The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

I adore Edith Wharton and have read and loved the cream of her books set in old New York – The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, The House of Mirth, The New York Stories, Old New York, as well as a couple of novellas set in New England such as Ethan Frome & Summer. Wanting to read another Wharton, it felt apt to try her Ghost Stories, particularly in October to get in the mood for Halloween.

Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories is a brilliant collection of eerie, chilling tales where she uses the medium of spectral visions to explore the familiar terrain of her themes that are so central to her New York novels and stories.  

The first story “The Lady Maid’s Bell” is a masterclass in narrative tension, a tale of isolation and loneliness, an unhappy marriage, and devotion. Told from a first-person perspective, we meet Alice Hartley who has just recovered from tuberculosis and is desperately seeking employment as a maid. After many failed attempts, a friend refers her to the pale and solitary Mrs Brympton, mistress of an isolated house tucked into the countryside. Hartley is unafraid of solitude, but the gloominess of the house and its surroundings begins to weigh heavy on her, the burden somewhat eased when she gets the chance to run errands for her mistress. Hartley immediately takes a liking to Mrs Brympton, a young and kind woman who is good to her staff and who in turn is fiercely loyal to her. And yet, Hartley’s feelings of unease are not entirely quietened. When the lady maid’s bell begins to ring in the dead of the night, and Alice witnesses the ghost of her mistress’s former beloved maid, Alice is scared out of her wits. This is a very subtly rendered tale where Wharton refuses to offer straightforward explanations and yet drops hints along the way for the reader to get a sense of what might be happening.

The next story, “The Eyes”, takes place in the cozy confines of the protagonist Andrew Culwin’s library, where after a sumptuous dinner, a group of men gathers in front of the fire for coffee, cigars, and conversation. A tale by one of the men, a narrative of a “strange personal visitation” puts the group in the mood for ghost stories. Consequently, each of the men provides an account of their “supernatural impressions”, all except their host Andrew Culwin, the kind of man unlikely to have witnessed the supernatural given his scientific background. And yet, Culwin has a story to tell, the details of which are subsequently fleshed out. As Culwin begins to recount his tale, some details and patterns emerge – the first appearance of those disconcerting ethereal eyes that stare at him in the dark most likely fuelled by him deserting his cousin who had begun to admire and depend on him; and later on we are given a detailed narrative of his troubled relationship with Noyes, an apprentice of his who displays no talent for the arts but whose beauty prevents Culwin from expressing his frank views, once again conjuring up the spectre of those eyes that seem to be judging him. This is a story that dwells on moral guilt, the burden of self-reflection, and the unflinching gaze of one’s conscience.

One of my favourite stories in the collection, “Afterward”, is a superb tale of guilt, moral failings, the repercussions of ill-gotten wealth, and women suffering because of the terrible misdeeds of men. “Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it” are the ominous opening words spoken by Alida Stair, a friend of the protagonists Ned and Mary Boyne. The Boynes, having relocated to England, consult Alida for a potential house they can buy, but they desire to live in one that is as old as possible with the least amount of modern amenities (“I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was thoroughly uncomfortable”). When Alida suggests Lyng at Dorsetshire, the Boynes’ interest is immediately piqued. It appears to meet most of the couple’s expectations and the fact that it’s graced by a ghost is the icing on the cake. But those opening lines accentuate the striking feature of this spectral being – that one won’t know it’s a ghost “not till long, long afterward.”

Gradually, the Boynes settle into their new abode, and are content with this welcome change in their life – a life of leisure and solitude, a much-needed respite, particularly after the “soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West” and all the tumult and pressures of Ned Boyne’s career as an engineer. He has amply benefitted from the American ideals of individual enterprise and capitalism, and with sufficient wealth now amassed has called it a day. And yet that gain may carry a price for which Mary might have to pay. Slowly but surely Mary Boyne perceives an unmistakable yet subtle change in the air; a phenomenon she can’t quite put a finger to.

The life had probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an intenser memory.

Mary is quite sure that something is bothering her husband, some secret that he has kept from her, whose significance centers on a man from Ned’s past. Mary wonders whether Ned’s brooding has been amplified by this ghost that Alida had spoken of, or whether the presence of a stranger on their property one day hints at something more portentous. 

And thence she was thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one’s greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing on the case, since, when one did see a ghost at Lyng, one did not know it. “Not till long afterward,” Alida Stair had said.

It’s a wonderfully haunting, skillfully woven tale that leaves the reader with a sense of unease and apprehension.

The thread of women having to bear the brunt of their men’s egos and horrific actions is palpable in the story “Kerfol” too. At the start of the story, we are introduced to two friends – the unnamed narrator and his friend, Lanrivain. Lanrivain is trying to persuade our narrator to buy the Kerfol house which he calls the most romantic house in Brittany and the sort that will work for our narrator’s solitary nature.  

Almost immediately, we get an inkling of the mystery and menace that engulfs our narrator as he makes his way towards the old mansion that is marked by an avenue, the like of which he had never seen before – ”If ever I saw an avenue that unmistakably led to something, it was the avenue at Kerfol. My heart beat a little as I began to walk down it.” There’s not a soul on the premises, but he sees a pack of dogs, of various breeds, whose strange behaviour decidedly unnerves him. When he recounts this bizarre incident to Lanrivain’s wife, she confirms that that those dogs are the ghosts of Kerfol. What follows subsequently is an engrossing tale of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Yves de Cornault known as the lord of Kerfol, an increasingly jealous and possessive man exerting his control over his young wife Anne. She is his second wife, and with the lord of Kerfol being away on business for most of the time, Anne is increasingly desolate and lonely. Yves showers her with expensive gifts to keep her happy and while outwardly she expresses her delight, inwardly she feels increasingly empty. It is only when Yves presents to her a dog that Anne’s spirits are genuinely lifted, she finally has a companion to bring her joy in those formless days stretching endlessly before her.  And then, Yves mysteriously dies, Anne is charged with the crime, and an illicit affair is insinuated.

