THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS
Page 93
E. (Edith) Nesbit
19 August 1858 - 4 May 1924
English poet, journalist, and short-story writer, perhaps now best-known for her children's books (the twice-filmed Five Children and It, The Railway Children and The Wouldbegoods) and the over-anthologized horror tale "Man-Size in Marble." She also published works under the joint pseudonym (with her husband) "Fabian Bland." In the anthology for some reason is named Evelyn.
Bram Stoker
8 November 1847 - 20 April 1912
Irish-born writer, theater critic, and manager for the famed late-C19 actor Henry Irving, Stoker is of course best known as the author of Dracula, the definitive vampire story. Stoker wrote a number of other novels and short stories, several of which (The Jewel of Seven Stars and Lair of the White Worm, to mention just a couple of the novels) also have major supernaturalist elements.
Perceval Landon
1868 - 23 January 1927
British writer and newspaper correspondent, educated at Oxford and a lifelong friend of Rudyard Kipling.
E. and H. Heron
Major Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard, DSO, MC, FRGS, FZS (17 November 1876 – 14 June 1922) was an explorer, adventurer, big-game hunter and marksman who made a significant contribution to sniping practice within the British Army during the First World War. Concerned not only with improving the quality of marksmanship, the measures he introduced to counter the threat of German snipers were credited by a contemporary with saving the lives of over 3,500 Allied soldiers.
During his lifetime, he also explored territory never seen before by white man, played cricket at first-class level, including on overseas tours, wrote short stories and novels (one of which was turned into a Douglas Fairbanks film) and was a successful newspaper correspondent and travel writer. His many activities brought him into the highest social and professional circles. Despite a lifetime's passion for shooting, he was an active campaigner for animal welfare and succeeded in seeing legal measures introduced for their protection.
He and his mother wrote together under the pseudonyms "H. Heron" and "E. Heron", and saw publication in several journals, including Cornhill Magazine
Amelia B. Edwards
7 June 1831 - 15 April 1892
English poet, novelist, suffragette, and Egyptologist. A friend of Charles Dickens, she published a number of her short stories in his magazines, especially the Christmas annuals. The multiple titles of a number of her works is a consequence of periodical publication/re-publication.
Amyas Northcote
(1864–1923)
Was an English writer. He was the seventh son of the First Earl of Iddesleigh (the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Disraeli) and was for several years a Justice of the Peace in Buckinghamshire. He wrote ghost stories in the line of those of M. R. James, which were compiled in his only book, In Ghostly Company
Miss Braddon (Mary Elizabeth Braddon)
4 October 1835 - 4 February 1915
Extremely successful and prolific British "sensation" novelist (best known for Lady Audley's Secret), dramatist, short-story writer, and editor, as well as actress.
Rosa Mulholland
(1841-1921)
born 1841, Belfast, Co. Antrim. The family was Catholic, and most of the men were physicians. At first she intended to be a painter, but she met Charles Dickens, who was impressed with her writing and persuaded her to concentrate on it. He published her story ‘Not to be taken at Bed-time' in All the Year Round, and wrote 'To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt' as a companion piece. After a period helping her husband's researches and raising a family, she produced several popular 'social' novels: Mulholland married Sir John Gilbert, the antiquary and historian of Dublin, and much of the work they did together on Irish folk-lore finds its way into her books. Her sister married Lord Charles Russell of Killowen, the first catholic Attorney-General of England in 300 years. Mulholland's constant theme is the emergence of a Catholic Irish gentry, as good as — and differing little from — the Protestant Anglo-Irish sort. Her attitude might be summed up as "We are Victorian gentlefolk of Irish persuasion." Allied to this is her protrayal of the Irish as merely another variety of Englishmen, quaint perhaps, but no more so than Yorkshiremen. She has a strong sense of the Celtic past as something to be expiated and tamed, though not altogether lost. Perhaps the logic of this position, developed over the years, was why in the end she seemed to abandon hope in this English connection and approach nationalism (when it became fashionable in society) — if "we" are as good as "they" are, then "they" are no better than "we" are. She died in 1921, during the War of Independence. Mulholland is strongly influenced by J. S. LeFanu and William Carleton, as well as by Dickens; she has more than a touch of Gaskell about her. Although "Not to be taken at Bed-time" surfaces in anthologies from time to time, she is little read today.
