end style can only take you so far.
And Friday the thirteenth is a good day to finish a book of ghost stories.
The settings are drawn from Wharton's own experience: country houses of the well to do in New York/New England, England, Brittany. One is set in a townhouse in NYC; another something of an outlier, in an old Crusader castle in an unspecified Middle Eastern location. Many feature people on the edge of society--a private secretary, a lady's maid, an old maid sister--and their travails.
Wharton excels at describing a scene and creating an atmosphere:
"I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol--I was new to Brittany, and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before--but one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only that sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a majesty to all old houses."
(one of the best description of the feeling of old houses that I have read)
"The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape."
(reminds of waiting for an evening bus in the blizzards of '77 and '78)
Narrative, however, is not Wharton's strength. Some of the longer stories drag a bit (which undermines the suspense). Endings are sometimes lame; "Mr Jones" has good build up, but the end is a model of irresolution. I started to give this four stars, but decided that in the end style can only take you so far.
And Friday the thirteenth is a good day to finish a book of ghost stories.
November 3, 2024
Un compitino godibile.
Gli occhi e Semi di melograno i migliori.
Gli occhi e Semi di melograno i migliori.
Read
October 30, 2024— Silence - more silence! It seemed to be piling itself up like the snow on the roof and in the gutters. Silence. How many people that she knew had any idea what silence was - and how loud it sounded when you really listened to it?
December 2, 2021
Abandoned at 61%.
I enjoyed Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and I like gothic, supernatural tales. Short story collections always tend to be a mixed bag, but I really thought that my overall enjoyment of these ghost stories would be pretty much guaranteed.
Well, I finally threw in the towel a little over half-way through, after struggling to find the will to pick this up for well over a month and entering a reading slump because of it. I skipped the final four stories (Bewitched, Mr. Jones, Pomegranate Seed, and A Bottle of Perrier), and while Miss Mary Pask was the last one I read, I didn't write down my thoughts right after, and am now finding that I have absolutely no recollection of it, and even a google search is not jogging my memory in the least.
That's the main flaw of these stories: They were unremarkable, forgettable, rather predictable, and all save the only one I actually liked, The Eyes, have almost completely faded in my memory at this point. The other big flaw is Wharton's writing being too wordy and laborious to be conducive to any feeling of creepiness—everything about her efforts just fell completely flat for me. I can only liken these to the worst Poe has to offer, and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw , which was only saved by its historical significance and ambiguous ending, as far as I'm concerned.
While I was more generous in my ratings of the individual stories, I'm giving the full collection just one star, because clearly I didn't like it—I couldn't finish it, and I wouldn't recommend it, unless you're the type of reader who thinks The Turn of the Screw is the height of its literary genre. Unfortunately it most definitely wasn't for me.
All Souls’ · ★★
In this Halloween story, a traditional gothic tale is placed into the modern setting of a suburban house—albeit a remote one, in which a widow lives with only her servants for company. She has an accident and becomes bed-bound with a broken ankle, and the strangest 36 hours follow. I took it as a metaphor for the loss of independence that comes with old age, and the fear of loneliness and abandonment that follows, but it wasn’t a particularly memorable or impressive choice as the first story in a collection.
The Eyes · ★★★
A well-known setting: Men gather in an oak-paneled library lit only by a fire-place, to smoke and exchange stories of the supernatural. Their host, an older gentleman, goes last, and shares a story about a pair of old and cruel floating eyes that have haunted him in the dead of night years before with his group of young admirers. I liked the twist, if that’s what you can call it; it was somewhat creepy for reasons that have nothing to do with monstrous apparitions.
Afterward · ★★½
A newly rich couple wants to move to a nice old house in the countryside, preferably with all the stereotypical INconveniences, including a ghost. They are promised that there is one, but that they won’t know they’ve been haunted until…. well, afterward. The title itself foreshadows the ending, and giving any more of the plot away would spoil it. I found it relatively predictable, but it was probably still creepily shocking at the time it was first published.
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell · ★½
A new maid joins the household of an unhappily married wealthy woman after her former maid passed away, and no one will talk about the deceased… I am a sucker for ambiguity in an ending, but this whole story was so vague, it’s like everything that’s important was left out of it. I have an inkling (or several) of what Wharton was getting at, but the reader has to do all of the heavy lifting, as there is so little to go on. Pretty fascinating as a narrative approach, but I can’t say that I enjoyed it.
