Gothic Tales

Description

Elizabeth Gaskell’s chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. ‘Disappearances’, inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; ‘Lois the Witch’, a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors. Whether darkly surreal, such as ‘The Poor Clare’, where an evil doppelgänger is formed by a woman’s bitter curse, or mischievous like ‘Curious, if True’, a playful reworking of fairy tales, all the stories in this volume form a stark contrast to the social realism of Gaskell’s novels, revealing a darker and more unsettling style of writing.Edited by Laura Kranzler

Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
Note on the Texts
Disappearances
The Old Nurse’s Story
The Squire’s Story
The Poor Clare
The Doom of the Griffiths
Lois the Witch
The Crooked Branch
Curious, if True
The Grey Woman
Appendix
Notes

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) wrote her first novel, MARY BARTON, in 1848 as a distraction from her sorrow at the death of her only son in infancy. It won the attention of Dickens and was followed by 5 other full-length novels as well as numerous short stories and novellas. Laura Kranzler has written on Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf and has published a novel.GB