“The Triumph of Night” is another atmospheric tale of money and exploitation that begins during the deepening of winter where we see a solitary man, our protagonist Faxon, trying to make his way to a place called Weymore. 

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. Dark, searching and sword-like, it alternately muffled and harried its victim, like a bull-fighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts. This analogy brought home to the young man the fact that he himself had no cloak, and that the overcoat in which he had faced the relatively temperate air of Boston seemed no thicker than a sheet of paper on the bleak heights of Northridge.

Faxon has just accepted the post of secretary, and when he lands at the Northridge railway station, he realises with a sinking feeling that his hostess has failed to send a sleigh for him. Faxon has no choice but to trudge through the snowy drifts, the biting wind wailing all around him, all the while ruminating on how best to address the situation. Miraculously, he soon hears the tinkling of bells harbouring the arrival of two sleighs. Alas, these are not the sleighs of Weymore, yet its young occupant Rainer makes an offer that Faxon just can’t refuse. It turns out that Rainer is staying with his wealthy uncle John Livingstone, a man renowned for his money, politics, charities, and hospitality, and Rainer takes the liberty to invite Faxon to their mansion as a guest. There Faxon inadvertently witnesses not only the signing of a will which seems a tad dubious but also an apparition that appears as a replica of the uncle, a spectral sight that only Faxon sees and which terrifies him intensely.

“Bewitched” is a suspenseful story of religion and old, primitive folklore set in the icy wastes and the claustrophobic boundaries of a desolate village. When the story opens, a group of taciturn men which includes a priest are on their way to meet Mrs Rutledge, a no-nonsense woman with a confounding problem for which she needs the advice of these men. The problem pertains to her husband Saul Rutledge who has been bewitched by the ghost of a woman he was once engaged to and is visibly distressed by her appearance. Since this woman happens to be the dead daughter of one of these men, her account not only makes them incredulous but also incites anger. It is only when Saul Rutledge makes a dramatic entry does his ghostly pallor and wasted appearance lend some credence to Mrs Rutledge story. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and at Mrs Rutledge’s insistence, the men decide to witness this meeting for themselves, but without making themselves known. At the moment, the group arrives at the scene in question, by the isolated Lamer’s pond, they are shocked to find the prints of a barefooted woman in the snow.

The snow had ceased, and a green sunset was spreading upward into the crystal sky. A stinging wind barbed with ice-flakes caught them in the face on the open ridges, but when they dropped down into the hollow by Lamer’s pond the air was as soundless and empty as an unswung bell.

“Mr Jones” dwells on the themes of patriarchal control and dominance both real and ghostly and is once again set in an isolated country manor. When Lady Jane Lynke unexpectedly inherits Bells, a beautiful country estate, she is immediately enchanted by the place and sets about making the house her home. But she never imagined she would have to deal with the largely absent but obstinate Mr Jones, a  caretaker who seems to lord over the place, whose permission is required for any changes to be made to the house, and who instills fear in the housekeeper and house-maid who dare not challenge him. But this house is haunted by a notorious history once again centered on a domineering husband and his helpless wife, and while Mr Jones is hell-bent on ensuring that this unsavoury past remains hidden, he does not reckon with Lady Jane’s persistence in getting to the bottom of things.

In “Pomegranate Seed”, the protagonist Charlotte Ashby is disturbed by the regular arrival of mysterious letters in a grey envelope, always with the same faint handwriting, which suggests the assurance of a man, and yet is feminine. What further disconcerts Charlotte is that every time these letters arrive, her husband Kenneth Ashby, is noticeably distressed by them, reflected in his curt manner and the distant look on his face giving the impression that his mind is elsewhere. We glean details of her marriage to Kenneth Ashby, a happy union by all counts and yet now clouded because of these strange letters, the content of which Ashby refuses to divulge. We also learn that Ashby, a lawyer, is a widower whose marriage to Charlotte has seemingly healed the grief he felt at the death of his first wife, Elsie Ashby. So sure she is of her place in Kenneth’s heart that Charlotte even agrees to move into the very house that Kenneth had shared with Elsie. To further reinforce the fact that Charlotte is now the mistress of the house, Elsie’s portrait is moved from his library to his children’s bedroom. And yet, it gradually becomes apparent that Kenneth hasn’t entirely forgotten Elsie and that her ghost continues to haunt him, nearly driving his marriage to Charlotte over the edge. This is another story in the collection where the second wife has been dealt a cruel hand of fate and must grapple with her husband’s shadowy past over which she has no control.

Bone-chilling silence permeates “All Souls”, another sinister tale set in an isolated country mansion in the depths of winter…

“…a quiet steady snow. It was still falling, with a business-like regularity, muffling the outer world in layers on layers of thick white velvet, and intensifying the silence within. A noiseless world – were people so sure that absence of noise was what they wanted?”  

Recently widowed, Sara Clayburn, a long-term resident of Whitegates, their country home, refuses to relocate to the bustling metropolises of Boston or New York on the death of her husband, preferring to continue where she is. Mrs Clayburn is an energetic, practical woman, unafraid of solitude, and with a devoted staff at her beck and call, the idea of staying put at Whitegates is particularly appealing. But that changes one evening on All Souls Eve, when on her walk back home, Mrs Clayburn runs into a stranger, a woman she has never met before. This fact itself surprises Mrs Clayburn although she promptly forgets about it, and in her haste to get back, slips and fractures her leg. Confined to her bed, Mrs Clayburn is unhappy and in pain, but there is a greater shock in store for her the next morning when she discovers that she is all alone in the house and her staff has simply vanished. The unbearable stillness and silence gnaws at her and the usually rational Mrs Clayburn with her cool and calm demeanour is utterly terrified by these strange turn of events.

It had a quality she had never been aware of in any other silence, as though it were not merely an absence of sound, a thin barrier between the ear and the surging murmur of life just beyond, but an impenetrable substance made out of the world-wide cessation of all life and all movement. Yes, that was what laid a chill on her: the feeling that there was no limit to this silence, no outer margin, nothing beyond it.

