These ghost stories are perfect for reading in the dead of night, perhaps by candlelight or beside a blazing fire. You will find abandoned mansions, carriage rides through desolate lands, ruined castles overlooking precipices, beautiful ladies with skin too pale to be alive and lost souls who cannot bring themselves to leave this world.
A literary genre obsessed with death and the afterlife, made famous by important female novelists who lived during the reign of Queen Victoria, specialists in the tale of horror: Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Willa Cather, Vernon Lee and many others. All very skilled in creating supernatural and terrifying atmospheres, and overturning the traditional point of view of the patriarchy: in these stories, it is the men who are hysterical, paralyzed by horror.
The volume is completed by some stories by Italian authors of the time: Grazia Deledda, Matilde Serao and Luisa Saredo. Because being "queens of terror" is first of all a question of attitude and sensitivity.
The stories:
Charlotte Brontë, Napoleon and the Spectre
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Old Nurse's Tale
Dinah M. Mulock Craik, The Last House on C. Street
Rosa Mulholland, Not to be taken before going to bed
Amelia B. Edwards, The Story of Salome
Rhoda Broughton, The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth
Vernon Lee, The Adventure of Winthrop
Louisa Baldwin, Great Waters Cannot Quench Love
Violet Hunt, The Prayer
Gertrude Atherton, A Place of Passage
Willa Cather, The Grover Station Case
Luisa Saredo, The Bear's Inn
Matilde Serao, 'The little munaciello'
Grazia Deledda, A Cry in the Night