Kerfol · ★★
A prospective buyer visits the grounds of an old castle on his own and comes across a pack of eerily quiet and well-cared for dogs… the former mistress’ beloved pets, and the backstory slowly emerged through old court documents. Non-human ghosts provided a welcome change from the other stories in this collection so far, but for some hard-to-pinpoint reason this gothic revenge tale reminded me a little of Bluebeard.
The Triumph of Night · ★★
A secretary is left stranded at a railway station on a Siberian-like winter night, and finds shelter with a young man suffering from tubercolosis and his wealthy industrialist uncle. Spooked by a malevolent apparition only he can see, in his fear he ends up becoming an unwitting agent in an evil plan. I quite enjoyed the writing and evoked atmosphere at the start of this one, but the rushed and bland ending ruined it for me.
—————
Note: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I enjoyed Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and I like gothic, supernatural tales. Short story collections always tend to be a mixed bag, but I really thought that my overall enjoyment of these ghost stories would be pretty much guaranteed.
Well, I finally threw in the towel a little over half-way through, after struggling to find the will to pick this up for well over a month and entering a reading slump because of it. I skipped the final four stories (Bewitched, Mr. Jones, Pomegranate Seed, and A Bottle of Perrier), and while Miss Mary Pask was the last one I read, I didn't write down my thoughts right after, and am now finding that I have absolutely no recollection of it, and even a google search is not jogging my memory in the least.
That's the main flaw of these stories: They were unremarkable, forgettable, rather predictable, and all save the only one I actually liked, The Eyes, have almost completely faded in my memory at this point. The other big flaw is Wharton's writing being too wordy and laborious to be conducive to any feeling of creepiness—everything about her efforts just fell completely flat for me. I can only liken these to the worst Poe has to offer, and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw , which was only saved by its historical significance and ambiguous ending, as far as I'm concerned.
While I was more generous in my ratings of the individual stories, I'm giving the full collection just one star, because clearly I didn't like it—I couldn't finish it, and I wouldn't recommend it, unless you're the type of reader who thinks The Turn of the Screw is the height of its literary genre. Unfortunately it most definitely wasn't for me.
All Souls’ · ★★
In this Halloween story, a traditional gothic tale is placed into the modern setting of a suburban house—albeit a remote one, in which a widow lives with only her servants for company. She has an accident and becomes bed-bound with a broken ankle, and the strangest 36 hours follow. I took it as a metaphor for the loss of independence that comes with old age, and the fear of loneliness and abandonment that follows, but it wasn’t a particularly memorable or impressive choice as the first story in a collection.
The Eyes · ★★★
A well-known setting: Men gather in an oak-paneled library lit only by a fire-place, to smoke and exchange stories of the supernatural. Their host, an older gentleman, goes last, and shares a story about a pair of old and cruel floating eyes that have haunted him in the dead of night years before with his group of young admirers. I liked the twist, if that’s what you can call it; it was somewhat creepy for reasons that have nothing to do with monstrous apparitions.
Afterward · ★★½
A newly rich couple wants to move to a nice old house in the countryside, preferably with all the stereotypical INconveniences, including a ghost. They are promised that there is one, but that they won’t know they’ve been haunted until…. well, afterward. The title itself foreshadows the ending, and giving any more of the plot away would spoil it. I found it relatively predictable, but it was probably still creepily shocking at the time it was first published.
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell · ★½
A new maid joins the household of an unhappily married wealthy woman after her former maid passed away, and no one will talk about the deceased… I am a sucker for ambiguity in an ending, but this whole story was so vague, it’s like everything that’s important was left out of it. I have an inkling (or several) of what Wharton was getting at, but the reader has to do all of the heavy lifting, as there is so little to go on. Pretty fascinating as a narrative approach, but I can’t say that I enjoyed it.
Kerfol · ★★
A prospective buyer visits the grounds of an old castle on his own and comes across a pack of eerily quiet and well-cared for dogs… the former mistress’ beloved pets, and the backstory slowly emerged through old court documents. Non-human ghosts provided a welcome change from the other stories in this collection so far, but for some hard-to-pinpoint reason this gothic revenge tale reminded me a little of Bluebeard.