Charles Dickens
7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870
Does this man really need an introduction? One of the best-known C19 English novelists, particularly famous today for helping to shape Christmas as we know it — and for contributing significantly to the tradition of the Christmas ghost story. While primarily a writer of realist novels characterized by his trademark concern with issues of social inequality and injustice, Dickens wrote a number of shorter ghostly pieces, many of which share the social and humanitarian concerns of his novels, and his role as a magazine editor and owner put him in a position to help shape the market for supernaturalist fiction.
Charles Collins
(1828 - 1873)
British painter, illustrator, and writer, brother of Wilkie Collins and son-in-law of Charles Dickens, for whose final (and unfinished) novel, Edwin Drood, Collins produced the cover illustration.
Vincent O'Sullivan
November 28, 1868–July 18, 1940
American-born short story writer, poet and critic. Born in New York City to Eugene and Christine O'Sullivan, he began his education in the New York public school system and completed it in Britain.[1] he lived comfortably in London, travelling often to France, until in 1909 he lost his income from the family coffee business when his brother Percy made a spectacularly mistimed futures gamble at the New York Coffee Exchange. The entire family was ruined, and Vincent was destitute for the remaining years of his life. His works dealt with the morbid and decadent. He was a friend of Oscar Wilde (to whom in his disgrace he was often generous), Leonard Smithers, Aubrey Beardsley and other fin-de-siècle figures.
Vernon Lee
14 October 1865 - 13 February 1935
British writer, author of novels, essays, literary criticism, travelogues and, of course, ghost stories. Pseudonym of Violet Paget.
Roger Pater
(1873-1936)
Mystic Voices (1923) and My Cousin Philip (1924) both claim to relate the experiences of Philip Roger Pater who is haunted by ghostly voices. They were actually written by Dom Gilbert Roger Hudlestone.
Wilkie Collins
8 January 1824 - 23 September 1889
British writer of novels, short fiction, and drama, Collins (a good friend of Charles Dickens) is best known for his mystery/suspense novels, particularly The Woman in White [1860] and The Moonstone [1868], works which make very effective use of post-Gothic atmospherics and tropes (insanity, mistaken identity, drugs, imprisonment, stolen inheritance, family intrigues and vengeance, among others); the latter work is often regarded as the first true detective novel, though of course Edgar Allan Poe created the genre with his tales of ratiocination. Collins, whose popularity waxed and waned during his lifetime and who, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, struggled with addiction to laudanum, also wrote a number of good supernaturalist tales, usually featuring his enduring interest in fate. Although in most respects a "typical" Victorian - and one whose works clearly spoke to a large swath of mainstream Victorian society - Collins was atypically Victorian in his domestic arrangments: in addition to what you'll learn from my note to "Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman" below, it's also the case that Collins h
ad a second mistress, with whom he fathered three children. His first mistress, who left him to marry another man when Collins refused to marry her, later rejoined the Collins household. Collins was the son of the well-known painter William Collins (of whom he wrote a biography), and dabbled in painting himself; he was also a lawyer, although he never practiced.
Richard Harris Barham
6 December 1788 – 17 June 1845
English cleric of the Church of England, novelist, and humorous poet. He was known better by his nom de plume Thomas Ingoldsby.
Frederick Marryat
10 July 1792 – 9 August 1848
English Royal Navy officer, novelist, and a contemporary and acquaintance of Charles Dickens, noted today as an early pioneer of the sea story. He is now known particularly for the semi-autobiographical novel Mr Midshipman Easy and his children's novel The Children of the New Forest, and for a widely used system of maritime flag signalling, known as Marryat's Code.
