Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Violet enjoyed writing from an early age, publishing her first story (in French no less) called “Les aventures d’une pièce de monnaie” in 1870, when she was fourteen years old, in the Swiss magazine La Famille. The story is about the adventures of a coin as it travels from person to person, moving through history. As she continued to write, her work showed her range of interests, from history to art to philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of aesthetics, or the study of beauty. In 1873, her mother finally received her full inheritance, and the family settled in Florence, a place that Violet would always consider home.

  In 1875, Paget adopted the public name of Vernon Lee, though she would alternate between the two in her personal life. At that time it wasn’t imperative for a woman to adopt a male name in order to be published—Lee’s female contemporaries were writing under their own names—but Lee felt that she would not be taken seriously as an art critic and philosopher if she used a woman’s name. According to Vineta Colby’s 2003 biography, Lee said, “No one reads a woman’s writings on art, history and aesthetics with anything but unmitigated contempt.”

  Spectral Psychology

  We may think of people who lived during the Victorian era and the decades after as staid, prudish, buttoned up, and intolerant, but Lee wore her feminism—and, during World War I, her pacifism—on her sleeve. In fact, she literally used her wardrobe to show how she felt about Victorian conventions. In an 1881 painting by Sargent, she wears men’s clothing (known as à la garçonne, or more masculine “gentlewoman,” fashion), highlighting her famous androgynous style. Her choice of Vernon as a pen name shows a rebellious attitude toward social constructions of gender (as was Lee, which was her half-brother Eugene’s surname).

  She also was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women, including the writer Mary Robinson, beginning in 1878. At this time, Lee was writing prolifically, sometimes publishing more than one work per year; her highly praised book on art, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, was published during their relationship. Also during this prolific period, Lee began a friendship with the author Henry James, to whom she would dedicate her 1884 novel Miss Brown (W. Blackwood). (James hated the book, saying it wasn’t representative of Lee’s talent.) Unfortunately, the happy streak did not last.

  Robinson broke off their relationship in 1887 and married a man soon after. Lee almost immediately began a new relationship with Clementina “Kit” Anstruther-Thomson. Lee, who had always been prone to anxiety, struggled to recover from Robinson’s abrupt departure, and her writing changed significantly following the breakup. Roughly from 1889 to 1902, she began to write more supernatural tales, particularly with a psychological haunting at their core. In an essay in her book Belcaro (W. Satchell, 1881), she detailed her thoughts on how hauntings and ghosts function in art and literature: “We none of us believe in ghosts as logical possibilities, but we most of us conceive them as imaginative probabilities…. By ghost we do not mean the vulgar apparition which is seen or heard in told or written in tales; we mean the ghost which slowly rises up in our mind, the haunter not of corridors and staircases, but of our fancies.”

  Ghosts interested Lee not because they could be real, but because of what they revealed about the people telling (and reading) the stories about them. Her ghost stories were less chilling and more psychological excavations into how humanity sees itself.

  Lee’s two best known supernatural works were the short novel A Phantom Lover (Roberts Brothers, 1886) and the collection Hauntings (Heinemann, 1890). In her preface to Hauntings, she dismissed the investigations of psychical societies and their attempts to collect evidence of genuine ghosts. In Lee’s view, people tell and read such stories because ghosts are mysterious, weird, and strange. Ghosts engage our imaginations.

  Her stories often feature women who defy societal expectations in their behavior and dress. One of the female characters in A Phantom Lover is a cross-dresser with a penchant for Elizabethan fashion who becomes the object of another woman’s obsession. Lee’s hauntings often manifest as possessions, allowing her to explore lesbian love and women’s relationships as subtext, at a time when society did not accept them.

  UGLY ENDING

  Vernon Lee’s longest love connection was with Clementina “Kit” Anstruther-Thomson. In her 2003 biography of Lee, Vineta Colby described their partnership as a type of marriage. It was brought down by scandal—but not over their same-sex relationship. Lee was struck by Kit’s physical responses to beauty and adapted her aesthetic theories accordingly. Together the couple wrote an essay about the physical and emotional experience of art, titled “Beauty and Ugliness.” The pair was accused of plagiarism, and though the accusations were later discredited, Kit never recovered from the stress of the controversy, and the relationship did not survive.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Vernon Lee’s ghost stories are best when she relies on her education in history and art to help set the stage. Broadview Press published Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales in 2006, a collection of Lee’s best-known ghostly tales. “A Phantom Lover” is set in an English manor house, but many of her other supernatural stories take place in Germany, Spain, or Italy. “Amour Dure” is about a historian who falls in love with a woman he sees in a medieval painting. Another selection worth seeking out is “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady,” which involves a tapestry that features a snake-tailed woman whose image haunts the protagonist.

  Also try: For those interested in Lee’s life, the scholar Vineta Colby wrote Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (University of Virginia Press, 2003), a meticulously researched biography that takes readers through Lee’s bohemian childhood and into her remarkable life as an intellectual and writer.

