October is Ghost Month on Fantasy Reads. This year I’ve chosen to celebrate the ghostly fiction of one of my heroines – author, suffragist and Egyptologist Amelia B. Edwards (1831-1892). Edwards has become so famous as an intrepid traveller and the Godmother of British Egyptology (see her bestselling A Thousand Miles Up the Nile 1877) that her earlier career as a successful writer of novels and short stories tends to get forgotten. Some of her fiction can be downloaded for free via Project Gutenberg and a few of her ghost stories have been republished in anthologies of Victorian Ghost Stories but the easiest place to find all of her supernatural stories is in a book called The Collected Supernatural & Weird Fiction of Amelia B. Edwards. This is part of Leonaur’s Supernatural Fiction Series and has a useful introduction.
The anthology contains two novellas – Monsieur Maurice and The Discovery of the Treasure Isles – and seventeen short stories. The two novellas are very different. The first is a story of political intrigue and a protective ghost set in early 19th century Prussia and told by an elderly woman looking back on the most important events of her childhood. The second is closer to true Fantasy fiction and relates the adventures of a young ship’s captain who is tempted into sailing to the fabled Treasure Isles and exploring the remains of a mysterious civilization. An important thing to stress about Edwards’ work is that her supernatural fiction is diverse in plot, settings, style and tone. This distinguishes her from some Classic Ghost Story writers such as M.R.James ( see Fantasy Reads October 2013) whose brilliantly unnerving tales are all very similar.
I shall look at the two novellas and then pick out some of the most interesting of the short stories. The Discovery of the Treasure Isles begins like an ordinary nautical adventure as William Burton sets out on his first voyage as Captain of the Mary-Jane in 1760. During the journey between Bristol and Jamaica, the Mary-Jane encounters another ship in heavy fog. The captain of this ship, The Adventure, claims to be returning from the Treasure Isles laden with gold and jewels. Burton is shown the position of the Treasure Isles on a chart and told that these islands are unclaimed and uninhabited. From that moment, Burton is determined to abandon his voyage to Jamaica and seek the Treasures Isles instead, even though his First Mate assures him that the isles are only a legend. The young Captain does reach the isles and goes ashore on his own to explore a ruined city. After a few hours he returns with all the treasure he can carry only to find his ship deserted and decaying. Burton sets out on a grim quest to discover the fate of his crew.
This is an eerie and powerful story. The sinister atmosphere aboard The Adventure is swiftly established when Edwards tells us that its captain’s cabin was lighted by an oil-lamp swinging from the roof, like a murderer swinging in chains. The Treasure Isles with their exotic flora and fauna and long abandoned tombs and temples are brilliantly described. They contain wonderful things but Burton isn’t interested in archeological discoveries. He is there to explore, to ransack, to plunder at my pleasure. His response to finding a jewel-encrusted idol is to wrench the great diamond from its head and plant the English flag. It is often assumed that everyone in Victorian Britain approved of Empire-building but that is far from being the case. I think Edwards makes her views very clear in this story and in the punishment she inflicts on Burton, a narrator who begins the story as a naive hero and turns into a villain as greed overwhelms him.
The narrators of Edwards’ stories are usually male, which gives them more scope to wander around the world having adventures. Many of her stories were first published anonymously in magazines such as Household Words, which was edited by Charles Dickens. This freed Edwards from the expectation that as a female author she was only suited to write about the domestic sphere. Nevertheless, there does seem greater emotional depth in the few stories that do have a female narrator – such as Monsieur Maurice. In this gentle, slow-moving novella an adult world of power-struggles and assassins is seen through the innocent eyes of a little girl who befriends a lonely political prisoner. The story is infused with melancholy as we come to realize that this was the most treasured relationship of the narrator’s life. Monsieur Maurice has two characteristics which are typical of Edwards’ work – the historical and geographical background is extremely well researched and the ghost (which manifests three times) is not malevolent.
On the misleadingly Gothic cover of The Collected Supernatural & Weird Fiction of Amelia B. Edwards her short stories are described as blood-chilling. Although some of them verge on Horror (Cain), I wouldn’t go that far. I’d call them haunting – in both senses of the word. The supernatural element can be quite slight, sometimes consisting of a brief glimpse of a person at or near the time of their death (Sister Johanna’s Story, Number Three, Four Ghost Stories). Seeing someone’s fetch is one of the most common types of ghost story told as true and this gives an air of authenticity to Edwards’ tales. Other motifs from folklore which Edwards uses are ghosts of victims warning of danger (A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest) and ghosts of the murdered seeking justice (The Four-Fifteen Express and Was it an Illusion?). Few of these ghosts mean any harm to the people sensitive enough to see them, though the experience may leave mental scars. In the first of the Four Ghost Stories, a female ghost has a unique and touching reason for appearing to a young artist. Dickens was so struck by this story that he rewrote it at much greater length. Like Dickens, Edwards featured characters from all levels of society and wasn’t afraid to set ghost stories in what were then very modern settings, such as railway stations or industrial pottery kilns.
Edwards most popular ghost story in her own lifetime – The Phantom Coach – is one of the more conventional. It begins with a young man, James Murray, getting lost on a northern moor in winter during a sudden snowstorm. He is reluctantly given shelter by a reclusive scholar who is embittered by the mockery he has received for his research on ghosts. When the scholar encourages Murray to take a short-cut across the moor to catch the night mail, his motives seem suspicious. Murray has unwittingly become part of his host’s research. The tension really builds in this story and the moment when Murray realizes that he is trapped inside a perpetually repeating disaster is truly terrifying.
The Phantom Coach takes place in England but the majority of Edwards’ supernatural stories are set in Europe. Towns and landscapes in France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland are vividly described. Edwards had originally wanted to be an artist and she paints wonderfully atmospheric word-pictures of places such as a Jewish cemetery on a Venetian island (The Story of Salome) a remote monastery perched above a lake in central Italy (The Eleventh of March) or a charming walled town in the Alps (In the Confessional). In this last story a young traveller is intrigued by a monument inside a church and has a ghostly encounter in the confession-box. Like many of Edwards’ ghosts, this gaunt, wild-eyed apparition has been generated by a crime of passion.
Edwards herself seems to have had a passionate nature but her strong feelings for other women were not always reciprocated. In her stories, she wrote with intensity about loves unrequited or betrayed which lead to murder or suicide. Unusually, her star-crossed lovers are not confined to the aristocracy or the idle rich. They are very ordinary people, such as a farmer, a woodcarver, a railway engineer and a pottery painter, who each become entangled in a grand passion. These are ghost stories with emotional heft. If you want to find out more about their remarkable author there is a recent biography by Margaret C. Jones called The Adventurous Life of Amelia B.Edwards: Egyptologist, Novelist, Activist (2022). Until next month….
Geraldine