The Triumph of Night · ★★
A secretary is left stranded at a railway station on a Siberian-like winter night, and finds shelter with a young man suffering from tubercolosis and his wealthy industrialist uncle. Spooked by a malevolent apparition only he can see, in his fear he ends up becoming an unwitting agent in an evil plan. I quite enjoyed the writing and evoked atmosphere at the start of this one, but the rushed and bland ending ruined it for me.
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Note: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
January 20, 2024
One of the twentieth century's greatest American supernatural fiction collections. Scratch that. One of the greatest supernatural fiction collections, period.
Wharton imbues her ghost stories with the kinds of cutting social observations she showcases in her brilliant novels The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, and Ethan Frome.
Impressive above all else is her formal ingenuity: she paces expertly to achieve the gradual, deliberate terror of her characters' dark revelations. Her prose is lush but never showy, working always toward narrative and atmospheric immersion.
These stories often read like highly distilled Gothic novels, economical without sparing dynamic characters or plots.
Wharton imbues her ghost stories with the kinds of cutting social observations she showcases in her brilliant novels The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, and Ethan Frome.
Impressive above all else is her formal ingenuity: she paces expertly to achieve the gradual, deliberate terror of her characters' dark revelations. Her prose is lush but never showy, working always toward narrative and atmospheric immersion.
These stories often read like highly distilled Gothic novels, economical without sparing dynamic characters or plots.
October 16, 2022
Edith can do no wrong for me. There are no weak links in this collection, but Afterward is a particular standout.
November 7, 2025
now edith you didn’t quite eat here but i dare say there were some nibbles
November 4, 2023
Overall, this collection is less overtly ghostly and more subtly eerie. I am not a super huge fan of short stories or ghost stories but thought that this would be a fun October read. Summaries of each story are below:
All souls
A strange little story about a widow who lives alone in an old house with her servants. On all souls eve (or in modern parlance, Halloween), she goes out for her usual walk and encounters a woman walking toward the house. When she asks where she is going, she only says “the see one of the girls” which the widow takes to mean one of her servants. She doesn’t think about it again, however, as she falls and breaks her ankle on her way back and is bedridden for the night, waiting for the doctor to return the next day with the X-ray machine. But when she wakes the next morning, the house is quiet, dark and cold, the snowstorm having knocked out the electricity, phone and heat. She stumbles around the house in search of her servants but the house in empty except for a radio turned to a foreign station. She passes out and when she awakes she is in her bed, in pain and feverish with her lady maid, Agnes, and the doctor examining her ankle. She tries to explain what happened but they blame it on the fever and pain. She recovers and thinks nothing else about it until, a year later, she meets the same woman on her walk. She leaves the house and never returns.
The Eyes
I did not understand this one at all. An old man is entertaining some younger men with a ghost story. In his youth, he was aimless and moved in with an aunt in NYC where he met young Alice. She wasn’t especially pretty or engaging but he fell in instalove and proposed to her. But that night, he awoke to menacing eyes staring at him from the foot of the bed. He could not sleep and left the house immediately the next morning, boarding a ship for Europe. He did not see the eyes again and so he stayed in Europe. A couple of years later, a young man,Gilbert, met him in Rome with a letter from Alice, his cousin, asking him to look after him. So he does and they fall into an easy friendship. Gilbert wants to write a book but his writing is terrible but he is afraid that if he tells him the truth, Gilbert will leave. So he lies and then he starts seeing the eyes again. Eventually he tells the truth, Gilbert leaves and he never see the eyes again. When he is done with his story, one of the young men who was listening is struck dumb, hiding the hatred on his face.
Afterward
Finally, a good story in the collection! Mary and her husband move to a remote home after her husband made a lot of money on one of his mines and her neighbors ask if she has seen the ghosts. She says that she doesn’t think so and they tell her that she’ll only know afterwards. It is only once Mary has finally stopped looking for the ghosts that things get creepy. Someone sends her a newspaper clipping about a man who is suing her husband over the mine. She knew nothing about it and is shocked. Her husband moves to reassure her that the suit was dropped and that there was nothing to worry about. The next day, she meets a man coming to the house looking for her husband so she sends him into the library. When she goes in for lunch, the servants tell her that her husband left with the gentleman caller. He never comes home. A few months after he has been missing, a lawyer that her husband hired to deal with the lawsuit pay a visit and explains that the lawsuit ended because the man killed himself and he shows her a newspaper clipping with the story that contains the man’s photo and it is none other than the man who took her husband away. She now realizes, afterwards, that he was a ghost.
