Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Also try: Wharton’s popularity has not waned since her death in 1937. Several collections of her short fiction are available, including books devoted entirely to her ghostly stories. Along with the ones mentioned above, we recommend seeking out “Bewitched,” which originally appeared in Here and Beyond (1926). Farmer Saul Rutledge is cheating on his wife, who is understandably upset. Complicating matters is the fact that Saul’s lover has been dead for quite a while. The love triangle between man, wife, and ghost only gets stranger as the story unfolds.

  When you consider the 1984 film Ghostbusters—or the 2016 romp of a reboot—and the glut of ghost hunter shows available on multiple cable channels any time of the day, any day of the week, ghost hunting seems like a modern enterprise. Not so! Fictional experts of supernatural investigation and battling negative entities go back all the way to Fitz James-O’Brien’s character Harry Escott, who first appeared in “The Pot of Tulips” (Harper’s, November 1855), Sheridan Le Fanu’s occult detective Dr. Martin Hesselius from In a Glass Darkly (Richard Bentley & Son, 1872), and of course Bram Stoker’s vampire hunter, Abraham Van Helsing, from Dracula (Archibald Constable, 1897). Following Sherlock Holmes’s debut in 1887, the concept of an eccentric private detective with a sidekick was quickly adapted to stories of paranormal investigation. The resulting genre of occult detection owes its popularity to several women writers whom you’re about to meet.

  Outside the realm of fiction, fascination with the occult reached a peak by the late nineteenth century, in both England and the United States. This expanding interest was a result of the Spiritualist movement (see this page). Though Spiritualism was fading in popularity by century’s end, its ideas never disappeared completely (in fact, the movement saw renewed interest after the First World War). Multiple groups formed to attempt the organized, scientific study of supernatural phenomena. Prominent examples include the Society for Psychical Research, founded in the United Kingdom in 1882, followed by the American Society for Psychical Research in 1885. These organizations originated with professors of philosophy, the sciences, psychology, and the classics at universities like Trinity College, Cambridge, and Harvard. But their membership reached beyond the halls of academe.

  Writers of supernatural fiction were irresistibly drawn to these groups. Algernon Blackwood and Dion Fortune were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its spin-off factions, which favored occult and magical interpretations of the unknown, as opposed to the psychical societies’ more objective and skeptical attitudes. Another member likely familiar to our readers is the prominent occultist Aleister Crowley, whose belief system called Thelema incorporated ceremonial magic (with quite a bit of sexual “magick”) and a blend of Eastern and Western religions and philosophies. Think mysticism mixed with Egyptian gods and goddesses, piled on top of an orgy, and you have a good, if not completely accurate, idea of what Crowley was experimenting with.

  Other writers of fiction, including Henry James (whose brother William was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research), Vernon Lee, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Margery Lawrence, were members of the Societies for Psychical Research, or at least interested in their investigations. Ghost stories written in the late nineteenth century would commonly mention the society and its work. Arthur Conan Doyle disapproved of the psychical societies’ skepticism, and he eventually aligned with Spiritualist groups.

  The resulting literature is just as wild as one would expect. In these stories, ghosts are rarely dead people who can’t find their way into the light. Sometimes they’re not even ghosts; these writers imagined and experimented with more entities lurking in the great beyond. After all, it didn’t have to be just your dead Uncle Frank reaching through the great veil of death. Who knows what might be hiding in the shadows where occultists go ghost hunting?

  Scribe of the Supernatural

  Marjorie Bowen

  1885–1952

  She was born, at least according to her autobiography, in the hour between All Saints Day and All Souls Day. She grew up in a haunted house. And, appropriately, she would become one of the most prolific writers of the ghost story and influence horror writers for decades to come.

  Marjorie Bowen was one of the many pseudonyms of the British writer Margaret Campbell, author of more than 150 published books. She wrote her first, The Viper of Milan (McClure, Phillips, 1906), when she was only sixteen years old. The novel went on to be a best seller, setting the stage for her to emerge as a literary celebrity. Remarkably, her talent for writing was largely self-taught.

