Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Early in her career Riddell published under the pseudonym F. G. Trafford, before settling on the Victorian commonplace of using her married name, Mrs. J. H. Riddell. Rumors swirled about her husband being in prison at one point. True or not, his inability to support himself was evident, and the constantly indebted Riddells faced bankruptcy. Nevertheless, Riddell proved just as stubborn as the spirits in her stories, refusing to let go of her passion, no matter what obstacles arose. Her family survived on the payments she earned for her writing, though she lamented that she always felt rushed because of their financial problems. Her personal story did not have a happy ending; she died penniless, still trying to write despite being ill with cancer and accepting financial help from the Society of Authors.

  Fortunately, her stories survived, so we will always have a good Riddell ghost tale to keep us up at night.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: A collection of Charlotte Riddell’s work, titled Weird Stories, was published in 1882 by James Hogg. The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell (Dover, 1977) is one of the most complete recent collections, and several newer collections exist, including The Open Door (Dodo Press, 2008) and a new edition of Weird Stories (Victorian Secrets, 2009), which includes some of her best-loved tales: “The Open Door,” “Nut Bush Farm,” “Sandy the Tinker,” and “Old Mrs. Jones.” Most of her stories are still in print, largely due to the efforts of literary critics and academics dedicated to keeping her works in the public arena, though we think a more complete collection of her work is long overdue. You’ll often find a Riddell tale or two included in Victorian ghost story anthologies, such as volume three of the excellent compilation The Valancourt Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Valancourt Books, 2018).

  Also try: Riddell participated in the Victorian trend of Christmas horror tales with her novellas Fairy Water, An Uninhabited House, The Haunted River, and The Disappearance of Mr. Jeremiah Redworth, all of which were published in serial and book form throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s. In 2019 British Library Publishing republished Fairy Water and An Uninhabited House as Haunted Houses, edited by Andrew Smith.

  Related work: Victorian ghost stories written by women are becoming increasingly hard to find. For a deeper dive into this storytelling tradition, we recommend Ellen Wood. Her story “The Ghost of the Hollow Field” makes for perfect fireside reading on a wintry night.

  The Most Learned Woman

  Amelia Edwards

  1831–1892

  Picture a writer, a world traveler, an expert in ancient Egyptian. An adventurer who traversed dangerous mountains and sailed the Nile to excavate tombs of pharaohs, in search of treasures from antiquity.

  Are you imagining Indiana Jones? You’re not far off. Amelia Edwards’s story sounds like something straight out of a Steven Spielberg summer blockbuster.

  She was born Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards in London in 1831. Her father was a banker; her mother educated young Amelia at home. From childhood, Edwards gravitated toward the literary, publishing her first story at age twelve (or perhaps age nine, according to some scholars, though the only known facts are that it may have been a submission to a contest). She proved to be an intelligent and creative child, showing talent in not only writing but also painting and music. By her twenties Edwards was focusing solely on writing, publishing her first novel, My Brother’s Wife, in 1855 (Harper) and, after her father lost his banking job, supporting her parents as a journalist for the Saturday Review and the Morning Post.

  Edwards loved to travel and published books about her adventures in Italy and France. But her life changed in the winter of 1873–74, when the gloomy, rainy climate of Europe prompted a trip to Egypt, where she found the sunny climate much more appealing. She and Lucy Renshawe, her travel companion, hired a boat and sailed the Nile River, a trip that resulted in one of her most popular travel books, Thousand Miles Up the Nile (Longmans, Green & Co., 1877). With the publication of that book, Edwards traded in her ink and pen for a career as a researcher. She taught herself to read hieroglyphs and worked to maintain the integrity of archeological digs, after witnessing the appallingly improper handling and care of artifacts. Following her trips to Egypt, Edwards spent the 1880s and 1890s lecturing in Britain and the United States on a wide variety of subjects relating to archeology and Egyptology, including the role of women explorers in a male-dominated field. In 1882 she founded the Egypt Exploration Fund in order to ensure that future Egyptian studies would be handled with care.

  Of all her writing, Edwards was probably proudest of her travel books, in which she detailed her adventures and her work in various archeological digs across Egypt, so much so that, by the end of her career, her writing largely focused on travel. She often wrote about the inspiration and emotion that landscapes stirred in her, as in this description of traveling through the Italian mountains:

  “The Dolomites! It was a full fifteen years since I had first seen the sketches of them made by a great artist not long since passed away, and their strange outlines and stranger colouring had haunted me ever since. I thought of them as every summer came round; I regretted them every autumn; I cherished dim hopes about them every spring. Sketching about Venice in a gondola a year before the time of which I write, I used to be ever looking towards the faint blue peaks beyond Murano.”

  Edwards’s prose, which was very accessible to the average reader, made her a popular author. Her beautiful and haunting descriptions of her travels are well worth seeking out.