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
Alice is a lady maid to a sickly woman. She is haunted by the pervious lady maid, Emma, who worked for the mistress for 20 years before her death. The husband is a vile man who scares his wife and the staff but he travels a lot and is rarely home. The mistress seems to be having a physical or emotional affair with a neighbor and her husband sneaks back one night to catch them but is haunted by the former maid and his wife dies. I’m still confused because it seems that perhaps her death wasn’t natural but it was never explained.
Kerfol
This one might be the best in the collection. A man is looking to buy an old castle and when he goes to see it the only thing he finds are a bunch of dogs. He learns that the castle is haunted by the dogs one day each year on the day that a former owner died. In the Middle Ages, a man wed late in life to a younger women. The couple was never able to have children and the woman was very lonely when her husband travelled. He always bought her lavish gifts and jewels but she was still lonely until he brought her a puppy. She draped the puppy with jewels and it was always by her side. When she traveled and met a younger man, she became enamored with him and gave him the dog’s necklace to take as a token of he affection. Somehow her husband found out and he killed the dog as punishment and every subsequent dog that his wife acquired. One night, when her lover was returning from war, she raced to warn him about her husband but before she could she heard her husband screaming amongst the sound of wild snarling. He died and she was put on trial where her defense was that her husband was killed by the ghosts of all her dead dogs that he killed. Creepy!
The Triumph of Night
A young man on his way to a new job as a woman’s secretary is waylaid by a snowstorm and taken in by a rich neighbor and his nephew for the night. While there, he witnesses the nephew’s will, for it is his birthday and he has just come into his inheritance from his deceased father. The secretary has a bad feeling about the scene and sees a ghost, of sorts, that looks exactly like the uncle but more menacing. The apparition shows up again at dinner and the secretary flees the house, out into the snowstorm. The nephew follows after him and his constitution is not what it once was since his bout with tuberculosis and he dies. The secretary has PTSD and is sent abroad for rest. While there, he comes across old newspapers that show that the uncle was being accused of fraud and his company was in trouble. But, a few days later, after the nephew’s death, the uncle is flush again and pumping money into his failing company. The secretary now realizes that the ghostly apparition was the man’s true intentions showing through and that he certainly killed his nephew for his inheritance.
Miss Mary Pask
An unnamed man is recovering from an unnamed illness by traveling and painting. When he is nearby a town where his friend, Grace’s, sister Mary lives, he decides to stop in for a visit. But after traveling though fog, he arrives to find the house dark. But an old woman opens the door and says that Mary will see him and leaves the house. Mary appears as a vision, and speaks like the dead. It now dawns on him that the last time he saw Grace, before his illness, she was dressed in black because Mary had died. Now, ghostly Mary tells him how lonely she is and that she doesn’t want him to go. He escapes and wakes the next morning with a fever, wondering if he dreamt the whole affair. When he returns home, he visits with Grace and asks if she ever got Mary a headstone and Grace is confused because Mary didn’t die, she was just in a coma.
Bewitched
I did not understand this one. A woman calls the deacon and some local men to her house to see her husband who says that he is bewitched by his former girlfriend, who is now dead. Her father says that it cannot be and urges the deacon to bear witness as they spy on the man’s activities. They follow him to a hut at the pond the next day where they see bare footprints in the snow. The father breaks into the cabin and fires his gun at the ghost-like figure. A few days later his other daughter dies and the woman says that her husband is cured.
Mr. Jones
This one started off so great but ended too abruptly! Lady Jane has inherited, through distant relations, an old estate named Bells. When she goes to visit it, the maid refuses to let her in saying that Mr. Jones won’t allow it. Once she finally moves in, the housekeeper won’t let her hire any outside help, access some of the rooms or have tradesmen come in to fix the chimney or open locked doors with lost keys saying that Mr. Jones won’t allow it. Lady Jane soon tires of this and says that she’ll break down the door if she has to and lo and behold the key appears. Inside the locked room, she finds the old files of previous owners, but the years of 1800-1830, when the last owners who actually inhabited the building were alive, are missing. The lord died of the plague but little is know of his wife. Lady Jane finds the missing papers in Mr. Jones’ old desk and learns that the woman was kept trapped in the house by her husband and Mr. Jones. When the housekeeper finds out what she has done, she runs off to her room where she is found later, dead from strangulation. The maid said that Mr. Jones did it as punishment for Lady Jane taking the papers.