Each of these eleven superbly crafted stories exhibits the quintessential elements of a ghost story – spooky locations such as old houses and remote mansions, ghostly apparitions and shadowy figures, unexplained phenomena that ratchet up the tension and suspense, murky backstories that hint at a tragedy, betrayal or moral failings, vivid imagery with its evocative depiction of icy, snow-laden landscapes or the gloom of autumnal afternoons heavy with rain and fading light, a sufficient sprinkling of ambiguity that leaves some of these stories open to interpretation, the literal and spiritual isolation of its protagonists, and an overall fear of the unknown that adds to the collection’s narrative power.

These forays into the otherworldly display Wharton’s flair for conjuring up atmospheric and psychological astute tales that delve into the uncanny and the supernatural. Women feature predominantly in this collection leading rather restricted lives. Often at the mercy of men, they are either physically confined or emotionally alienated and kept in the dark about many things but must still confront and navigate the consequences of their men’s nebulous actions and wrongdoings.

Besides the ghosts lurking on these pages, the richness and allure of these stories are further accentuated by the complexity of themes lacing them such as moral corruption, greed, domestic strife, control, entrapment, and abuse; themes that typically form the core of her New York stories but also explored in these ghost stories in a singularly innovative way. The spectral apparitions or ghostly presences that manifest themselves are the product of moral dilemmas and inner conflicts, often showing us how the past comes back to haunt the present.

None of Wharton’s stories are downright frightening, but they are deeply unsettling throbbing with unknown dangers, unexplained fears, and a deep sense of foreboding. Not all of these apparitions are necessarily nocturnal, and a couple of stories are particularly disquieting because the ghosts appear in broad daylight.

All in all, this is a remarkable collection of ghost stories from Edith Wharton, and I’ll leave you with a quote from her own Introduction which reveals the essence of ghosts…

“Do you believe in ghosts? is the pointless question often addressed by those who are incapable of feeling ghostly influences to I will not say the ghost-seer, always a rare bird, but the ghost-feeler, the person sensible of invisible currents of being in certain places and at certain hours.

The celebrated reply (I forget whose): ‘No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them,’ is much more than the cheap paradox it seems to many. To ‘believe,’ in that sense, is a conscious act of the intellect, and it is in the warm darkness of the prenatal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with the gift of seeing.”

No Love Lost: Selected Novellas – Rachel Ingalls

Last year, I read the brilliant Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls – a tale of the disintegration of a marriage, love and sexual freedom, grief and loss, friendship and betrayal, and the re-invention of a woman having hit rock bottom, and that novella whetted my appetite for more of her work. I was, therefore, thrilled when Faber released a collection of her novellas in a single edition, and I’m glad to say my expectations were met.

No Love Lost is a wonderful collection of eight novellas that have all the hallmarks of Ingalls’s magical, subversive writing à la Mrs Caliban, and yet each is surprising and distinct in its own way.

In “Blessed Art Thou” one of the protagonists, Brother Anselm has an ethereal visitation from the angel Gabriel with the two engaging in an erotic, one-night stand. Brother Anselm subsequently becomes pregnant, changing into a woman and this strange transformation sends ripples throughout their community of monks, exposing the rigid hierarchical structures and deep rifts within the Order. While Brother Anselm is unsettled by this mystical encounter, he is also filled with a sense of contentment and longs to confess to someone. That turns out to be Brother Francis, a benevolent, relatively progressive senior monk. Once the other elderly monks – Brother Frederick and Brother Adrian – get wind of these developments, all hell breaks loose leading to a string of fierce debates between them as to how to best tackle this situation without rupturing the seemingly solid foundations of their faith. Frederick is disgusted by the immorality of it, afraid of the bad influence likely to befall the younger, more impressionable monks. Adrian with his unforgiving, extremist views insists “This is not a miracle. It’s an abnormality. Brother Anselm is a freak, not a phenomenon.” 

As the discussions around Brother Anselm’s miraculous pregnancy and physical transformation reach fever-pitch, Brother Anselm, himself, is gripped by an alarming sense of danger, of being violated and caught up in the frenzy and fissures engulfing the powers that be. This a superb tale that explores themes such as bodily autonomy, tolerance, the nature of priesthood and the need to remain relevant, conservative versus modern values, and the ostracization of outsiders.

The next novella and my favourite “In the Act” is a wonderfully bizarre and comic tale of a toxic marriage that unravels and culminates in a highly unconventional, should I say, threesome. We meet Helen, a housewife, married to the dominating cad Edgar. When the story opens, we learn that twice a week, Helen attends adult education classes so that Edgar “could have a completely quiet house for his work, or his thinking, or whatever it was.” That “whatever it was” means that there is more to his need for solitude than meets the eye. Edgar’s sanctuary is his attic cum laboratory, a place out of bounds even to his wife. She is forbidden from entering it and even his insistence on her bi-weekly absences borders on the extreme. Helen, though, in a fit of rebellion enters the attic and discovers his secret; a discovery that makes her livid. It turns out that Edgar has created a real-life sex doll called Dolly and Helen is deeply offended by this (“She’d seen enough. She was quivering with rage, shame and the need for revenge”).

When she thought about wearing herself out doing the shopping and cooking and scrubbing, she prickled all over with a sense of grievance. She’d been slaving away for years, just so he could run up to the attic every evening and keep his secrets. And the boys were turning into the same kind as their father: what they wanted too was someone menial to provide services for them. And then they could spend their lives playing.

She saw herself as a lone, victimized woman beleaguered by selfish men. Her anger gave her a courage she wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Helen confronts Edgar and demands he build a male sex doll for her and the plot further thickens when a thief called Ron steals Dolly from the locker where Helen has kept her hidden as a ploy to blackmail Edgar for her own ends. Things get complicated when Ron falls in love with Dolly setting the stage for a hilarious confrontation between the three. This is black comedy at its finest, a novella that explores the nuances of power play within a marriage, infidelity, and a wronged woman’s thirst for rebellion and revenge.