  The Still of the Night

  But Edwards’s fiction is what most interests us and earns her a spot among the top writers of the Victorian ghost story. She wrote extensively—poetry and novels in addition to travel writing—and though her ghost stories were only a small part of her career, she excelled at this format. Edwards’s creepy tales were not always intended to frighten and they included neither gore nor violence. Rather, they were quieter fare, meant to be enjoyed by a fireside, given the gentle chills they induce.

  “The Story of Salome” (Tinsley’s Christmas Annual, 1867) is a perfect example. In this tale, a young man traveling across Europe spies the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She’s breathtaking, but this mysterious woman also possesses a quiet sadness…appropriately so, given that she’s visiting a grave when the man first sees her. Our hero is so taken with his new love that he returns to said grave to take a rubbing of it. The inscription is in Hebrew, which he cannot read, so he sends it off to a friend to decipher. The romantic hero’s obsession grows until he must find out everything he can about this woman—which leads him to discover that he is in love with a ghost. Cue spooky music.

  Another classic, quietly ghostly Edwards tale is the short story “The Phantom Coach” (All the Year Round, 1864). A lonely and lost man. A snowstorm. A strange and possibly deadly encounter with the unknown. Edwards is at her best when describing a haunting landscape, probably thanks to her skills honed while writing about her travels. Here’s how she sets the scene:

  “Although the wind had fallen, it was still bitterly cold. Not a star glimmered in the black vault overhead. Not a sound, save the rapid crunching of the snow beneath our feet, disturbed the heavy stillness of the night.”

  She so excelled at evoking an eerie atmosphere that readers would have shivers even before the ghost showed up.

  Edwards was a fierce defender of women’s rights, proving through her journeys that a woman could do anything a man could and using her writing talent to further the cause. Her heroines were usually headstrong and fiercely intelligent, like the title character of her novel Barbara’s History (1864), which tells the story of an awkward but intelligent orphan who falls for a mysterious older man with a secret. It’s a bit like Jane Eyre, and the novel was successful enough to boost Edwards’s literary career. She was among the first writers published in the English Woman’s Journal, a periodical established in 1858 and run by women’s rights activist Emily
Faithfull. Later in life, Edwards became an active member and, at one point, vice president of the Society for Promoting Women’s Suffrage. Her work in Egyptology earned her the title “the most learned woman in the world,” bestowed by the Boston Globe.

  These days Amelia Edwards has become an important figure among defenders of gay and lesbian rights. Edwards flouted convention by often traveling with female rather than male companions. One such companion was Ellen Braysher, who would become Edwards’s longtime travel partner (and possible romantic partner, though Edwards was never outspoken on the subject). Edwards died of influenza at age sixty-one and was buried, fittingly, under an Egyptian obelisk and stone ankh. She was interred beside Ellen, who had passed away only a few months before. A marker commemorates the lives of these adventurous spirits, and the site has become a place of pilgrimage for the LGBTQ community in the United Kingdom and beyond.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Amelia B. Edwards, published by Leonaur in 2009, contains twenty spooky tales as well as two adventure novellas.

  Also try: Edwards’s accounts of traveling up the Nile are still readily available. Norton Creek Press released a fully illustrated edition in 2008. As with Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Riddell, her works are often included in anthologies of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories. Her story “The Four-Fifteen Express,” originally published in 1867, can be found in The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Wimbourne Books, 2018).

  Related work: Like Edwards, the American author Barbara Mertz, who earned a PhD in Egyptology, was interested in studying other cultures in order to write fiction. She used her knowledge to write mystery books. We recommend the Amelia Peabody series (William Morrow, 1975–2010 and 2017), about a plucky and adventurous woman who is inspired partly by Amelia Edwards.

  His face was as purple as a corpse and his lips were pulled back as if in the agony of death, showing his bright teeth.”

  —“The Phantom Coach”

  The Most Productive Writer

  Pauline E. Hopkins

  1859–1930

  The history of African American speculative writing goes back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beginning with writers such as Martin Delany and his alternate-history serialized novel Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859–1862), Sutton Griggs’s 1899 utopian novel Imperium in Imperio, Charles Chesnutt’s 1899 story collection The Conjure Woman, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s apocalyptic tale “The Comet” (1920). All are engaging examples of speculative fiction that grappled with the racism of the day. Another writer who worked in this vein during this period is Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.

  Hopkins’s name may not be familiar to twenty-first-century readers, but according to the scholar Richard Yarborough, she was “the single most productive black woman writer at the turn of the century.” He notes that between 1900 and 1905 Hopkins published four novels, at least seven short stories, a historical booklet about Africa, more than twenty biographical sketches, and numerous essays and feature articles for the magazines The Colored American (for which she was literary editor from 1903 to 1904) and The Voice of the Negro.