Pomegranate Seed
I did not understand this one. A woman marries a widower who everyone says is still madly in love with his dead wife. Once they return from their honeymoon, a letter awaits him and she can see how anguished he becomes. This goes on for several months, a letter arrives and he is upset, to the point where she cannot take it anymore and demands to know who they are from. He refuses to tell her but agrees to go away with her on a trip when she begs. The next morning, he leaves to see to their passage but he never returns. The woman goes to her mother in law for help and she recognizes the handwriting on the letters as that of his dead wife. They call the police.
A Bottle of Perrier
A man goes to visit his friend at an encampment in the desert but he has not returned from his expedition. As he waits, he tells the English servant that he only drinks water, not wine, and is informed that the Perrier is gone and they are awaiting another case from the caravan. He drinks the well water, boiled with lemon. But each day that goes by without any sign of his friend, the water smells worse and worse. Finally the man says that he will go out to search for his friend but the servant stops him. They are both going stir crazy and a bit mad and are each equally suspicious of one another. Finally the servant cracks and says that he has never had a holiday in the 12 years that he has been in the desert and he was finally going to get one but his master reneged and the servant became so mad he stuck him down. I suspect that he is the one fouling the water.
All souls
A strange little story about a widow who lives alone in an old house with her servants. On all souls eve (or in modern parlance, Halloween), she goes out for her usual walk and encounters a woman walking toward the house. When she asks where she is going, she only says “the see one of the girls” which the widow takes to mean one of her servants. She doesn’t think about it again, however, as she falls and breaks her ankle on her way back and is bedridden for the night, waiting for the doctor to return the next day with the X-ray machine. But when she wakes the next morning, the house is quiet, dark and cold, the snowstorm having knocked out the electricity, phone and heat. She stumbles around the house in search of her servants but the house in empty except for a radio turned to a foreign station. She passes out and when she awakes she is in her bed, in pain and feverish with her lady maid, Agnes, and the doctor examining her ankle. She tries to explain what happened but they blame it on the fever and pain. She recovers and thinks nothing else about it until, a year later, she meets the same woman on her walk. She leaves the house and never returns.
The Eyes
I did not understand this one at all. An old man is entertaining some younger men with a ghost story. In his youth, he was aimless and moved in with an aunt in NYC where he met young Alice. She wasn’t especially pretty or engaging but he fell in instalove and proposed to her. But that night, he awoke to menacing eyes staring at him from the foot of the bed. He could not sleep and left the house immediately the next morning, boarding a ship for Europe. He did not see the eyes again and so he stayed in Europe. A couple of years later, a young man,Gilbert, met him in Rome with a letter from Alice, his cousin, asking him to look after him. So he does and they fall into an easy friendship. Gilbert wants to write a book but his writing is terrible but he is afraid that if he tells him the truth, Gilbert will leave. So he lies and then he starts seeing the eyes again. Eventually he tells the truth, Gilbert leaves and he never see the eyes again. When he is done with his story, one of the young men who was listening is struck dumb, hiding the hatred on his face.
Afterward
Finally, a good story in the collection! Mary and her husband move to a remote home after her husband made a lot of money on one of his mines and her neighbors ask if she has seen the ghosts. She says that she doesn’t think so and they tell her that she’ll only know afterwards. It is only once Mary has finally stopped looking for the ghosts that things get creepy. Someone sends her a newspaper clipping about a man who is suing her husband over the mine. She knew nothing about it and is shocked. Her husband moves to reassure her that the suit was dropped and that there was nothing to worry about. The next day, she meets a man coming to the house looking for her husband so she sends him into the library. When she goes in for lunch, the servants tell her that her husband left with the gentleman caller. He never comes home. A few months after he has been missing, a lawyer that her husband hired to deal with the lawsuit pay a visit and explains that the lawsuit ended because the man killed himself and he shows her a newspaper clipping with the story that contains the man’s photo and it is none other than the man who took her husband away. She now realizes, afterwards, that he was a ghost.
