Ghost writer

Ghost and horror stories, according to a recent article in the Financial Times, are big business. Quoting the Bookseller, the FT reported that book sales of the genre rose “by 54% across territories between 2022 and 2023”. Was it not ever thus? The theatrical adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black (1983) ran for more than thirty years in the West End; when it closed in 2023 it was the second longest-running play in London stage history, after The Mousetrap. Since 2021 Danny Robins’s 2:22: A ghost story, with its rotating cast of starry actors and stomach-dropping plot twists, has been pulling in the crowds, and Robins’s popular Uncanny podcast and television series has just crossed over to the US.

Readers and audiences love to be scared. As a form of entertainment it’s a manageable counterpoint to real-life uncertainty and turmoil, and one recreated and explored, in short-story form, by generations of international writers.

Edith Nesbit, who died 100 years ago, is best known as the author of quixotic late-Victorian and Edwardian children’s books such as Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Railway Children. A prolific, energetic writer and early Fabian socialist with a large household to support (including the mistress of her husband, Hubert Bland, and their two children, brought up as Nesbit’s own), she began publishing ghost fiction at the end of the nineteenth century, in magazines, prior and then in addition to her successful career as a children’s novelist. The best of these – out of a hit-and-miss bunch – are now brought together in one volume by the redoubtable Handheld Press, publisher of neglected works, mainly by women writers. Sadly, this is to be one of Handheld’s last offerings: it closes this summer, another victim of the rising costs faced by small publishers since Brexit.

The American academic Melissa Edmundson supplies an illuminating biographical and critical introduction to the book, which she has also edited. Nesbit’s stories range from the arch and the melancholic to the baroque and genuinely, tinglingly supernatural. The first story in the collection, “Man-Size in Marble”, is often praised as one of the author’s finest; and, though the tale of two ancient knights in armour hopping off their church tombs every Halloween is creaky and predictable, the title itself is splendid and provides an intriguing companion to the later (and less well-known) story “The Marble Child”, a poignant, deliciously realized tale of a bored, lonely boy and his stone-cold inanimate statue companion: “the first time that Ernest ever saw the marble child move was on the hottest Sunday of the year”.

Decaying country mansions bequeathed to breezy and impecunious young men by hitherto unknown relatives feature prominently (and are entertainingly spoofed in “The Haunted Inheritance” and “The Haunted House”, both of which rest on cases of mistaken identity), as do lost loves through the ages (in “The Ebony Frame” and “The Detective”). “The Violet Car” features possibly the first instance of a haunted automobile in fiction, while in the proto-feminist “The White Lady” a young woman passes herself off as the family ghost to gain approval – and consent to her engagement to his son – from her wealthy and superstitious future father-in-law. The stand-out inclusion, “John Charrington’s Wedding”, in which the story’s subject cheerfully announces to his best man, ahead of his impending nuptials, that “alive or dead I mean to be married on Thursday” is a ghastly forerunner of Elizabeth Bowen’s classic “The Demon Lover” (1945).

Frustratingly, none of the stories is individually dated in this anthology, so their chronology is uncertain. In the seemingly random “Notes on the stories” from the publisher, we are enlightened as to the meaning of “Arcadian”, the origin of Cleo­patra’s Needle and the history of the Window Tax.

The obvious comparison with Nesbit in terms of style and content is M. R. James. Edmundson comments: “As M. R. James observed in the Preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911) the most effective ghost stories are those that could happen to us. Edith Nesbit well understood this, long before James put his words on paper”. This is slightly dis­ingenuous. Nesbit’s “Number 17”, about a haunted hotel room, was first published in the Strand magazine in June 1910. James’s “Number 13”, also featuring a haunted hotel room, was published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904. There must have been something in the ether.

Catherine Taylor’s memoir, The Stirrings, was published last year and has been shortlisted for this year’s TLS Ackerley prize

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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