  Pauline E. Hopkins was born in Portland, Maine, in 1859 and raised in Boston. She was interested in writing and the arts at a young age; when she was fifteen years old, her essay “Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedy” won a writing contest sponsored by abolitionist writer William Wells Brown. As a young woman, Hopkins wrote plays and acted and sang in a performing group called the Hopkins Colored Troubadours, which included her family members and friends. Although much of her work as a playwright has been lost, Yarborough notes that a record exists of a play she wrote titled Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad, which her troupe performed in 1880. She often gave lectures on important figures in African American history. Like all writers, Hopkins needed a day job in addition to her creative work, so she studied stenography and worked for the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics and Labor and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among other institutions.

  Hopkins is best known to literary critics and historians for her novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Colored Co-operative, 1900). The book, an example of the eighteenth-century literary genre known as sentimentalism, addressed racial issues in society by influencing readers’ emotions. This was a common characteristic of abolitionist writing and the work of African American activists and allies during and after Reconstruction. Sentimentalists would offer noble and morally strong protagonists and build readers’ compassion for characters who worked to better their financial standing and achieve education. These writers also strove to build sympathy for characters who were victims of abuse, such as young women whose virtue was under siege by unsavory villains. Contending Forces challenged damaging and horrific stereotypes of black sexuality, including misconceptions that African American men were a danger to white women and that African American women were responsible for sexual abuse inflicted upon them by slaveholders. The book also contained elements of the supernatural.

  Hopkins’s fourth novel, Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self, serialized in The Colored American from 1902 to 1903, fully embraced the speculative themes of the day, incorporating a “lost race” archaeological adventure with romance and aspects of the occult, from mesmerism and spiritualism to ghosts to automatic writing. The protagonist, Reuel Briggs, is a medical student who hides his African American identity and has an interest in mysticism and the occult. He falls in love with a woman whom he sees in dreams and then meets in real life performing at a concert. On Halloween, he and some colleagues are investigating the grounds of a haunted house, and she appears to him again and asks for his help. When she shows up seemingly dead at the hospital where Briggs studies, he employs his mystical knowledge and revives her with a vial of life-giving powder of his own formulation. As the story progresses, Briggs is unlucky in love, and he sets out on an archaeological trip to Africa to look for artifacts and treasures. Instead he discovers a hidden country untouched by colonialism. (Sounds familiar to anyone who has seen the 2018 film Black Panther.) This lost civilization is the root of all culture and knowledge on Earth, much older than any Western civilization. Briggs finds more than he bargained for, and if you read the book, so will you.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Of One Blood is a reworking of the tropes in Victorian-age “lost race” books like She by H. Rider Haggard (serialized in The Graphic magazine, 1886–87), upending those novels’ Eurocentric views of Africa. Washington Square Press reprinted the novel in 2010 with an introduction by scholar Deborah McDowell.

  Related work: Nisi Shawl’s book Everfair (Tor, 2016) is set in the time of European expansion into Africa and focuses on the town of Everfair, a utopia carved out of the Belgian Congo for native people. It’s also a steampunk tale that explores what developing steam-power technology in the late nineteenth century could have meant for communities living in the Congo. Shawl wrote an article for Tor.com about Hopkins’s novel, entitled “What Men Have Put Asunder: Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood,” in June 2018.

  Anyone interested in African American speculative fiction should check out the collection Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (Warner Books, 2000), edited by Sheree R. Thomas. The table of contents includes names well known to readers of speculative fiction and horror, such as Linda Addison, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, and Samuel R. Delany, as well as Shawl and Hopkins’s peers Charles Chesnutt and W. E. B. Du Bois. Sadly, Hopkins is not included.

  “The supernatural presides over man’s formation always.”

  —Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self

  Ghostwriter à la Garçonne

  Vernon Lee

  1856–1935

  Ghosts and hauntings are related, but not exactly the same thing. Ghosts are specters of the past
—people who have lived before and cannot quite leave this mortal realm behind. But hauntings are more broadly defined. People can be haunted by ideas, by the past, by an obsession. Inanimate objects can be haunted as well, holding on to some nameless evil or trauma that won’t dissipate. Vernon Lee’s brand of supernatural fiction fits this latter category: less about ghosts resolving their mortal issues and more about people who can’t escape their own psychology. Lee’s characters are women obsessed with strange ancestors, or men who are artistically—and sometimes sexually—frustrated. And they’re all dangerously preoccupied with, and almost possessed by, the past.

  “Vernon Lee” was the pen name of the British writer Violet Paget, who became known for her supernatural tales as well her views on aesthetics. Born in 1856 to expatriate British parents living in France, Lee led a wandering existence. Her mother, Matilda, was an heiress, though her inheritance was locked in legal battles. So they were not exactly poor, but the Pagets frequently had to move to more affordable locales. Violet was a bright child who spoke several languages; she was friends with John Singer Sargent (who would later gain fame as an artist) and his sister Emily. The children reportedly played together frequently; a favorite game was to read about historical executions in books and then act them out. Emily and Violet remained close throughout their adult lives.