Published in 2002 (first published 1935)
194 pages
Edith Wharton was the author of more than 40 acclaimed literary works, including The Age of Innocence, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Edith described herself as having an “intense Celtic sense of the supernatural.” The Ghost-Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural, selected and introduced by Peter Haining, contains nine stories that Wharton wrote between 1893 and 1935. While they display the elegant prose of her novels, these tales revolve around supernatural manifestations (vampires, doppelgangers) made credible by Wharton’s superb storytelling skills.
What is this book about?
Readers of The Buccaneers, The House of Mirth, and The Age of Innocence may be surprised to learn that Edith Wharton, known for her elegant narrative style, described herself as someone with an “intense Celtic sense of the supernatural”. As a “ghost-feeler”, she wrote a number of chilling tales that objectify this sense of unease, even terror. With themes of vampirism, isolation and hallucination, they reflect the author’s internalized fears and her unhappy experience with marriage. Some of these nine stories appeared in magazines and one, “The Duchess at Prayer”, is published again, for the first time since the nineteenth century.
Diagnosed with typhoid fever at age of nine, Edith Wharton was beginning a long convalescence when she was given a book of ghost tales to read. Not only setting back her recovery, this reading opened up her fevered imagination to ‘a world haunted by formless horrors’. So chronic was this paranoia that she was unable to sleep in a room with any book containing a ghost story. She was even moved to burn such volumes. These fears persisted until her late twenties. She outgrew them but retained a heightened or ‘celtic’ (her term) sense of the supernatural. Wharton considered herself not ‘a ghostseer’ – the term applied to those people who have claimed to have witnessed apparitions – but rather a ‘ghostfeeler’, someone who senses what cannot be seen. This experience and ability enabled Edith Wharton to write chilling tales that objectify this sense of unease. Far removed from the comfort and urbane elegance associated with the author’s famous novels, the stories in this volume were praised by Henry James, L. P. Hartley, Graham Greene and many others.
