Female writers are a bit like male ones, really. Some of them are outstanding, and some of them produce tosh. So one of the more sensible things to do during Women in Horror Month is to look at the actual works, and point out the many striking dark stories you can find by women. Today, we bring you Edith Wharton, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, and Mary E Wilkins Freeman. And some of what follows includes a serious look at the changing nature of supernatural fiction.

Yes, here we are with Part Three of The History of Women in Horror, exploring some scary writing by women in the early Twentieth Century…

The first decades of the century were a difficult time for women (as opposed to all the laid back, easy times they’d had before). Men were busy making important political and military decisions, and killing each other. Women, meanwhile, idled away their time with such frivolities as keeping their children alive, repopulating devastated countries, nursing wounded men, and working in munitions factories.

“Definitions of femininity and of women’s social roles were in flux. During World War I, women had gained jobs that had hitherto been held only by men; afterward, women’s job options again narrowed. England’s two million “surplus women” were newly identified as a social problem, suffragettes were demonstrating, Freud’s works were in the bookshops, and hems were on the rise. “

Katherine Bischoping & Riley Olstead, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2013)

Some women went all literary, and charged their writing with hidden meanings which could only be decoded by boys who knew the secret handshake. A few broke out in attacks of initials (see also Part 1) and pretended to be men for publishing purposes. But many female writers produced works of distinctive supernatural and weird fiction under their own names. We’ve picked three of the earlier writers, with illustrative stories, to show what you may be missing.

Mary E Wilkins Freeman

Mary E Wilkins Freeman is our first pick, because this allows us to mention stories which straddle the boundaries between Victoriana and the weird. The period up to the First World War was a transitional time, as shadows lurked behind those Edwardian summers. Society was changing, and the black crepe was gradually being shed. Gothic had gone, and weird was coming in, though there was still a place for straightforward ghost tales.

Freeman had an odd enough life. She had a strict religious upbringing, and lost both her parents by the age of 31, leaving her to try and make money by writing. At the age of fifty she married a chap with alcohol and drug problems, who ended up being admitted to a hospital for the insane. On his death she inherited $1.

Sidenote: There is a detailed biography of Freeman which includes analysis of her writings overall, and which is relevant to the changes going on in writing and society. This is In a Hidden Closet: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, by Leah Blatt Glasser (1996).

It “explores the multiple tensions at the core of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s life and work. A prolific short story writer and novelist, Freeman (1852-1930) developed a reputation as a local colorist who depicted the peculiarities of her native New England… Freeman was one of the first American authors to write extensively about the relationships women form outside of marriage and motherhood, the role of work in women’s lives, the complexity of women’s sexuality, and the interior lives of women who rebel rather than conform to patriarchal strictures.”

She was a respected and prolific writer, and is still famous in ghostly circles for her story ‘Luella Miller’. This is notable for being a sort of vampire story, but more subtle and unusual than the old type (there’s a nice reading by our friend Morgan Scorpion on Librivox).

‘Shadows on the Wall’ is another good tale which might almost be called Jamesian (but this is an over-used adjective). Much of the story, seen from the point of view of three women in a household, is concerned with the building tension which follows a man’s death, seemingly from natural causes. It is a simple tale, reminiscent of the old style of ghost story, yet the way in which the women interact and develop their concerns is deftly handled.

Quite different is ‘The Hall Bedroom’ (1905), and we mention this one because it enters the weirder zone which was to follow in supernatural fiction. Rooms that are ‘different’, and hints of the fifth dimension, together with the way in which the story unfolds, gives hints of what would come with H P Lovecraft and others – stories which evoke sensations and suggest the possibility of science beyond our ken, without the standard resolutions. The writer and anthologist Dorothy Scarborough cited ‘The Hall Bedroom’ as

“One of the best illustrations of the use of dream imagery and impressions.”

The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)

All the above are in The Wind in the Rose Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903). Some time after Freeman’s death, Arkham House released a collection of all eleven of her known supernatural stories (Collected Ghost Stories, 1974).

Both of the stories are available on audio:

Shadows on the Wall

The Hall Bedroom

A somewhat altered version of ‘Shadows’ was made for TV as part of the Night Gallery series – “Certain Shadows on the Wall” December 30, 1970.

“The shadow of a recently deceased woman (Agnes Moorehead) remains cast on the parlor wall to haunt her sinister brother.”

They meant ‘parlour’, of course.

More trivia: Despite having been in Citizen Kane and other major films, Agnes Moorehead is remembered by many today for playing Endora in Bewitched, the sixties and seventies TV series. We assume that her character’s name was a play on the Witch of Endor, from the jolly old Bible.

Katharine E Fullerton Gerould

Next comes Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould (1879 – 1944), an American writer and essayist. Unlike Freeman, she was a noted writer by the time she reached her early twenties, highly educated and adept at essay and short story alike. From 1902 onwards she wrote regularly for major journals, and between 1911 and 1929, she published nearly fifty short stories. Her small number of novels didn’t go down so well.