Edgar had done all that, she thought – he’d been driven to it, because she wasn’t enough for him. She obviously hadn’t been good enough in bed, either, otherwise he wouldn’t have needed such a blatant type as compensation for her deficiencies. Her only success had been the children. She should really give up.

She caught herself just in time. She fought hard against despair, whipping her indignation up again. If things were bad, you should never crumple. Do something about it no matter what. She stoked her fury until she thought she could do any- thing, even break up her marriage, if she had to. She was too mad to care whether she wrecked her home or not. Let him suffer for a change, she thought.

The thread of toxic relationships runs through “Friends in a Country” as well where couple Jim and Lisa are invited to a party thrown by a friend’s friends who they’ve never met. Jim and Lisa are driving in the gloomy dark surrounded by a dense, encroaching fog, and they are utterly lost. Carefully navigating their way through an unfamiliar terrain, filled with creeping dread, the two finally stumble upon a well-lit, cozy mansion and their relief knows no bounds at having finally reached their destination. Except when a string of uncanny occurrences begin to unfold, doubts emerge about whether they are indeed at the right place. The food is unpalatable, the guests seem to be part of a weird cult and in an unnerving incident, Lisa discovers an army of frogs in the bathroom. Lisa prepares to escape but finds herself thwarted at every turn, while Jim begins to be influenced and drawn in by the aura of this strange band of people. Slowly, cracks begin to appear in their relationship as Lisa begs that they leave this place immediately while Jim refuses to take her seriously or pay much attention to her misgivings.

“Something to Write Home About” is another disquieting tale about marital problems, mental illness, and denial unfurling in the mesmeric, haunting beauty of the Greek islands where the blue skies and dazzling sun mask the darker overtones that mark the story. As John and Amy roam the plethora of islands on their honeymoon, soaking up the art, culture, and history of these places, the reader notices an odd detail in this seemingly idyllic picture – Amy seems obsessed with buying postcards and writing on them wherever they go and irrespective of the fact that they’ve already bought many. Clearly, all is not well, and John appears to be in denial, refusing to acknowledge the signs of his wife’s mental illness and obsessive behaviour.

The set-up of the protagonist being lured into and trapped in a cultish society forms the kernel of three of the novellas; we see some similar elements in all three and yet they unspool in different ways. Besides “Friends in the Country” outlined above where we see this scenario play out, the other novella imbibing this quality is “Inheritance”, an unsettling, dark tale of wealth, privilege, family feuds, questionable legacies, and fascist ideologies. We meet Carla, who is beset by a gaping sense of loss after the death of her grandmother and is suddenly gripped by the urge to meet her mother’s side of the family, a lineage she is unaware of. She finally meets a stream of eccentric, rich great-aunts, proud of their German heritage, and who ply her with their murky family history where the women’s skins turn precious pearls into scorched objects. One of the great-aunts thrusts on her the task of finding the “great treasure”, the details of which remain opaque, and Carla goes on a quest to look for it accompanied by the family’s accountant with whom she also has an affair. Their search takes them to South America where they meet the other branch of the family led by Uncle Theo whose conservative, fascist viewpoints greatly disturb her. Once again Carla finds herself in a situation from which she has no clue how to extricate herself.

In “I See a Long Journey” we meet the protagonist Flora who is married to James, a man much older than her; a union that enmeshes her in an immensely wealthy family leading a comfortable, sheltered life. After a flurry of missteps and hiccups that overwhelm her while struggling to adjust to her new life, Flora gradually begins to settle in. But she’s tortured by a growing sense of emptiness at not being able to do something worthwhile that will give her a sense of purpose. She has everything and yet she feels she has nothing. Fear also grips her – their status and position in society attract unsavoury elements and make them vulnerable to aggression. While Flora is fond of her husband, she is also infatuated with their driver cum bodyguard Michael and she insists on his presence wherever they travel. When the couple go on a holiday to an Asian destination to soothe Flora’s increasingly fraught nerves, Flora is entranced by her encounter with a child-like, primal goddess setting the scene for an ominous finale.

The collection is rounded off by the titular story “No Love Lost” in which we are presented with a dystopian, ravaged landscape in the aftermath of war. Husband and wife return to their damaged home after the end of this brutal conflict, and realise they’ll need to start from scratch. Miraculously, their house is still standing, but the damage is immense and a lot of work is required. The man has lost an arm in the war, now replaced with a hook, and has managed to find work doing hard labour. The wife is in charge of the house and bringing up the children, whom the man fears have turned wild and whose future he worries about. This is a grim situation where refugees are abundant and houses are coaxed to shelter them in return for food rations from the authorities. We are told of a quarry nearby, a cesspit where things and even people are unceremoniously discarded, a hell-hole teeming with drugs, crime, and growing threats of violence. Meanwhile, the relationship between husband and wife begins to fray fuelled by the stress and pressures of everyday living. Things come to a boil when they are entrusted with the care of an old woman who stubbornly refuses to die while the house reeks of her presence; a catalyst that further deepens the rift in their marriage leading to a macabre turn of events.

The only story that didn’t work for me was the rather lenghthy “Theft” where a man and his brother-in-law are imprisoned; the man having stolen a loaf of bread driven by sheer hunger. At the prison, they strike up a stream of conversations with the jailer called Homer and there’s a biblical, fable-like quality to this set-up. I must admit, it’s the only story that I found quite dry and boring and consequently left unfinished. But I’m considering giving it another try later if I’m in the mood.

Overall, Ingalls’s strength lies in her ability to use surreal, subversive elements and situations to explore some of the most relevant topics of today. Fractured relationships, poisonous marriages, control, authority, singling out outsiders, the tussle between traditional and modern ideas, the deterioration of humanity, the noxious facets of wealth and privilege, and the troubling power of cults, are some of the themes that reverberate throughout this collection.

