Today, an
anthology of women writers' feels quite passe. Women
are hardly under-represented in the field; least of all requiring of
showcasing by a named male
editor. Then, I suppose, the state of play in the 19th
and early 20th
century was rather different. This collection of known gems and all too occasional obscurities, is book-ended between an early tale -
Mary Shelley's post-Frankenstein
'Transformation' (1830) - and the latest - May Sinclair's excellent
'Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched' (1922).
In
most cases, this is only a worthy collection if you've somehow
overlooked, or yet to be introduced to, the cheap and easily
available Wordworth Editions Mystery and the Supernatural
series. (At
least eleven
of their nineteen entries are here, in fact). Less often anthologised
titles – certainly new to me – are all too few, but include
Margaret Olipant's 'The Secret Chamber' (1876), Sarah Orne Jewett's
distinctly odd 'In Dark New England Days' (1890), Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman's revelatory 'The Hall Bedroom' (1903) and Ellen Glasgow's
intriguing 'The Shadowy Third' (1916).
Re-reading some of the earlier entries reminds me how the sedentary
pace and explanatory minutiae, redolent in late Victorian short
fiction, so often deflates any sense of approaching menace or threat.
For this reason, I now find Vernon Lee's 'A Wedding Chest' (1904)
almost unreadable; too many Latin terms crammed into breathless
nine-line sentences, misting the reader's focus.
Even if climaxes are too easily foregrounded, the best of them,
here and through the rest of the anthology, concentrate on playing
out the plot from the opening page. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's title
tale a love-obsessed young student, a "scoffer at revelation"
and "enthusiastic adorer of the mystical" vows that, should
fate end their match, one or other of their spirits would return to
hold the surviving lover forever. In Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's 'The
Hall Bedroom' a landlady relates the journal of one of her former
tenants whose extreme sensual experiences at night gradually
challenge his earlier, presumably sane, perceptions. A tale that
foretells early takes on drug-induced experiments, (such as Crowley's
'The Drug,' previously reviewed here), it is a revelation itself
considering its age.
In 'The Shadowy Third' a nurse is summoned, by a great surgeon, to
a country house to look after his bedridden wife. The sudden,
unexpected presence of a little girl who may – or may not – be a
figment of his ailing wife's imagination, is nevertheless also
witnessed by the nurse. When the patient confides in her that her
surgeon husband had previously killed the girl, and discovers
their mutual connection, the conclusion is made suddenly inevitable.
Pleasingly, as with 'The Hall Bedroom,' this is too well written to
be a mere shocker.
Again, this is one of those collections that is passable for
those unfamiliar with the form's early highlights. For the rest of
us, it is top-heavy with re-runs reprinted elsewhere. I can at least
glean some new finds in the latter three that prompt some renewed
interest.