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
Alice is a lady maid to a sickly woman. She is haunted by the pervious lady maid, Emma, who worked for the mistress for 20 years before her death. The husband is a vile man who scares his wife and the staff but he travels a lot and is rarely home. The mistress seems to be having a physical or emotional affair with a neighbor and her husband sneaks back one night to catch them but is haunted by the former maid and his wife dies. I’m still confused because it seems that perhaps her death wasn’t natural but it was never explained.
Kerfol
This one might be the best in the collection. A man is looking to buy an old castle and when he goes to see it the only thing he finds are a bunch of dogs. He learns that the castle is haunted by the dogs one day each year on the day that a former owner died. In the Middle Ages, a man wed late in life to a younger women. The couple was never able to have children and the woman was very lonely when her husband travelled. He always bought her lavish gifts and jewels but she was still lonely until he brought her a puppy. She draped the puppy with jewels and it was always by her side. When she traveled and met a younger man, she became enamored with him and gave him the dog’s necklace to take as a token of he affection. Somehow her husband found out and he killed the dog as punishment and every subsequent dog that his wife acquired. One night, when her lover was returning from war, she raced to warn him about her husband but before she could she heard her husband screaming amongst the sound of wild snarling. He died and she was put on trial where her defense was that her husband was killed by the ghosts of all her dead dogs that he killed. Creepy!
The Triumph of Night
A young man on his way to a new job as a woman’s secretary is waylaid by a snowstorm and taken in by a rich neighbor and his nephew for the night. While there, he witnesses the nephew’s will, for it is his birthday and he has just come into his inheritance from his deceased father. The secretary has a bad feeling about the scene and sees a ghost, of sorts, that looks exactly like the uncle but more menacing. The apparition shows up again at dinner and the secretary flees the house, out into the snowstorm. The nephew follows after him and his constitution is not what it once was since his bout with tuberculosis and he dies. The secretary has PTSD and is sent abroad for rest. While there, he comes across old newspapers that show that the uncle was being accused of fraud and his company was in trouble. But, a few days later, after the nephew’s death, the uncle is flush again and pumping money into his failing company. The secretary now realizes that the ghostly apparition was the man’s true intentions showing through and that he certainly killed his nephew for his inheritance.
Miss Mary Pask
An unnamed man is recovering from an unnamed illness by traveling and painting. When he is nearby a town where his friend, Grace’s, sister Mary lives, he decides to stop in for a visit. But after traveling though fog, he arrives to find the house dark. But an old woman opens the door and says that Mary will see him and leaves the house. Mary appears as a vision, and speaks like the dead. It now dawns on him that the last time he saw Grace, before his illness, she was dressed in black because Mary had died. Now, ghostly Mary tells him how lonely she is and that she doesn’t want him to go. He escapes and wakes the next morning with a fever, wondering if he dreamt the whole affair. When he returns home, he visits with Grace and asks if she ever got Mary a headstone and Grace is confused because Mary didn’t die, she was just in a coma.
Bewitched
I did not understand this one. A woman calls the deacon and some local men to her house to see her husband who says that he is bewitched by his former girlfriend, who is now dead. Her father says that it cannot be and urges the deacon to bear witness as they spy on the man’s activities. They follow him to a hut at the pond the next day where they see bare footprints in the snow. The father breaks into the cabin and fires his gun at the ghost-like figure. A few days later his other daughter dies and the woman says that her husband is cured.
Mr. Jones
This one started off so great but ended too abruptly! Lady Jane has inherited, through distant relations, an old estate named Bells. When she goes to visit it, the maid refuses to let her in saying that Mr. Jones won’t allow it. Once she finally moves in, the housekeeper won’t let her hire any outside help, access some of the rooms or have tradesmen come in to fix the chimney or open locked doors with lost keys saying that Mr. Jones won’t allow it. Lady Jane soon tires of this and says that she’ll break down the door if she has to and lo and behold the key appears. Inside the locked room, she finds the old files of previous owners, but the years of 1800-1830, when the last owners who actually inhabited the building were alive, are missing. The lord died of the plague but little is know of his wife. Lady Jane finds the missing papers in Mr. Jones’ old desk and learns that the woman was kept trapped in the house by her husband and Mr. Jones. When the housekeeper finds out what she has done, she runs off to her room where she is found later, dead from strangulation. The maid said that Mr. Jones did it as punishment for Lady Jane taking the papers.