Ingalls’s use of imagery is particularly striking conveying an atmosphere of menace and horror – a claustrophobic impenetrable fog, an isolated country mansion imbued with a Gothic feel, frogs lashing like rain on the car windshield, a war-torn vista throbbing with delinquency and the spectre of violence, bodily transgressions, disconcertingly real man-made dolls complete with lavish ceremonies and Biblical references display Ingalls’ vibrant and singular imagination.

Ingalls’ writing is sparse and economical; the kind of brevity that creates a sense of urgency and intensity in her narratives. Well-paced, dialogue-heavy, and smartly written, these novellas often take the reader into unexpected territories as the lines between the real and the strange begin to blur. It adds depth as well as an element of unpredictability and a dream-like quality to her writing and heightens the overall pull and allure of the collection. If you loved Mrs Caliban, then this compendium of novellas is definitely worth exploring.

Women in a Dystopian World: Seven Stellar Books

Last month, I wrote two themed posts on Sisters in Literature and Female Friendship in Fiction, where I showcased ten favourite books in each piece. Here, I have focused on some dystopian literature featuring women in either central or secondary roles, and written by women. Some are quite well-known and many others need to reach a wider audience. Barren vistas, pandemics, environmental disasters, isolation, captivity, and control form the kernel of these books in terms of theme and content. I’m generally not much of a fan of dystopian fiction, but I thought these seven books were particularly excellent. 

So without further ado, here is the list. You can read the detailed reviews on each by clicking on the title links…

THE WALL by Marlen Haushofer (Translated from German by Shaun Whiteside)

This is a powerful book about survival, self-renewal, and the capacity to love. While holidaying in an Alpine hunting lodge, our unnamed narrator wakes up one day to an unimaginable catastrophe. She is possibly the last living person although she is yet to grasp the significance of this.

Against such a terrifying backdrop, the bulk of the book is all about how the narrator fights for survival and ekes out a living in the forest. The deep bond that she forms with her coterie of animals is very sensitively portrayed and is one of the highlights of the book. And there are some wonderful passages on existentialism and the meaning of life, love and caring, and the evolution of the physical and metaphysical selves. Ultimately, the narrator’s strength of will to forge ahead is what makes the book so beautiful.

I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jacqueline Harpman (Translated from French by Ros Schwartz)

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is a wonderfully strange, surreal novel of entrapment and survival set in a place that may or may not be planet Earth. It’s a bleak but powerful book in the way it explores the concepts of humanity and community when placed against a dystopian backdrop.

The plot of this novel is fairly simple. A group of forty women of all ages lives imprisoned in an underground cage outside which armed guards keep an eye on them continuously. These women have no idea of the catastrophic event that led to their capture and have a vague recollection of the lives they led before imprisonment. A sense of apathy has settled over them as they see no possibility of ever being set free, or of ever gaining any knowledge about how they got here and what fate has in store for them. The youngest prisoner in this motley group is a young girl, our unnamed narrator, referred to as “child” by the other women.

But then one day, an ear-shattering siren goes off. All of a sudden, the guards disappear, vanishing into thin air. Our narrator quickly takes charge, frees the other women, and the group in sheer trepidation climbs up the stairs out into the open, welcoming and embracing their newfound freedom. 

But are they really free? This is a beautiful novel, equally devastating and hopeful, and one that sizzles with compassion and humanity as the characters grapple with dwindling hopes and mounting fear, frustrated by the illusion of freedom that gives them a window of optimism but fails to completely transform their lives.

STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel

I read Station Eleven in March 2020 when the Covid pandemic had just begun and lockdown looked imminent, especially since the premise of the book was eerily familiar to what we were witnessing then. The novel centers around the Georgian Flu disease that sweeps over America, its aftermath, and the events leading to it, all the while focusing on a certain group of characters.

Station Eleven is excellent, but to label it a science fiction novel would in some sense be inaccurate. Yes, the central premise is certainly dystopian – a lethal virus contaminates a world and destroys humanity. But the author is much more interested in the human angle of this development and how people adapt to two different realities rather than describing the minute details of an altered world. It is what makes the novel very rich, immersive, and absorbing.

THE MEMORY POLICE by Yoko Ogawa (Translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder)

At its very core, the theme in The Memory Police centers on disappearance and memory loss. Our narrator is a woman earning her living by writing novels on an unnamed island. It’s a place where the Memory Police at regular intervals make things and all memories associated with them disappear. As soon as these objects are made to vanish, most residents easily forget them and no longer recall that they ever existed. But there are those who cannot forget. Thus, the Memory Police’s mandate also involves tracking and hunting down these people after which they are never heard of again.

In the present, our narrator is working on a novel and provides updates on its progress to her editor R. Upon realising that R cannot erase his memories, she decides she has to hide him before he is found out by the police. Ogawa’s prose is haunting, quiet, reflective, and yet suffused with enough tension to keep the reader heavily interested. 

 ICE by Anna Kavan

Anna Kavan’s Ice is a book where the boundaries between fiction, science fiction, and fantasy are blurred. When the novel opens, we are in a stark, desolate and surreal territory. We don’t know where or when the novel is set, it’s possibly in a frozen dystopian world. Our male unnamed narrator is traversing the icy roads driven by a growing urge to find the girl he loves who continues to remain elusive. The disorienting nature of the book is precisely its strength, it’s as if we are in a dream where anything can seem real, and yet it is not. Kavan’s prose soars and shimmers – the world she has painted is cold, bleak, and desolate; gradually being crushed by ice, on the brink of an apocalypse.

