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If you read about ghosts in order to be filled with dread, then Edith Wharton may not be your favorite supernatural author. On the other hand, if you are a fan of elegant realistic fiction but like a few chills from time to time, Wharton's ghost tales may belong at the top of your list. Each of Wharton's stories is a subtle exercise rooted in everyday reality, and the ghostly presences--such as they are--emerge from the nourishing soil that constitutes her finely crafted realism. Many of her sto...
Edith Wharton may be an unlikely ghost story writer, but she does it rather well. As you would expect they are well written and have subtlety and nuance and don’t have the gore and bludgeoning of some modern horror. There is a sprinkling of the gothic, a few rambling and creepy houses and a variety of settings: England, the eastern US states, France and the desert in an unspecified Middle Eastern country. Some of the tales aren’t really ghost stories, but explore everyday moral dilemmas and huma...
I seem to love all things Wharton, but I must say she outdoes herself with these strange and eerie tales of ghostly happenings. They are all quite well done, but there are a few that are beyond excellent. What makes most of them work is the lack of surety that they could not all be explained away with a little logical and clear thinking. Of course, here in the real world, that is how ghostly encounters always are, inexplicable phenomena or explained away--and those of us who have them are never
Most of Edith Wharton's ghost stories have a sense of ambiguity. Is the supernatural at work, or did people misinterpret real events? Wharton writes her works with a Gothic atmosphere--foggy nights, creepy old houses, strange servants, and unreliable narrators. The weight of a guilty conscience leads to supernatural events in some cases. Women are victims of controlling men in a few stories, but women manipulate the men in others. Wharton's writing is elegant, and she exhibits a deep understandi...
This is an interesting collection of 11 Ghost Stories which are short stories written by Edith Wharton spanning from 1909 through 1937. The following stories are listed & a brief review. All these stories are a different kind of ghost story which have outcomes with uncertainty & bewildering. Many stories have you wondering how it will end & your own imagination will have to suffice.The Lady's Maid Bell- 1902 Hartley is in need of a job after recovering from a lingering illness. Due to this many
I quite like Edith Wharton's writing, but not every story here penetrated with me. A couple of them did. Kerfol is very emotional, with the ghosts of the murdered dogs. I really loved The Pomegranate Seed, with its mysterious mythological title, vague creepiness and open ended.ness
Perhaps because she is one of the most esteemed writers of the 20th century, Edith Wharton may not be immediately associated with the genre of horror. Today, she is probably best remembered for her novels "The House of Mirth" (1905) and "The Age of Innocence" (1920), which latter book copped her the Pulitzer Prize, as well as for her classic novella from 1911, "Ethan Frome," a staple reading assignment for all English majors. In novel after novel, Wharton examined the members of the upper crust
Edith Wharton has written what I term "genteel" ghost stories, with a variation in success if achieving a sense of mood and dread are the measure. There are several that I specifically enjoyed, "Afterward", "Kerfol", "The Triumph of Night", "Mr Jones". All are well written of course (it seems silly of me to judge Wharton). If I judge them as ghost stories then some don't seem as successful. "Eyes" in particular seems a let down (as discussed in the story section).Overall though I find the storie...
I got off to a rough start with this one because I didn't like the first two stories. I persevered and I'm very glad I did because I enjoyed these stories tremendously. There was a remarkable range of types of stories and causes of the events. I really should read the deliciously creepy All Souls' every year on Halloween.
Abandoned at 61%.I enjoyed Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and I like gothic, supernatural tales. Short story collections always tend to be a mixed bag, but I really thought that my overall enjoyment of these ghost stories would be pretty much guaranteed. Well, I finally threw in the towel a little over half-way through, after struggling to find the will to pick this up for well over a month and entering a reading slump because of it. I skipped the final four stories (Bewitched, Mr. Jones...
I loved these stories.Not too scary more of was that a ghost or a real person!Beautifully written.
Edith Wharton, delicate yet cruel, casts a cold eye on the misdeeds and toxic egos of men, and an occasionally more empathetic one on women and their struggles, in this collection of beautifully written stories. Precise prose: each sentence has a crystalline clarity, a careful distillation of words and ideas. Gorgeously atmospheric imagery: Wharton knows her way around sprawling manors of course, but has equal talent at evoking lonely moorlands, quiet roads at dusk, even a nearly empty fortress
I loved this collection of short stories. The writing is absolutely excellent - the perfect balance of intrigue, satire and subtlety, with a hint of humour. The tales are just macabre enough to hold your attention without being too obvious or sensational, and they're all the perfect length. My favourite thing about many of these stories was that they are very open-ended, open to all kinds of interpretation - the ghostly, the metaphorical, the satirical. 'The Eyes' was genuinely frightening, asid...
Cover of the 1976 Popular Library mass-market. You can tell it's post-Exorcist, as it definitely imitates the style, as did a lot of horror or occult-themed paperbacks of the day.
Some might feel that Wharton was out of her element here, but I found these perfectly jewel-like tales. They are, as is to be expected, stylistically elegant -- Wharton doesn't lower her standards just because she's writing in a sometimes-maligned genre. These are classic "literary" ghost tales, best appreciated for the subtle shadings of tone and rich evocation of atmosphere. There are (this being Wharton, after all) heavy infusions of social class and the weight this imposes on the central cha...
My husband and I enjoy reading Edith Wharton stories to each other, and in fact have managed to get through all, or at least nearly all, of her shorter works in this manner. I love her writing and these stories are no exception but, as other GR members have mentioned, these stories are not horrifying and some are not even scary. They are simply great stories, some of them chilling and others sad.
Good stories. Well told. Wide variety.I liked 9 of the 11 stories.List of the 11 stories."The Eyes""Afterward""Kerfol""Triumphs of Night""Miss Mary Pask""Bewitched""Mr Jones""Pomegranate Seeds""The Looking Glass""All Souls"I did not like "Triumphs of Night". Some in buddy read group liked it, and others did not. But it is always good to have a bad one in the bunch to show as contrast to the good.What I would like to see as a movie:"Miss Pask""Pomegranate Seeds""All Souls" (The story is named for...
These stories were okay, if a bit dry, and unmemorable for the most part. The exception for me was "Afterward," which I had read before and seen dramatized. It involves a married couple that intentionally purchases a home with ghost included. The caveat: They won't know they have encountered the ghost until long afterward. Classic.
Wharton’s Ghost Stories – collected together in this beautifully-produced book from Virago’s Designer Collection – are characterised by the tensions between restraint and passion, respectability and impropriety. Here we have narratives rooted in reality, with the ghostly chills mostly stemming from psychological factors – the fear of the unknown, the power of the imagination and the judicious use of supernatural imagery to unnerve the soul. As one might expect with Wharton, the writing is first
[EDIT: Note, if this pops back up in my feed as some new thing...Goodreads seems to be having issues with multiple editions of a book and somehow marked both the paperback and kindle versions of read at the same time (which is, technically, true) and I was trying to not cheat on the "challenge" so I've been trying to get it to combine my reading, and it was glitchy, so I had to sort of delete one instance of the review so the other one could stand alone...and who knows what will happen next]I'm