Pomegranate Seed
I did not understand this one. A woman marries a widower who everyone says is still madly in love with his dead wife. Once they return from their honeymoon, a letter awaits him and she can see how anguished he becomes. This goes on for several months, a letter arrives and he is upset, to the point where she cannot take it anymore and demands to know who they are from. He refuses to tell her but agrees to go away with her on a trip when she begs. The next morning, he leaves to see to their passage but he never returns. The woman goes to her mother in law for help and she recognizes the handwriting on the letters as that of his dead wife. They call the police.
A Bottle of Perrier
A man goes to visit his friend at an encampment in the desert but he has not returned from his expedition. As he waits, he tells the English servant that he only drinks water, not wine, and is informed that the Perrier is gone and they are awaiting another case from the caravan. He drinks the well water, boiled with lemon. But each day that goes by without any sign of his friend, the water smells worse and worse. Finally the man says that he will go out to search for his friend but the servant stops him. They are both going stir crazy and a bit mad and are each equally suspicious of one another. Finally the servant cracks and says that he has never had a holiday in the 12 years that he has been in the desert and he was finally going to get one but his master reneged and the servant became so mad he stuck him down. I suspect that he is the one fouling the water.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 7, 2024
3.5 stars rounded up, because…Edith Wharton’s writing.
I didn’t know Edith Wharton dipped so often into the supernatural, but this book of stories personally chosen by her is here to prove it. Her subjects are, as usual, members of the very comfortably middle-class or gentry, and the stories roam from New York, to England, to Brittany, to a Middle Eastern desert. These tales are not meant to terrify but rather to profoundly chill. All is very genteel, even the (decidedly unbloody) ghosts.
I didn’t know Edith Wharton dipped so often into the supernatural, but this book of stories personally chosen by her is here to prove it. Her subjects are, as usual, members of the very comfortably middle-class or gentry, and the stories roam from New York, to England, to Brittany, to a Middle Eastern desert. These tales are not meant to terrify but rather to profoundly chill. All is very genteel, even the (decidedly unbloody) ghosts.
November 3, 2024
I adore Edith Wharton and feel like she is criminally underrated and should be a name spoken about as often as Austen or a Bronte. This collection of ghost stories definitely didn't disappoint.
The stories themselves, whether explicitly about ghosts, or a mystery, or some sort of haunting presence, also explore other facets of the world around Wharton, the author shining a light on loneliness, class conflict, strained relationships, womanhood, and sexuality. Edith Wharton's writing is strong, as always, ahead of her time, and I feel almost all of the stories were able to stand up against one another, a difficult feat when it comes to short story collections.
Unsettling, fun, thrilling, a great gothic read.
The stories themselves, whether explicitly about ghosts, or a mystery, or some sort of haunting presence, also explore other facets of the world around Wharton, the author shining a light on loneliness, class conflict, strained relationships, womanhood, and sexuality. Edith Wharton's writing is strong, as always, ahead of her time, and I feel almost all of the stories were able to stand up against one another, a difficult feat when it comes to short story collections.
Unsettling, fun, thrilling, a great gothic read.
October 14, 2025
I fear this short story collection did not give what I wanted it to give but maybe I had the wrong expectations.
This wasn’t scary at ALL, nor was it spooky. To be fair it’s meant to be more unsettling (rather than scary) from what I’ve gathered, but I would rate this 2/10 in terms of how unsettled I felt.
There were a couple stories I liked, but actually the rest were very much forgettable. That aside I did like the plots of most of the stories just wish it gave a little more, I mostly finished the stories a little disappointed
This wasn’t scary at ALL, nor was it spooky. To be fair it’s meant to be more unsettling (rather than scary) from what I’ve gathered, but I would rate this 2/10 in terms of how unsettled I felt.
There were a couple stories I liked, but actually the rest were very much forgettable. That aside I did like the plots of most of the stories just wish it gave a little more, I mostly finished the stories a little disappointed
Read
November 3, 2024I tried literary fiction but it’s not for me
February 21, 2025
perfect gothic ghost stories, i already wanna reread
November 4, 2025
Some really solid stories my favorite was Pomegranate Seed but these are much better suited towards winter (very dark snowy nights in drafty cold houses) more than it is an autumn ghost story collection. Read it in December or January.