TENTACLE by Rita Indiana (Translated from Spanish by Achy Obejas)

Called a “post-apocalyptic odyssey” by the Guardian, Tentacle is such a difficult book to summarize, so I won’t attempt except to urge you to read it. It’s a wonderful, roller coaster of a novel that displays Indiana’s brilliant and unique imagination, as she effortlessly packs in big topics such as time travel, environmental disasters, gender fluidity, and art history in just 130 high-octane pages. For more colour on the plot, you can read my write-up by clicking on the title.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood

Unsurprisingly, the famous book in this bunch, but whose themes are disturbingly relevant even today. Atwood takes her time in setting up the story – the structure of Gilead, and the characters that people this oppressive regime, their roles and functions. Gilead is a tyrannical system, where rules have to be strictly followed to the tee. Men mostly control women. But even within each gender group, there are tiers. Meanwhile, handmaids have a role to perform. If the wife can’t conceive, there is a Handmaid assigned to the Commander, and her role is to breed children. Handmaids wear the red dress with the white headgear. A story told through the viewpoint of Offred, handmaid and protagonist, this is a novel about rebellion, state control of a woman’s body, and the power dynamics between men and women.

And that’s it! I enjoyed writing this post, and welcome any more recommendations from you.

A Helping Hand – Celia Dale

Celia Dale is a new author to me and now a wonderful discovery thanks to Daunt Books’ recent reissue of A Helping Hand. As I write about this terrific book, another of her titles just published titled Sheep’s Clothing is on its way to me.

It’s Christmas time, a festive season marked by cheer and good company, but one of the novel’s central characters Mrs Fingal is all alone, confined to her room, about halfway through the book. And yet she brims with excitement, at the prospect of presents she is expecting from her niece Lena who hasn’t kept in touch with her for a while, and the Evans couple Josh and Maisie at whose home she has been residing. But when the time to open her presents finally dawns, Mrs Fingal is hit with a crushing sense of disappointment. Lena’s present is cheap with not much thought gone into it, and Mrs Fingal finds Josh and Maisie’s presents equally unremarkable. Mrs Fingal is reduced to a state of tears but is too proud to show her distress, yet the sadness within her is complete. Having led such a rich and vibrant life with her husband, waves of nostalgia often washing upon her, Mrs Fingal finds the reality of her now shrunken circumstances too hard to bear.

It is claustrophobic, chilling scenes such as these that make A Helping Hand so deliciously compelling – a brilliant tale of lies, greed and deception, loneliness, and the heartaches of growing old.

There’s something sinister about Josh and Maisie Evans, the novel’s other protagonists, in the opening pages. An elderly woman, Aunt Flo, lodging with them, has just expired, and the two are seen going through her papers and the contents of her bag. What also lends an eerie air to this chapter is the sense that Aunt Flo was not really related to them in any way and that Josh and Maisie had murky motives for taking her on.

The next chapter then cuts to the Italian beaches, glorious days of summer brimming with sun, sand, bracing air, and a surfeit of tourists. Capitalising on the legacy left behind by Aunt Flo, Josh and Maisie are vacationing in Italy staying in a mid-range pensione. Creepy Josh spends his time ogling at the women on the beach as well as the waitresses at the pensione, but Maisie appears to have made new friends. Enter the elder lady Cynthia Fingal (a wealthy widow close to turning 80) and her niece Lena who are staying in a much luxurious and expensive hotel. Mrs Fingal is pretty fit and active considering her age, but she is stubborn, willful, and opinionated driving Lena over the edge.

Soon, this unlikely set of four people begins bonding. In Josh, Mrs Fingal finds a sympathetic and attentive listener, while Maisie adroitly befriends Lena lulling her into confessional chats about her life or the alleged lack of it. It soon transpires that Lena is Mrs Fingal’s niece but only by marriage; she is no blood relation of Mrs Fingal, a point the old lady keeps harping about to Josh. We learn how after the death of her sister Peggy, Mrs Fingal has no choice but to shift in with Lena; the latter is resentful of Cynthia’s unwelcome presence that cramps her style.

A proud woman for whom her independence is critical, Mrs Fingal finds Lena rude, uncaring, and a killjoy. The fact that she latches on to Josh during their Italian holiday shows how Mrs Fingal longs for a man’s attention; she misses her husband who passed away long ago. Josh is adept at outwardly showing an interest in Mrs Fingal’s chatter even if his mind is elsewhere, and Mrs Fingal feels flattered and complicit in their companionship. Meanwhile, Lena unburdens herself to Maisie; she complains about the impossibility of caring for Mrs Fingal which has brought her social life to a dead end; the two living together has left no room for privacy which Lena yearns for. To Josh and Maisie in separate conversations, it is quite clear that Cynthia Fingal and Lena are pretty unhappy with each other, and thereby arises a ripe situation for the pair to take advantage of.

Offering to accommodate Mrs Fingal, and lend “a helping hand” if you will, at the Evans’s suggestion Mrs Fingal soon comes to stay with the couple as a paying guest; Josh and Maisie have a spare room now that Aunt Flo is dead, and Lena is finally relieved to wash her hands off Mrs Fingal. At first, the old lady thrives on her sense of independence (she is paying for her room) and her freedom (free from Lena), and looks forward to those afternoon conversations with Josh carried over from their Italian sojourn to these drab surroundings of their English suburban residence. But slowly and very subtly, Maisie through her clipped efficiency and psychological manipulation disorients Mrs Fingal who gradually begins to lose her sense of self besieged by a lingering notion that her mind is playing tricks on her.

It took Mrs Fingal some time to do everything: to make up her mind to get out of bed and then actually to do so, for her joints got painful in the night. It was, of course, kind of Mrs E. to make her stay in bed; but at Lena’s she used to get up as soon as she felt like it, with the whole day ahead of her full of small tasks, tidying, washing-up, little trips to the shops, even if she grumbled about them and certainly got no thanks. Here there was so little she had to do that it took twice as long to do it, and became twice as important.

Celia Dale’s excellent character sketches showcase a perceptive mind. Josh is quite the creep with his repulsive male gaze but is subservient to Maisie, in their relationship; she is the one who wears the pants. Indeed, Dale excels in her chilling portrayal of Maisie, a very capable nurse lacking bedside manners; her demeanour suggests a readiness to be kind and caring, when the reality is anything but, her cruelty masked by an air of civility and propriety. She is quite the terror not just to Josh who dare not challenge her, but even to Mrs Fingal who is afraid of her but helpless to do anything about it. Maisie also displays a penchant for smooth-talking when it suits her, particularly in the way she keeps Lena in the dark about Mrs Fingal’s time with them.