John Guinan
(1874-1945)
John Guinan was an Irish playwright and civil servant who wrote four plays for the Abbey Theatre, “The Cuckoo's Nest” (1913), “The Plough Lifters” (1916), “Black Oliver” (1927), and “The Rune of Healing” (1931). He also wrote short stories for Irish newspapers, but these were never collected. His story "The Watcher o' the Dead" (Cornhill Magazine, June 1929), concerning a curious custom associated with the cemetery Gort na Marbh, was reprinted by Montague Summers in The Supernatural Omnibus (1931), and thus Guinan rates mention here. One other folklorish and borderline weird story is “The Scythe Bearer” (Blackwood’s Magazine, November 1933). His books include his first play, The Cuckoo’s Nest: A Comedy in Three Acts (1933), an Irish edition of “Black Oliver” as Oilibhéar Dubh: Cluiche aon Ghníomh (1935), and the posthumous The Wonderful Wedding: A Play in Three Acts (written between 1906 and 1908, but not published until 1978), written in collaboration with George Fitzmaurice (1877-1963).
W. B. Seabrook
February 22, 1884 – September 20, 1945
William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 – September 20, 1945) was an American Lost Generation occultist, explorer, traveller, cannibal, and journalist, born in Westminster, Maryland. He began his career as a reporter and City Editor of the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia. He later became a partner in an advertising agency in Atlanta.
F. Marion Crawford
2 August 1854 - 9 April 1909
Born and raised mostly in Italy, where he spent most of his adult life, Crawford was the son of the American sculptor Thomas Crawford (quite popular in the mid C19). With a cosmopolitan education (in Italy, America, England, and Germany) and extensively traveled (including a stint in India as a newspaper editor), Crawford was the living embodiment, for many, of the late C19 genteel tradition. Extremely popular as a novelist at the turn of the 20th century, Crawford is now little read; it is somewhat ironic that he may now be best known for a few ghost stories, pieces which Crawford wrote largely to help keep his name before the public and/or to make some quick and easy cash. These tales are a miniscule and fairly unrepresentative part of his total literary output, although several of them are solid ghost stories, particularly if you like the sort of "in your face" supernaturalism which Crawford favored.
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
31 October 1852 - 13 March 1930
American writer (sometimes known as "Mary E. Wilkins" or "Mary Wilkins"), born on Halloween in 1852. Freeman is often regarded (read "devalued") even today as a New England regionalist, perhaps because so much of her work was staunchly realist in its depiction of life in decaying New England hill towns. Her reputation went into decline for much of the mid-C20, for her "feminine" subjects were often dismissed by critics as simply unimportant in the context of larger world events. More recent scholarship has argued convincingly for the importance of Freeman's work, which often does feature spinster heroines or — especially in some of her more well-known ghost stories — abandoned children (this "forlorn child" theme is widely thought to be Freeman's working out of her own feelings regarding the death, at age seventeen, of her sister). Freeman's ghost stories have only recently begun to attract appreciative critical attention, and there remains considerable opportunity for further investigation of these works, which in their combination of pragmatism and supernaturalism are very much in the tradition, going back to Charles Brockden Brown, of an "Americanized" Gothic. More particularly, these stories are powerfully illustrative of the claim that many female writers of the time used the ghost story as a means of examining, indirectly, many of the social, personal, and economic pressures which often silenced or devalued women and their concerns.
A few of Freeman's ghost stories are still anthologized, perhaps most notably "Luella Miller" and "The Wind in the Rose-Bush."
Max Beerbohm
1872 - 1956
Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm, famed British essayist, caricaturist, and novelist who also wrote a few ironic ghostly tales.
Oscar Wilde
16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death.
Wilde's parents were successful Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States of America and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art", and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde had become one of the most well-known personalities of his day.
At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome (1891) in French in Paris but it was refused a licence. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, prosecuted for libel, a charge carrying a penalty of up to two years in prison. The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with other men. After two more trials he was convicted and imprisoned for two years' hard labour. In prison he wrote De Profundis (written in 1897 & published in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six.
Arthur Machen
3 March 1863 – 15 December 1947
Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella "The Great God Pan" (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror (Stephen King has called it "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language"). He is also well known for his leading role in creatin
g the legend of the Angels of Mons.
Ambrose Bierce
(1842-1913?)
American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. Today, he is probably best known for his short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and his satirical lexicon The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto "Nothing matters" and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work all earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce".
Despite his reputation as a searing critic, Bierce was known to encourage younger writers, including poet George Sterling and fiction writer W. C. Morrow. Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. His style often embraces an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited descriptions, impossible events and the theme of war.
In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, he disappeared without a trace.