October is Ghost Month on Fantasy Reads and this year I’m recommending the supernatural fiction of D.K.Broster (1877 -1950). Broster was an historical novelist, best known for her Flight of the Heron trilogy, but she also published two collections of short fiction – A Fire of Driftwood (1932) and Couching at the Door (1942) – which include a variety of Ghost and Horror stories. These are most easily found in From the Abyss (Handheld Press 2022) a collection edited and introduced by Melissa Edmunson and given the subtitle Weird Fiction 1907-1945. It is part of the Handheld Classic Series of `fabulous forgotten fiction’ mainly by women. This is a list well worth exploring.

Although Dorothy Kathleen Broster’s best known novels are set in Scotland she never lived there. She was English but the country she was most interested in was France, which is the setting for a number of her short stories. Broster studied History at St Hilda’s College, Oxford from 1896-1898 but at this period women were not allowed to graduate so, instead of the academic career she deserved, Broster took the job of research secretary to the Regius Professor of History. During World War I she intrepidly served as a Red Cross nurse in France and after the war she moved to Sussex to live with a female friend. In 1920 she published a novel The Yellow Poppy which was turned into a play and she was among the first group of women to receive the Oxford degrees they had earned – along with fellow novelist Dorothy L. Sayers. After the great success of her Jacobite novel The Flight of the Heron (1925) and its two sequels, Broster was able to earn a living as a writer. I have always loved Broster’s historical fiction so I wish that I knew more about her but she was a very private person who avoided publicity of any kind.

Broster’s novels are very well researched but I would classify them as Historical Romances. Her short fiction is mainly darker in tone. Some of the stories feature her favourite periods of the 18th or early 19th centuries while others are set in the era in which they were written. The novels are dominated by male characters but the short stories have a wide range of important and distinctive female characters. This is quite rare in Classic British Ghost and Horror fiction. Authors such as M.R.James (Fantasy Reads – October 2013 ) and E.F. Benson (Fantasy Reads – October 2021) were mainly writing for and about men.

If I say that Broster brings a feminine sensibility to her supernatural fiction I certainly don’t mean that her stories are gentle or dainty. Some of the stories in From the Abyss feature extreme and terrifying violence – The Window, with its French Revolution inspired haunting, made me very grateful that I no longer live in a house with sash-windows. In Clairvoyance, the narrative glides from an amusingly presented house-party and exquisite descriptions of Japanese art into mass murder, described in a detached way that only adds to the horror. What Broster does do is place female experiences of life at the heart of most of her stories. The women and girls in her stories may be victims or killers, the haunter or the haunted. We meet a woman about to snap after years in a coercive relationship with a female relative (The Promised Land), two sisters – one practical and one over-imaginative – who are transported back in time to a very dangerous era (The Taste of Pomegranates), a woman divided into two personalities after a ghastly accident (From the Abyss), and a murdered streetwalker represented by her fur tippet which haunts the egotistical male writer who thought her death a small price to pay for poetic inspiration (Couching at the Door).

Many ghost story writers use standard plot elements in all their work but Broster’s stories are pleasingly varied. She never repeats herself and it is hard to guess whether or not her stories will have a tragic ending. To give a flavour of her work I’ll look at three of the stories in From the Abyss in more detail. The Pavement (1938) is a story set around 1900 that simmers with barely repressed rage. The leading character is a 74 year-old countrywoman called Lydia who is described as others see her, using dismissive words such as small, old, faded and ordinary. Lydia though has an extraordinary inner life centred on the remains of a Roman villa found on the family farm. Her crippled brother is the owner of the land but Lydia is the one who unlocks the shed protecting the villa to show its magnificent mosaic pavement to visitors. She has dedicated her life to learning about and caring for the pavement and increasingly identifies with a female figure in the mosaic. When two patronising male experts visit the villa they are dismissive of Lydia’s scholarship and easily persuade her brother to pass custodianship of the villa to a government department. Furious at losing her beloved other self in the mosaic, Lydia plots a shocking revenge. This is an account of a bizarre obsession, written with passionate intensity. It also asks pertinent questions about who owns the past.

A story written in 1935, Juggernaut, begins in a more light-hearted fashion with a popular writer called Flora Halkett on holiday in a seaside village with her niece, Primrose. Due to a badly sprained ankle, portly Flora needs to be pushed around the resort in a bath-chair. Primrose notices that one of these hooded chairs is pushed along the sea cliffs by an elderly man even in the most terrible weather. The ladies are later told that this bathchair-man no longer accepts passengers but one morning Flora does persuade him to let her into his chair – an action that places her in dreadful danger. On the face of it, this is the story of a guilty man being haunted by a woman he committed a crime against but it gradually transpires that his victim was callous and manipulative. At first Broster seems to be having fun at her own expense with her portrait of prosaic Flora as a writer of wildly improbable adventure stories. The sting in the tail is that the tormented bathchair-man seems to recognize an affinity between the dominating writer and the very unpleasant ghost who is haunting him.

My third choice is a longer story with the intriguing title of The Pestering (1932). It begins when impoverished couple, Ralph and Evadne Seaton, buy a suspiciously cheap cottage in Worcestershire called Hallows. Captain Seaton’s health was ruined during World War I and he has lost nearly all his money in poor investments. Evadne was not brought up to earn a living but she enterprisingly uses her skill at baking to turn the cottage into a teashop. The business goes well but Evadne is soon troubled by a shadowy visitor who claims that he has come about a chest. She won’t let him in but the visitor keeps coming back in different forms to reclaim something that he had hidden in the cottage. Evadne and Ralph learn that previous owners of the cottage also experienced this supernatural pestering. After some terrifying experiences, Ralph and the local doctor investigate the haunting and discover a hidden room containing a chest with a beautiful figurine inside it but the curse still isn’t broken.

In some ways The Pestering is Broster’s most traditional ghost story. For a while it looks as if Evadne will succumb to hysteria while the men save the day, but Ralph is too haunted by his experiences in the war to overcome the persistent ghost. This is a haunting which arises from an ancient crime of passion against a woman but it is modern woman Evadne who finds the courage to rescue her husband. I think the ghost in this story, by turns frightening and pathetic, is among the most memorable in all supernatural fiction. He is just one of many reasons to try the stories in From the Abyss. Until next month…