  Related work: Readers who like a bit of psychology and art with their spirits may enjoy Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (first published in the New England Magazine, January 1892). The ghosts in this story dwell not in the walls but in the mind of the main character, whose psychosis only worsens when her access to art and society is taken away from her. The story is widely anthologized and should be read by anyone interested in psychological horror.

  Voice for the Dead

  Margaret Oliphant

  1828–1897

  Atmospheric ghost stories are never quite as well done as when they’re written by Margaret Oliphant. Perhaps that’s because she wrote like her life depended on it…which it kind of did.

  Oliphant published profusely, even by the standards of the other prolific authors in this book, producing nearly one hundred novels, more than fifty short stories, and various nonfiction pieces, essays, and reviews. Her body of work reveals her as the shrewd voice of a generation, a skilled storyteller with a keen eye for social commentary. Why aren’t more people talking about Margaret Oliphant?

  Oliphant’s critical reputation may have been killed by her copious output. Meaning, perhaps she wrote herself into obscurity. Her output was so great that critics of the day viewed her as a sensational writer, one whose writing was meant to be enjoyed quickly by the masses and then tossed aside, rather than as a true literary talent.

  The truth is, Oliphant wrote furiously because she had no other choice.

  Margaret Oliphant began her literary career in her Scottish homeland when she was only twenty-one years old, upon the publication of her first novel, Passages in the Life of Mrs Margaret Maitland (H. Colburn, 1850). Shortly after, she married a stained-glass artist named Francis “Frank” Oliphant and moved to London, where she continued to write, becoming a regular in Blackwood’s Magazine, famed for publishing the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Sir Walter Scott. Despite its ties to Romanticism, Blackwood’s was an important publisher of horror fiction, and the stories in its pages would later influence Edgar Allan Poe and other masters of the genre.

  When Oliphant’s husband died of tuberculosis in 1859, leavi
ng her to care for their three surviving children (three others had died in infancy), her writing took on a fevered speed. Given the dearth of career choices available to women in the late 1800s, Oliphant was forced to make money any way she could. She was good at writing and had proved that the family could live off her earnings while her husband was ill. Now her writing was the only income the family had. By the end of her life, Margaret Oliphant was taking care of an alcoholic brother and some of her nieces and nephews; by 1894, all her children had perished from illness.

  God Is Silent

  Though she wrote historical novels and other genres, Oliphant’s talent shone brightest when she tackled horror and supernatural fiction. Her 1882 story “The Open Door” (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1882) is an atmospheric tale that relies on terror simmering just offstage. The format is familiar: A man takes his family to an old estate, where they are tormented by a ghostly voice on the other side of a doorway in a crumbling castle wall, crying to be let in. But Oliphant is masterful in crafting the suspense, pulling it tight, a bit like a noose around a throat, as a ghostly child calls for its mother: “Oh, Mother, let me in! Oh, Mother, let me in! Let me in!”

  Though she hasn’t been discussed by critics as much as her contemporaries, Oliphant had her fans. In his 1929 essay “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories,” the English author M. R. James wrote that “the religious ghost story, as it may be called, was never done better than by Mrs. Oliphant in ‘The Open Door’ and ‘A Beleaguered City.’ ” Oliphant’s use of religion and the supernatural is more complex than James suggests. Many of her ghost stories revolve around a supernatural element that presupposes a life after death, often one which seems incompatible with the Christian idea of heaven, or even the Christian deity.

  Oliphant’s characters tend to question God, or at least religious faith, when confronted with the supernatural. If the dead from the past return to haunt the present, then surely God, as compared to science, holds the answers. But in Oliphant’s stories, there is no deus ex machina—no God will offer help. It’s of note that Oliphant usually doesn’t use the name of God in her supernatural stories or refer to anything explicitly religious. Rather, they hint at a Christian paradigm that’s being tested.

  Oliphant mixes these Christian elements with trauma. The spaces where her stories unfold—crumbling castles, old manor houses—are haunted by a long history of abuse. Her characters crave relief in comfortable constructs like religion, but often relief is not easily found. It would seem that, according to Oliphant at least, the past can never truly be conquered. It can only be confronted, no matter how painful doing so may be.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Over the past few decades several academic presses have published reprints of Oliphant’s work. Canongate Classics compiled her ghostly tales in 2009 in A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and Unseen, which includes some of her best work, such as “The Open Door” and the short novel A Beleaguered City, about a small town besieged by the dead returning. It’s not quite the zombie apocalypse envisioned by filmmakers like George Romero, but it’s an eerie read nonetheless.

  Also try: “The Open Door” was adapted for television in 1966 for the BBC’s Mystery and Imagination anthology series (season 1, episode 4).

  Related work: Oliphant often draws comparisons to other female supernatural writers of her day. Her name is usually joined to Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Rhoda Broughton (though Oliphant openly criticized the latter for her purple prose). Broughton’s story “The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth” (Temple Bar, February 1868), in which letters exchanged between women slowly build tension, and Braddon’s “At Chrighton Abbey” (Belgravia, May 1871), about a cursed mansion in which would-be grooms are killed before their weddings, are worth a read.