  Born Margaret Gabrielle Vere Campbell in Hampshire, England, Bowen learned quickly to fend for herself. Her father was a kind man, but he struggled with alcohol addiction and walked out on the family when Bowen was only five years old. Around 1905 he died homeless on the streets in London, leaving Margaret to be raised by a single mother with limited savings and a volatile temper (though she was beautiful, charming, and smart). Any money available for education was allotted to her older siblings. Margaret was close to her nurse, Nana, who taught her to read, and she spent much of her childhood in the library. A favorite book was Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (Edward Moxon, 1859–85). Nana also filled the girl’s imagination with fairy tales that would keep Margaret enrapt for hours.

  Throughout her childhood, Bowen’s mother moved the family to several homes in and around London, with a constant parade of artists, actors, and writers marching in and out of the household. In her autobiography, Bowen writes about several encounters with haunted houses. She describes experiencing as a child what modern readers might consider night terrors—nightmares that prevented sleep. But as she grew older, she encouraged Nana to tell her stories of the rumored murders that occurred nearby.

  With dreams of becoming an artist, Bowen enrolled in the Slade School of Arts in London. Her instructors deemed her talentless, so she left school and took work as a research assistant in the British Museum, an opportunity she made the most of, reading and learning as much as she could.

  Next, Bowen’s mother pushed her to go to Paris to pursue the arts. Bowen struggled to sell her artwork and sent home what little money she earned. Her mother mismanaged the family’s finances, so Bowen cut short her artistic career yet again and returned home. She became the family’s sole breadwinner by writing to help pay the bills. Unfortunately, Bowen’s mother had a habit of spending the money as soon as it came in.

  Bowen’s first book, the Renaissance drama The Viper of Milan, was rejected by eleven publishers, who considered its violence inappropriate for a woman writer. Bowen persisted, and the book she had begun writing as a teenager was finally published in 1906, when Bowen was twenty-one years old. She turned her entire paycheck over to her struggling family, but her mother—who’d once had her own dreams of being a writer—quickly grew jealous of her daughter’s success. Bowen wrote that her mother would discourage any dreams of literary achievement.

  Certified Haunted

  Bowen enjoyed writing dramas that involved history, a love she had cultivated since working in the British Museum. But the trajectory of her literary career took a sharp turn when she—along with her mother, Nana, and her siblings—moved to a new home. Strange things started happening, and Bowen worried that her childhood troubles had returned. She quickly realized, however, that what she was witnessing was more than just nightmares. The family heard footsteps walking up and down stairs, all night long. Through the walls, they heard the soft shuffling of feet, as if someone was pacing back and forth, but when Bowen would investigate, the rooms were always empty. Groaning emanated through the house. Lights constantly flickered. Eventually the family contacted the Society for Psychical Research, whose members investigated and determined the house to indeed be haunted—by madmen who had committed murder there years ago.

  Yet, in a way, the haunting was a boon, for now Bowen began to write ghost stories, which sold quickly.

 
And once she started, Bowen didn’t stop, becoming one of the most prolific writers of her time and a best seller in both the United States and Britain. Still, she never felt as though the money was enough. She continued supporting her family and paying off the debts her mother incurred for squandering her daughter’s earnings on frivolous things.

  In 1912, Bowen married Zefferino Emilio Costanza, who died of tuberculosis four years later. She remarried, to Arthur L. Long. With her two husbands, Bowen had four children though one daughter died in infancy. Through it all, she kept writing, producing more than 150 works under the pen name Marjorie Bowen, which she initially chose to differentiate her work from her mother’s literary attempts. She also published under the names Joseph Shearing, George Preedy, and Robert Paye; she used multiple aliases to confound literary critics, many of whom believed that the work of prolific writers was somehow cheaper than that of their less productive counterparts.

