In the Haute Auvergne in France, three resting mountain herdsmen hear a hunting horn call from the ravine below. It is 1710, and the tale which follows will include death, passion, treachery and sacrifice. It is ‘All Saints’ Eve’, by Amelia B Edwards, and it seemed fitting for today’s post, a mere three hundred and six years after the story is set. Oh, and we have news of The Arte Mephitic, a new project by Phil Breach and Russell Olson.
Ms Edwards first. We’re not going to give too many spoilers for the murder mystery which unfolds in ‘All Saints’ Eve’. We first came across it in the Wordsworth collection of the same name (cover above), eight or so years ago, and that led us onto more of Edwards’ fiction. As these things go, we had previously thought of Amelia B Edwards (1831-1892) as an Egyptologist, which she was, and had paid little attention to her stranger fictions.
“It was, in truth, an unburied corpse; part of the trunk only above the surface. They tried to lift it; but it had been so long underwater, and was in so advanced a state of decomposition, that to bring it to shore without a shautter was impossible.”
from ‘Was it an Illusion?’
She was quite an admirable character, Amelia – forthright in her views on women’s suffrage, the leading female Egyptologist of her day and celebrated in that field long after her death. She travelled widely from the Upper Rhine to Abu Simbel on the Nile, and wrote extensively of her travels. A Thousand Miles up the Nile, published in 1876, was widely admired and considered a definitive work on Egyptology. She was convinced of the need for scientific archaeology, rather than digging out sites to destruction, as so often happened. Rather fittingly, her grave in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Bristol, is an obelisk with an extremely large stone ankh set into the ground next to it.
Her private life seems to have been as lively as her professional one. Acquaintances said that she was involved with more than one other woman (in one case, she seemed to have formed a menage a trois). The eccentric, melancholic John Addington Symonds (1840 – 1893), poet, historian and critic, said that she had spoken openly to him of her lesbianism. Both lived in Bristol for some time.
Symonds, on the other hand, wrote on ‘Greek’ love for private circulation, had crushes and affairs with various blokes, and may be the first writer to use the term homosexual in English literature. This was in the 1890s, mind you, when you were supposed to keep that stuff out of the papers. Symonds shared many poetic works with Edwards, and his poem “To a Friend Leaving England in September” was originally dedicated “To A.B.E.”
Edwards wrote both novels and short stories. Our interest is in her odder stories, which vary from thrilling tales of dark deeds to the out-and-out supernatural. In some cases these are blended in the same tale. Perhaps her most well-known story is ‘The Phantom Coach’, which concerns a young man struggling through the onset a snowstorm. Finding temporary shelter, he is advised of a local coach which might take him back to his wife twenty miles away – but what will he meet on the road?
There are plenty of ways to find out. The Phantom Coach and Other Stories is available on Project Gutenberg, and contains:
- The Phantom Coach
- An Engineer’s Story
- A Service of Danger
- The Story of Salome
- Was it an Illusion? A Parson’s Story
- How the Third Floor Knew the Potteries
the phantom coach and other stories
‘How the Third Floor Knew the Potteries’, a nasty little tale, is better known as Number Three. You’re never sure with an Edwards if it will be a murder-mystery or a genuine supernatural tale, which is part of the fun. The story ‘All Saints’ Eve’ itself has evil and untimely deaths, but is not actually an occult tale. We won’t spoil the rest of her work by saying which is which. Ash-Tree Press have a Kindle collection available which collects all of Amelia B Edwards supernatural fiction in one volume.
“In addition to all her known ghost stories, the volume also contains three additional items, including a delightful piece by Edwards herself about ‘My Home Life’: a fascinating look at one of the Victorian era’s most fascinating women.”
the phantom coach: collected ghost stories
And rather delightfully, if you only want to focus on ‘The Phantom Coach’, our old friends Richard and Daniel of Mansfield Dark have produced a neat silhouette film which brings you the gist of it in a most enjoyable way:
Mansfield Dark are, of course, responsible for a number of very stylish and chilling M R James adaptations, and you can find out more here:
The unabridged Phantom Coach can be found in a number of versions on Youtube. The horror film All Saints’ Eve, we should point out, has nothing to do with Amelia B Edwards as far as we can see, and is not supposed to be brilliant, but we ain’t a-seen ‘im yet…
The Arte Mephitic
We were going to save this for one of our medley posts, but we have a little room left. Phil Breach and Russell Mark Olson have commenced a campaign to bring an ambitious piece of work into our lives.
“The Arte Mephitic, a dark and lyrical cautionary tale told over 52 rhyming quatrains of iambic pentameter, provides a grim, vivid, magickal account of a man’s search for life eternal, and the depths to which he would plumb to attain it.
“The accompanying illustrations have been designed to mimic the crude woodcuts that often illuminated the popular chapbooks of the 17th and 18th centuries. The dark concepts of the story are given more space to glower and menace by hiding behind the less-sophisticated visual vocabulary of the penny press. Initially, each image will be cut in lino and printed by hand in an attempt at authenticity.”
Here’s an extract from the text:
‘In my chest, that drought and flaking cave,
an organ dangles, twitching at its graft.
It guards me from the grasping of the grave.
‘Tis the bruised and tender acme of my craft.’
‘I had associates in my endeavour;
I made compact with a vile and vicious puck.
It fetched me anything I needed whatsoever,
in return for all the blood that it could suck.’
(Note: Campaign was successful!)
Goodbye for now, dear listener. Be not afeared on this, our All Saints’ Eve…