  The Spine–Tingler

  Edith Wharton

  1862–1937

  Edith Wharton once wrote that a good ghost story should send “the cold shiver down one’s spine.” She called this the “thermometrical quality” of a supernatural tale. Wharton may have been more attuned than most to this spectral quality. According to an often-told anecdote, as a young woman she was so deathly afraid of ghost stories that she wouldn’t even sleep in a house that had a book of them somewhere inside. So how did she end up writing some of the most spine-tingling tales of the twentieth century? Some suggest that she did so precisely to get over her fear.

  Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, in New York City. The youngest of three children (and the only girl), Wharton was given a broad education, which was still unusual for girls at that time. Her family traveled across Europe, visiting France, Spain, and Italy, and young Edith learned languages, art, and history. In 1870 her parents took her and her siblings to Germany, where Wharton fell dangerously ill with typhoid fever. While recovering, she relied on books—mostly fairy tales and ghost stories—to stave off boredom. She was still petrified by these stories, but her dread had morphed into a kind of morbid fascination and she became entranced by what she feared. Wharton recovered for a while, but then suffered a relapse. She would ultimately regain full health, but this period changed her. In a biographical fragment she called “My Life and I,” Wharton writes:

  “When I came to myself, it was to enter a world haunted by formless fears. I had been a naturally fearless child; now I lived in a state of chronic fear.”

  She described her newfound terror as “some dark indefinable menace, forever dogging my steps, lurking and threatening.”

  A few years later, the family returned to New York City, where Wharton continued her education via private tutoring at home. Following her illness, Wharton suffered from anxiety and hallucinations that plagued her into early adulthood. They faded after a few years but would return when she was older, following the death of her mother. Though horrible to experience, these hallucinations and fears also provided inspiration as she penned her ghost stories.

  In 1885, Wharton was twenty-three years old and nearly considered an old maid, so she settled into married life with Edward “Teddy” Robbins Wharton. Theirs wasn’t a passionate affair, but married life suited her, and she began writing. She published her first novel at age forty. Wharton’s career would outlast her marriage; the couple divorced in 1913.

  The Other Works of Edith Wharton

  Like many authors of the supernatural who preceded her, such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, Wharton has been remembered primarily for her realist fiction, especially in the classroom (unless it’s a class taught by one of the authors of this book). She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature, in 1921, for her novel The Age of Innocence (D. Appleton & Co., 1920). She was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1927, 1928, and 1930. She wrote celebrated novels such as The House of Mirth (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905) and Ethan Frome (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911) and short stories, including “Roman Fever” (November 1934, Liberty). During her career, realist fiction was the fashion, and hers received more critical attention than did her ghost stories.

  Like her contemporary and friend Henry James, Wharton often focused on the privileged upper class of America, and she was not afraid to skewer the foibles of her own cohort. Also similar to James, who had a fascination with the Societies for Psychical Research (more on them in the next chapter) and wrote The Turn of the Screw (Macmillan, 1898) among numerous other supernatural tales, Wharton was intrigued by ghost stories. To ignore the ones she penned is to paint an incomplete picture of one of the twentieth century’s great writers.

  In 1937 Wharton collected her eleven supernatural stories in one volume, appropriately titled Ghosts (Appleton Century). These tales, and her characters, are often preoccupied with the past. In one popular story, “The Eyes,” the main character is telling his dinner guests a story about a pair of ghostly eyes that followed him in his youth. The story takes a spine-tingling, and ironic, turn
as the storyteller realizes the eyes belonged to him—his older self was looking (rather) disapprovingly on the adventures of his youth. “The Eyes” is indicative of Wharton’s supernatural style; she likes the cozy setting of the Victorian Christmas ghost story (think fireside tales told in drawing rooms with snifters of brandy, or in Gothic-style libraries surrounded by stacks of dusty tomes). But though Wharton’s staging is decidedly Victorian, her scares are not muted, and she often detours into unexpected territory. “Bewitched” is a creepy vampire tale set in a small, rural New England village reminiscent of Ethan Frome’s neighborhood. “Kerfol” is a ghost story that adds spectral dogs into the mix, and “All Souls” takes on the possibility of witchcraft at the end of October, the spookiest time of year.

  Anyone who has read “Roman Fever” knows that Wharton loves a twist ending, and her story “Afterward” has one of her best. The protagonist Ned Boyne wants to purchase a haunted house for fun. He and his wife buy a home that they are assured has a ghost, but they won’t know for sure “till afterward.” Ned is unimpressed—until his past catches up to him and he gets more than he bargained for.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: It’s no surprise to anyone who’s taken a university literature class that Edith Wharton is still widely published today. Short-story collections abound, and our favorite is The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (Wordsworth Editions, 2009), which includes favorites like “Afterword” and “Kerfol.” We especially recommend “Miss Mary Pask,” another chiller that shows off Wharton’s talent for unexpected endings.