October is Ghost Month on Fantasy Reads and this year I’m recommending the subtle ghost stories of the American author, Edith Wharton (1872-1937). Although she is more famous for literary classics such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, Wharton wrote on supernatural themes throughout her career and her last published book was Ghosts (1937) – a collection of her Ghost and Horror stories. This contains eleven stories and an intriguing author’s preface. It has often been reprinted and the paperback edition in the New York Review of Books Classics series might be a good one to choose. For a bigger selection (fifteen stories) try The Complete Supernatural Stories of Edith Wharton (Dark Chaos 2019) which is easily available in paperback or as an ebook.

Edith was born into a wealthy and well-connected New York family but spent much of her childhood in Europe. She married quite young and the marriage was not a happy one, partly due to her husband, Teddy Wharton, suffering from mental illness. After she divorced him, Edith settled permanently in France. Her inherited wealthy was largely controlled by male relatives, so it gave Edith great satisfaction to be able to earn an independent living by her writing. Although some of her novels and stories are clearly inspired by events in her own life, she remains an enigmatic personality. In one of her earliest supernatural stories – The Fulness of Life (1893) – she writes about the death and afterlife of a woman who describes herself as being like a house full of rooms, many of which have never been entered by anyone else. In spite of having struggled through Hermione Lee’s over long and over detailed biography (Edith Wharton 2007) I still feel that there are many doors in Edith’s mind which will remain forever closed to her readers.

One thing that isn’t in dispute is that Edith was a great traveller with an interest in and appreciation of many different cultures. Some of her ghost stories are set in north-eastern America but others are located in England, Italy, France or North Africa. In each story there is a strong and convincing sense of place. Edith was a frequent guest in some of the stately homes of England and she recreated such houses in two of her ghost stories – Afterward (1910) and Mr Jones (1928). She was particularly knowledgable about architecture, she published a book on The Decoration of Houses, and, like her niece Beatrix Farrand, was renowned for her skill at designing gardens. So it isn’t surprising that in some of her stories a property seems to be the leading and most memorable character. In Kerfol (1916) for example, a wealthy American who is looking to buy a house in Brittany is enchanted by the fortified manor of Kerfol with its romantically overgrown gardens and yet has a sense that the whole place is a tomb. The only obvious oddity is the absence of the promised caretakers and the presence of a silent circle of dogs but the narrator finds it too disconcerting to stay. We are later given a cruel medieval backstory to explain the haunting of Kerfol but it is the melancholy beauty of the deserted house which makes the greatest impression.

Edith belonged to an era in which wealthy people employed numerous servants and did not always treat them well. Even as an old lady officially living alone with her dogs, Edith never had less than seven servants to look after her. Like most women of her class, she complains in her letters about the difficulty of finding reliable servants and yet some of the closest relationships of her life were with long-time servants. Stories such as All Souls (1937) or A Bottle of Perrier (1926) seem to betray a deep-seated fear that downtrodden servants will one day rise up and abandon or even murder their masters, while in Mr Jones a woman who has inherited an ancient house has to struggle for dominance with the ghost of an old servant.

Yet some of Edith’s best ghost stories are sympathetically told from a servant’s point of view. An outstanding example is The Lady’s Maid’s Bell (1902). In this story a maid, Hartley, who has been seriously ill agrees to take a job looking after a delicate reclusive lady called Mrs Brympton who lives in a country house. The work is light but Hartley soon realizes that there is something very wrong with the Brympton household. Mrs Brympton is still mourning the death of her previous devoted maid. She seems to be frightened of her boorish husband but has a close relationship with a cultured neighbour. The story hints at the cruel abuse that can go on behind the closed doors of the rich and respectable. The house is haunted by the ghost of the previous maid who still answers her lady’s bell when Mrs Brympton is in danger. Hartley tries to interpret the ghost’s warnings but neither of the maids can avert a tragedy. The story doesn’t spell out the exact course of events and that is typical of Edith’s elusive style.

In one of her most famous stories – Pomegranate Seed (1931) – nominally all that happens is that a series of letters are found on a hall table at the New York house of a Mr Kenneth Ashby. His second wife, Charlotte, observes the mixture of dread and fascination which the arrival of each of the mysterious letters seems to cause her husband and realizes that their happy marriage is deteriorating. The first Mrs Ashby has been dead for some time but Charlotte begins to suspect that the letters might be from her. She and her mother-in-law try to rescue Kenneth from his obsession with the letters but some people are unable to escape from former toxic relationships. Edith’s original editor asked her to change this story so that the ending was more specific and some kind of gaslighting explanation was provided. She rightly refused and published elsewhere. Edith thought that reading should be a creative act and she wanted her readers’ primed imaginations to fill in the missing parts of the story. This technique certainly works on me. I’ve always found Pomegranate Seed to be one of the most haunting and troubling of ghost stories.

Another of her stories, The Eyes (1910), begins in a very conventional way with a group of men talking about ghostly encounters after dinner. Their jovial host, Mr Culwin surprises the younger men by admitting to a supernatural or hallucinatory experience of his own. At a few points in his life he has been haunted by a pair of eyes. Edith describes these detached eyes in repulsive detail (their swollen lids dropped across the little watery bulbs rolling loose in their orbits, and the puff of flesh making a muddy shadow underneath) while allowing passages in Mr Culwin’s frivolous narrative to hint at the cruelty of his true character. Culwin is in denial about the nature of this haunting but by the end of his story at least one of his listeners does understand. Uncertainty about recognizing ghosts is a recurring theme in Edith’s work. At least two of the stories – Miss Mary Pask (1925) and Bewitched (1925) are more horrible if there is no ghost.

In Afterward, wealthy American couple, Mr and Mrs Boyne, are delighted to hear that the English country house they are planning to buy is haunted even though they are warned that the ghost will only be recognized in retrospect. The Boynes seem a contented and charming couple but everything begins to change when they glimpse a visitor walking up the drive who doesn’t arrive at the house. Mrs Boyne thinks little of it at first and she has never troubled to enquire about the details of her husband’s recent increase in wealth. Mr Boyne it turns out has good reason to be haunted by his past and Mrs Boyne will learn the true cost of the privileged lifestyle she enjoys. This is a story that could be about Edith herself. In the preface to Ghosts, she suggests that the teller of supernatural tales should be well frightened in the telling. Edith wrote stories that frightened herself and they continue to frighten and intrigue modern readers. Wishing you a safe but eerie Hallowe’en…

Geraldine

October 2024