  Among her notable horror works are the novel Black Magic: A Tale of the Rise and Fall of the Antichrist (Alston Rivers, 1909) and two excellent short-story collections, The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (The Bodley Head, 1949; Wordsworth Editions, 2006) and The Last Bouquet: Some Twilight Tales (The Bodley Head, 1933). Bowen’s horror fiction often mixes the supernatural with Gothic traditions. Her story “Scoured Silk” (first published in 1918 in All-Story Weekly, collected a year later in Bowen’s Crimes of Old Ludlow) almost predicts the domestic themes in Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic horror novel Rebecca (Victor Gollancz, 1938). It’s the account of a young bride who becomes frightened when her husband-to-be insists on taking her to visit the grave of his first wife. Ghosts of the past and personal demons abound in Bowen’s work, but she excels at writing female characters, particularly those who face real-life horrors such as violent men and suitors obsessed with youth and beauty.

  The twelve-story collection Kecksies and Other Twilight Tales (Arkham House, 1976) republished some of Bowen’s earlier stories with a few newer ones, serving to reignite interest in her work. “Florence Flannery” is a good example of her talent. The narrative seems to be a typical haunted house yarn about a young couple moving into a decrepit old home. But there’s a twist: the wife quickly discovers that the house had been previously occupied by a woman of the same name born centuries earlier. The story demonstrates Bowen’s flair for injecting life into a tired horror plot by putting women in dangerous situations that are rooted in the real world, with details like abusive spouses and the isolation that comes with a lack of access to education.

  The threat in Bowen’s stories is usually both supernatural and mundane, and her writing is best when that threat is directed toward women. Women readers will find these dangers all too familiar, which adds delicious suspense to Bowen’s tales.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Bowen remains a popular writer today, and many of her collected stories are readily available, including the Wordsworth Edition of The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (a new edition was published in 2006). In addition to her hits, such as “Scoured Silk,” check out “Ann Mellor’s Lover,” an atmospheric tale of a psychic bookseller who is intrigued by a sketch of a woman he finds in an eighteenth-century book.

  Related work: Though Edith Nesbit is known for her children’s books, such as The Railway Children (Wells Gardner, 1906), she also wrote ghost stories for an adult audience, earning her comparisons to Marjorie Bowen. Nesbit’s story “John Charrington’s Wedding” (in Grim Tales, 1893; 2012 edition available from Echo Library) is a good example of her ability to craft evil. The narrator is jealous of an engaged couple, so much so that he stalks them throughout the story. The ending is revealed to be his darkest wish come true.

  Maker of Female Masterminds

  L. T. Meade

  1844–1914

  Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith may not be a household name, but many who know her work have called her the J. K. Rowling of her day.

  Born in 1844 in Ireland, Meade was raised by a Protestant clergyman and a devout mother. Her father took great pride in the fact that no woman in his family had ever had to work. One can imagine his horror when his daughter announced that she wanted a career—as an author, no less! Meade would not be deterred, however, and when her mother died and her father remarried, she set off for London: the big city, the place of dreams and opportunities. Like Marjorie Bowen (page 94), Meade found a place to pursue her dreams in the Reading Room of the British Museum, where she studied everything she could about her chosen craft.

  Meade published more than 280 works, much of which would now be called “girl’s fiction,” with titles like A Sweet Girl Graduate (A. I. Burt, 1891), Polly: A New-Fashioned Girl (Grosset & Dunlap, 1889), and the oddly titled Dumps: A Plain Girl (W. & R. Chambers, 1905). These sound more like nineteenth-century precursors to the Baby-Sitters Club or Sweet Valley High than anything produced by an icon of horror or speculative fiction. But Meade’s work offers more depth than these books suggest.

  Her stories focused on young schoolgirls dealing with childhood issues, from making and losing friends to dealing with illness and grief. Often Meade’s young heroines had lost their mothers, were left with distant fathers, and, therefore, looked to a schoolmistress for an adult role model. Meade’s works in this mold were quite successful; one of her books, A World of Girls (Cassell and Co., 1886), sold more than 37,000 copies. It’s this vast contribution to children’s literature, with books popular among readers of all ages, that has earned her the comparison to Rowling. Meade also wrote crime fiction, particularly short stories, some of which appeared in The Strand, the magazine familiar to those fond of a certain detective who lived at 221B Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes, for the uninitiated). Fans of TV’s House may want to seek them out; some critics consider Meade the godmother of the medical mystery subgenre.