Dale also superbly plays with the reader’s emotions where Cynthia Fingal is concerned. At first, Cynthia comes across as an annoying, bullying woman with her complaints and her grievances, so much so that Lena’s frustrations begin to rub off onto the reader too, but that quickly transforms into a sense of mounting fear once she begins staying with the couple and finds herself at their mercy. Cynthia Fingal is also an incredibly lonely woman who craves companionship, her life has been replete with tragedy what with the death of her husband and her only daughter, and the presence of Josh rekindles in her a desire for some kind of a connection.

Lena, of course, is the quintessential angry young woman who finds the responsibility of looking after an elder relative too cumbersome and a heavy burden; she is filled with despondency that life is quickly slipping past her as a result. A surprise element is later on introduced in the form of another character who makes a brief appearance in the novel’s opening chapters, a character on the fringes then, but who becomes pivotal in the second half of the novel, a breath of fresh air in contrast to the deep and ominous gloom of the Evanses.

What’s remarkable about A Helping Hand is that most of the action is dressed in the garb of polite conversations; an outward, all-is-well façade that belies the currents of menace flowing underneath. Here, a striking scene depicting the conversation between Maisie and Lena in a shopping mall is particularly telling; Maisie doles out snippets of information on Mrs Fingal’s health in a manner that sounds disturbingly plausible, and Lena accepts it at face value because that version fits in nicely with how dramatically her life has changed for the better.

Dale’s evocative portrayal of the dreariness of the Evans’s limited suburban existence is spot on. The sameness of her surroundings at home and its unwavering routines accentuates Mrs Fingal’s sense of claustrophobia, a living made all the more cheerless by the grim, featureless landscape outdoors, the anxiety-inducing roar of airplanes flying in the sky, and other aspects that bring to the fore the barren industrial wasteland that is England.

The landscape was not dissimilar to that round Salvione: flat, characterless, the fields half-cultivated, half-industrialised, the proliferation of expedient building, and the arterial road with its whipping, stenching traffic. But beyond it there was not the sea, placidly lipping the sand and the little crabs; and beyond cabbage fields and concrete factories were not the mountains, over whose spine lay patrician cities. For all Graziella knew, this wasteland extended indefinitely, was all England. And over it was a sky pierced by aircraft, that was never the same from one hour to the next unless to be a sullen grey, that never surrendered itself to being bountiful. In Salvione the rain poured itself out of purple clouds extravagantly, like a Verdi opera. Here it stung from a closed sky, spitefully.

The physical and mental anguish of growing old, crippling loneliness, cruelty and deception, what caring for an individual entails, and the exploitation of vulnerable people are some of the themes that are expertly explored in A Helping Hand.  Desperate for company that can keep her growing isolation at bay, Mrs Fingal turns to Josh although her infatuation with him is pretty unnerving. Maisie’s experience as a nurse stands her in good stead but her mode of caregiving is too clinical, one character aptly describing it thus “They seem kind, they take care of her – but they don’t care for her.”

The strength of A Helping Hand lies in the way the story juxtaposes an outward veneer of suburban respectability, with its polite tête-à-têtes and appearances of genteel living against the darker forces of greed and exploitation. We see how appearances can be deceiving and how generally accepted social norms leave room for masking questionable behavior.

Sharply observed, astute, and utterly riveting, A Helping Hand is domestic horror at its finest where Dale deftly and with aplomb exposes the hidden depths of sheer evil, the darkness prevalent in the banality of everyday life that often goes unnoticed. The terror here is not sudden but one that slowly and quietly creeps up on you. With its dark and suspenseful atmosphere suffused with growing dread and unease, A Helping Hand effectively examines the moral and ethical dilemmas that arise when helpless individuals bear the brunt of cruelty and exploitation. Highly recommended!

Two Months of Reading – August & September 2023

This post combines both my August and September reads, once again low on quantity but high on quality. Of these books, two were part of Kim’s #NYRBWomen23 reading project which also fitted in nicely with August’s WIT Month, while the rest were a return to my favourite 20^th-century women writers as well as the discovery of a new author. I had started Renata Adler’s Speedboat for #NYRBWomen23 but I haven’t finished it yet, so it will most likely feature in my October reading post. I also read a couple of novellas from Rachel Ingalls’ Selected Novellas compilation, but again will write about it once I’m through.

So, without further ado, here’s a brief look at the books…You can read the detailed reviews on each by clicking on the title links.

THE MIRADOR: DREAMED MEMORIES OF IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY BY HER DAUGHTER by Élisabeth Gille (Translated from French by Marina Harss)

The Mirador is no ordinary biography. The byline below the title reads “Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by her Daughter” which is to say Gille has breathed life into her mother by giving her a voice and thus positioned this as a memoir. What we read, therefore, is a first-person narrative giving the impression that it is Irène herself who is speaking directly to us.

The Mirador comprises two sections – the first is Némirovsky’s imagined memoir penned in 1929 covering her childhood in Russia and Paris amid sweeping changes and a rapidly evolving political landscape; while the somber and hauntingly sad second section fast forwards to 1942, days before her arrest at a time when she was living in precarious circumstances with her husband and two young daughters in a small French village, isolated with a deep sense of foreboding with regards the future.

Élisabeth Gille traverses the zenith and nadir of her mother’s glittering but cruelly short life; The Mirador is not only a brilliant, immersive, and deeply humane account of Irène Némirovsky’s life lived in tumultuous Russia and France, but also a window into her legacy and fame as a writer par excellence.

IZA’S BALLAD by Magda Szabó (Translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes)

On the death of her husband Vince, Ettie goes to live with her daughter Iza in her flat in Budapest. Ettie is ecstatic at first, she looks forward to spending quality time with her beloved daughter, but alas things unfold quite differently. The first days of adjustment in the big, bustling city of Budapest are particularly hard for Ettie who has spent most of her time in a village taking comfort in its familiarity and sense of community. Pest frightens her, and with Iza too immersed in her career and social life, Ettie’s sense of isolation only heightens.