November 24, 2025
i’m mad that i waited this long to start my edith wharton journey. i’m not mad that i began with a collection of stories from nyrb. elegant writing!!! can’t wait for more!
December 14, 2025
I'm usually a fan of Edith Wharton's work. But I read the first short story here and decided I didn't want to carry on. It's the story of a man who wants to die, and thus confesses to a murder he committed some years ago in the hopes of getting arrested and hanged, but no one believes him. The humour feels dated, childish, and the plotline contrived. I didn't see the point in forcing myself to read on.
October 28, 2023
Senti i fantasmi?
Se il racconto procura un brivido freddo lungo la schiena, ha fatto il suo lavoro e l’ha fatto bene. Così scrive Edith Wharton nella prefazione che anticipa questa raccolta di racconti gotici, messa insieme da lei stessa prima che venisse pubblicata postuma, nel 1937.
Racconti gotici ma non dell’orrore, badate bene, perché non c’è molto di cui spaventarsi qui. Ma le atmosfere che li circondano, quelle sì che sono irresistibili e vi daranno i brividi.
L’horror whartoniano è molto classico, fatto di case spettrali e fantasmi che si palesano ai vivi senza alcuno scrupolo, dialogando perfino con loro. Molto descrittiva, elegante e raffinata, l’autrice si impegna al massimo nella realizzazione dell’atmosfera suggestiva.
Ma spesso il vero orrore è quello subito dalle donne, incatenate in matrimoni infelici e costrittivi, relegate ai ruoli per loro voluti dalla società patriarcale. Queste presenze dell’aldilà sono infatti esseri ribelli, che non si piegano al volere del mondo.
Nonostante la piacevolezza della scrittura è l’abilità della Wharton di ritrarre i destini femminili più infelici in cornici gotiche ben costruite, alcuni racconti risultano un po’ deboli e stereotipati, perdono mordente e sembrano essere invecchiati male.
Inoltre, credo di preferire una narrazione più subdola, un horror solo accennato, d’atmosfera, che non si rivela mai davvero ma semina dietro di sé indizi e presagi. Quella è l’inquietudine che rimane attaccata addosso più a lungo e sì, sto pensando proprio a Shirley Jackson.
Ma alla fine Fantasmi va preso per quel che è: un divertissement letterario e l’occasione per la sua autrice di uscire dalla propria zona di comfort e condividere i propri demoni con gli altri.
Se il racconto procura un brivido freddo lungo la schiena, ha fatto il suo lavoro e l’ha fatto bene. Così scrive Edith Wharton nella prefazione che anticipa questa raccolta di racconti gotici, messa insieme da lei stessa prima che venisse pubblicata postuma, nel 1937.
Racconti gotici ma non dell’orrore, badate bene, perché non c’è molto di cui spaventarsi qui. Ma le atmosfere che li circondano, quelle sì che sono irresistibili e vi daranno i brividi.
L’horror whartoniano è molto classico, fatto di case spettrali e fantasmi che si palesano ai vivi senza alcuno scrupolo, dialogando perfino con loro. Molto descrittiva, elegante e raffinata, l’autrice si impegna al massimo nella realizzazione dell’atmosfera suggestiva.
Ma spesso il vero orrore è quello subito dalle donne, incatenate in matrimoni infelici e costrittivi, relegate ai ruoli per loro voluti dalla società patriarcale. Queste presenze dell’aldilà sono infatti esseri ribelli, che non si piegano al volere del mondo.
Nonostante la piacevolezza della scrittura è l’abilità della Wharton di ritrarre i destini femminili più infelici in cornici gotiche ben costruite, alcuni racconti risultano un po’ deboli e stereotipati, perdono mordente e sembrano essere invecchiati male.
Inoltre, credo di preferire una narrazione più subdola, un horror solo accennato, d’atmosfera, che non si rivela mai davvero ma semina dietro di sé indizi e presagi. Quella è l’inquietudine che rimane attaccata addosso più a lungo e sì, sto pensando proprio a Shirley Jackson.
Ma alla fine Fantasmi va preso per quel che è: un divertissement letterario e l’occasione per la sua autrice di uscire dalla propria zona di comfort e condividere i propri demoni con gli altri.
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