  Meade’s crime fiction crossed over into horror when her detectives became intimately involved with the supernatural. Starting in 1898, she wrote a series of stories with the author Robert Eustace. That was the pen name of Eustace Robert Barton, a medical doctor who collaborated with numerous writers, including Dorothy L. Sayers on The Documents in the Case (Victor Gollancz, 1930). Together Meade and Eustace produced some eleven volumes of stories. One collection of occult detective tales titled A Master of Mysteries (Ward, Locke, 1898) focuses on the character John Bell, alternately called the “Ghost Breaker” or “Ghost Exposer.” Bell is an independent and eccentric Victorian man of means who solves unsolvable mysteries reminiscent of the adventures of Scooby-Doo. To be clear, Bell’s exploits are not written for kids, and he doesn’t have a talking Great Dane as a sidekick. But most of his cases first appear to be supernatural but turn out to be intricate schemes orchestrated by villains using technologies new for the time period. As with the Scooby gang, the faux hauntings are intended to cover up criminal activity or scare away snoopers.

  Meade and Eustace’s other recurring characters are two unforgettably crafty women villains: Madame Sara and Madame Kalouchy. The latter appears in The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (serialized in 1898 in The Strand, published in total the following year by Ward, Locke), and she remains one of the most diabolical criminal masterminds in literature. Madame Kalouchy is a smart, well-respected doctor whose reputation gains her entry into exclusive societies where wealth abounds. Charming, beautiful, and deadly, she is everything readers could want in villain. She’s creative in her murder methods, too, attempting everything from homicide via injected diseases to a mass killing delivered by killer bugs. Of course, her plans are always foiled. Kalouchy’s talent for escape and her position as head of a secret organization of criminals who follow her orders are reminiscent of another criminal mastermind who appeared just five years earlier in The Strand—Professor James Moriarty.

  Madame Sara, who appears in the collection The Sorceress of the Strand (Strand Magazine, 1902), is in many ways Kalouchy’s dopplegänger, also possessing brains and beauty
that she uses for nefarious purposes. But Sara’s a bit more exotic and a bit darker in both heritage (possessing Indian and Italian blood) and practice (she’s described as a kind of underground abortionist in some stories). Most villains in Victorian literature are male, and Sara stands out not only because of her gender but also because of her intelligence, especially in the medical and scientific fields. The Sherlockian reasoning of the detectives who pursued her was no match for her fiendish mind. Madame Kalouchy was a nefarious villain, but Madame Sara was an evil genius, a true Moriarty—only wearing a skirt.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: If you’re looking for some supernatural fare by Meade, check out her and Eustace’s story collection A Master of Mysteries (Ward, Locke, 1898), about John Bell the “Ghost Exposer.” It’s in the public domain as well as in print, notably in Volume 1 of Coachwhip Press’s Supernatural Detectives series (2011).

  Also try: Madame Sara appeared in season one, episode seven, of the British television show The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, which aired on November 1, 1971. Meade was given a writing credit for the episode.

  Related work: Sherlock Holmes may be the Victorian detective who gets all the love, but he wasn’t the only investigator on the block. Another worth mentioning is Susan Hopley, a character created by the English writer Catherine Crowe. In The Adventures of Susan Hopley; or, Circumstantial Evidence, published in three volumes in 1841 by Saunders and Otley, Hopley is a maid suspected of murder who has to gather evidence to prove her innocence. The carefully designed crime story is ahead of its time both for the procedural aspect of the plot and for its depiction of a working-class woman as the detective and heroine. Readers may also be interested in Crowe’s The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (T. C. Newby, 1848; reprinted by Wordsworth Editions, 2001), which was a best-selling nonfiction book examining ghosts and those who look for them. It also delved into occult topics like phrenology and mesmerism. Both books are in the public domain.