One of the biggest strengths of the novel is Szabó’s superb characterization. Ettie and Iza are such brilliantly etched, fully realised characters, and Szabó particularly excels in showing how their diametrically opposite personas and outlook set the stage for heartache and tragedy. The two are as unalike as chalk and cheese. Ettie is warm, Iza is frozen. For Ettie the past is an anchor, while Iza is forward-thinking, her gaze settled on the future. Ettie craves companionship, Iza wants to be alone. Iza’s Ballad, then, is a piercing, unflinching examination of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, a striking depiction of two women who are poles apart. 

THE DEVASTATING BOYS by Elizabeth Taylor

The Devastating Boys is a gorgeous collection of stories showcasing Elizabeth Taylor’s unmatched talent and remarkable range both in terms of the worlds she creates and her piercing gaze into the hearts and minds of her characters. The title story in the collection – “The Devastating Boys” – is a subtle and beautifully written story of a marriage, of how doing things out of the ordinary holds the promise of joy and renewal, while “An Excursion to the Source” is a story about a diffident young woman Polly and her overbearing guardian Gwenda and the unexpected circumstances that confront them on a holiday. One of my favourites, “In and Out the Houses”, is a cleverly constructed tale focusing on the petty jealousies of village life complete with the unspoken disappointments and the secret tinge of envy that mark the lives of its inhabitants, while “Flesh” is another superbly crafted story of loneliness and the tragicomedy of middle-aged romance. It’s a collection that shows Taylor at the top of her game where each story is a joy to savour and treasure.

DUSTY ANSWER by Rosamond Lehmann

Dusty Answer is a gorgeous, evocative novel of childhood friendships, thwarted love, and the intensity of the hopes and expectations of youth. We follow Judith Earle, our protagonist, from her childhood to young womanhood, and the transformative relationships that leave a deep impression on her. 

Through a stream of flashbacks reflecting Judith’s reminisces, the first few chapters move back and forth between the past and present, at first mostly dwelling on Judith’s childhood, particularly her fascination with the Fyfe children – Mariella and her four cousins, Charlie, Martin, Julian, and Roddy.

After the death of her father, Judith goes to Cambridge where she meets the charismatic and enigmatic Jennifer Baird. Judith is utterly enchanted by Jennifer to the point where her time in Cambridge is entirely defined by this more than platonic friendship and evenings spent with their coterie of friends. Judith is mesmerised by Jennifer and reciprocates her feelings, there’s a sense that her love for Jennifer doesn’t succeed in quelling her all-consuming passion for Roddy. Once she is out of Cambridge, the Fyfe men fill up Judith’s world again. This is such an exquisitely written, melancholic novel as the characters navigate the rough terrain of early adulthood filled with heartbreak, tenderness, joys, and disappointments.  

THE SKIN CHAIRS by Barbara Comyns

Barbara Comyns’ The Skin Chairs is a marvellous tale of family, abject poverty, and the bewildering, ghoulish world of adults seen through the eyes of a beguiling 10-year-old girl, a story that has all the elements of Comyns’ trademark offbeat worldview.

When the book opens, ten-year-old Frances is sent to stay for a few days with her ‘horsey’ relations, the Lawrences. Growing up in a family of five siblings (Frances has three sisters and two brothers), we learn that the mother often packs them off to various relatives so that she can have some respite and time for herself. However, Frances’ father dies unexpectedly and with this sudden development, the family is plunged into poverty after having led a life of comfort. Despite the subsequent horrors of their existence, Frances’ life is not without incident; she is an inquisitive, affectionate child and makes some unusual friends, and things do take a turn for the better led by a new arrival at the village which sees the fortunes of the family transform, while the holier-than-thou Lawrences finally get their comeuppance.

The Skin Chairs, then, has all the hallmarks of a characteristic Comynsian world – a child or child-like narrator whose unique, distinct voice manages to belie the hopelessness of the circumstances and take some edge off its horrors making the story not just easier to bear but also incredibly compelling. I was lucky to finally find a copy of this novel, it was so incredibly hard to find, and given the implications of the skin chairs in the book, it’s possible that a reissue by publishers might not be on the cards yet.

THE MOUNTAIN LION by Jean Stafford

Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion is a wonderfully strange and unsettling novel of the trials of adolescence, tumultuous sibling relationships, isolation, alienation, and the alluring enigma of nature.

Ralph and Molly Fawcett, the novel’s pre-adolescent protagonists, reside in Covina, Los Angeles with their mother and their two elder sisters Leah and Rachel. That they are unlike the rest of the family is evident from the striking first chapter itself where we learn of Ralph and Molly’s tendency to get unexpected nosebleeds, the result of having suffered from scarlet fever. These nosebleeds often make them objects of ridicule, and they withdraw into their private interior world, but this shared affliction also forges a special bond between brother and sister.

Once their beloved grandfather, Grandpa Kenyon, dies while on his annual visit to the Fawcetts, Ralph and Molly begin to spend the summers at his son Uncle Claude’s ranch in Colorado. For a few years, Ralph and Molly lead a double life flitting between Covina and Colorado, until a decision made by Mrs Fawcett to first travel the world with Leah and Rachel and then relocate with all her children to Connecticut, sets the stage for events to follow complete with the novel’s devastating conclusion.

Stafford’s writing pulsates with a dreamlike, cinematic quality evident in the way she depicts the interiority of her characters, particularly children when pitted against grown-ups, the intensity of emotions playing out against a mesmeric, unsettling and sinister landscape; potent ingredients that make for an immersive reading experience.

That’s it for August and September. In October I’ve been reading A Helping Hand by Celia Dale and A Fairly Good Time by Mavis Gallant for #NYRBWomen23 – both pretty good so far. I’ve also begun The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton to get in the mood for the spooky season.