Girlish Trivia: Although few know her 1931 novel The Light That Never Was, the classic SF writer Lloyd Biggle Jr wrote a novel of the same name in 1972. It’s an interesting book, dealing with non-human refugees on the human artist colony of Donov, and the nature of art and creativity. Worth looking out for. Bloody men, coming over here and stealing our titles…

Gerould’s essays are interesting as well. Given that we brushed against Lord Byron, very badly, in Part One, we liked her 1922 article on why people were so peculiar about Byron – ‘Men, Women, And The Byron-Complex’ (Atlantic Monthly):

“Ninety-eight years ago, in April, 1824, Lord Byron died at Missolonghi. But in the non-academic world of letters no one, apparently, either knows or cares whether Byron was a great poet. No one… either knows or cares, as we have said, whether he was a better or a worse letter-writer than we had thought. After a hundred years, the sole question that impassions people is: ‘Just how much of a cad was he?’”

Her stranger stories are hard to find, but she wrote tales such as ‘The Eighty Third’ (1916), which was collected in Tales of Dungeons and Dragons, edited by Peter Haining (1986). She was known at one time for her story ‘On the Staircase’ (1913), of which Dorothy Scarborough said:

“Warning spirits of futurity are seen [in this story], where each man beholds his own destiny,—one seeing the spectral snake that afterwards kills him in a hunting expedition, one the ghost of a Zulu, the savage that almost destroys him some time afterwards, and the last the ghost of a young woman in a blue dress, the woman whom he marries and who hounds him to his death. She presently sees her own fate, too, but what it is the author does not tell us. One curious incident in the story is the instantaneous appearance on the stairs of the woman herself and her ghostly double, one in a white dress, one in the fatal blue. This sort of spectral warning, this wireless service for the conveyance of bad news and hint of threatening danger, serves to link the ghost story of the present with those of the past.”

The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)

Gerould is also worth noting because she had connections with our last author for today, Edith Wharton. Wharton helped Gerould to get published by Scribners, but the two writers got caught up in a romantic triangle involving Gerould’s promiscuous journalist cousin, William Morton Fullerton. Wharton, though married, had an affair with him on and off between 1906 and 1910, yet he also got engaged to Gerould at the same time – and was living with a French woman in Paris. Blimey.

Edith Wharton

Which leads us nicely onto the stories of the best known of our three, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) herself. A social whirl, novelist, Pulitzer Prize winner, Nobel nominee – and she worked in Paris during the First World War to protect French women and children. Rather impressive.

It would be a bit redundant to clog greydogtales with her biography, which is easily found, or details of The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth etc. We merely want to mention her contribution to supernatural and horror literature.

“Of particular interest are Wharton’s stories of the uncanny and the supernatural, like the grisly “A Bottle of Perrier,” set in the North African desert, and the chilling “All Souls’,” written just before her death. An unacknowledged master of American horror fiction, Wharton’s lucid prose makes all the more powerful her exploration of the irrational forces underlying ordinary life.”

Library of America

Wharton tended to more subtle horrors. Much is suggested but not nailed down:

“When the reader’s confidence is gained the next rule of the game is to avoid distracting and splintering his attention. Many a would-be tale of horror becomes innocuous through the very multiplication and variety of its horrors. Above all, if they are multiplied they should be cumulative and not dispersed. But the fewer the better: once the preliminary horror is posited, it is the harping on the same string — the same nerve — that does the trick. Quiet iteration is far more racking than the diversified assaults; the expected is more frightful than the unforeseen.”

Edith Wharton, “The Writing of Fiction,” Scribner’s Magazine (1925)

We want to slip in three stories of hers before we go. ‘The Duchess at Prayer’ (1902) is a dark tale of love and ruin, concerning a Duke’s unwelcome gift of a statue to his wife, and its impact.

“I saw how admirably the sculptor had caught the poise of her head, the tender slope of the shoulder; then I crossed over and looked into her face — it was a frozen horror. Never have hate, revolt and agony so possessed a human countenance…”

It’s been suggested that Wharton was influenced by both Balzac and Edgar Allan Poe, with resemblances to aspects of Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. There’s no doubt that it harks back to earlier eerie tales from the Victorian period, though it is still Wharton.

‘Triumph of Night’ (1914) is a different tale, one of implications rather than overt horror. It is a story of ‘doubles’, where more is revealed by the double of one John Lavington than can be seen in his human face. Doubt and failure pervade the story.

Best of all is ‘The Eyes’ (1910), from Edith Wharton’s collection Tales of Men and Ghosts. This stands out as a move beyond the classic ghost story. A seemingly convivial telling of tales develops into a confrontation with truths about life – our failures and our weaknesses. Without a Gothic skeleton, ominous shadow or white sheet in sight, Wharton introduces us to the unknown, and quite deliberately does not give us all the answers. The descriptive prose is fascinating:

“The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids hung over the eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken. One lid drooped a little lower than the other, with the effect of a crooked leer; and between these folds of flesh, with their scant bristle of lashes, the eyes themselves, small glassy disks with an agate-like rim, looked like sea pebbles in the grip of a starfish.”

And it is scary, but not in the usual way. For those who like a touch of style, all of Wharton’s supernatural stories are available from the rather nice Tartarus Press, either as a collector’s edition or in e-format:

http://www.tartaruspress.com/wharton-the-triumph-of-night.html

Next week: Probably less about supernatural literature in the early Twentieth Century! We need a change for a few days…