I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I love a good ghost story. Lately, I have especially been enjoying discovering the works of many of the talented female authors who flourished during the golden age of ghost stories but have since gone largely unrecognized. Which is why I was devastated to learn that the small publisher who introduced me to many of these authors will be shutting their doors: Handheld Press, the small UK house who brought us Women’s Weird volumes I and II, The Outcast and the Rite, From the Abyss, The Unknown, Strange Relics, and so much more have announced that they are done publishing as of this summer. But they made sure to go out with a bang. One of their last titles was The House of Silence: Ghost Stories 1887–1920 by E. Nesbit, with an introduction by Melissa Edmundson, which came out in May. Nesbit’s stories were among my favorites that I first encountered in Women’s Weird and in my sporadic reading since, so I was thrilled when Handheld announced they’d be doing an entire collection of her ghost stories. And I was not disappointed!
Edith Nesbit—to the extent that she is known today—is best known as the author of popular children’s books such as The Railway Children and Five Children and It. But she was also an absolute master of the modern ghost story. Her stories range from the truly terrifying to the gently comedic, from the devastatingly tragic to the sweetly romantic, with many hovering unsettlingly between these different modes. Melissa Edmundson’s very thorough introduction goes through Nesbit’s biography, from her childhood, to her social activism, to her unconventional marriage and her writing career. I found most interesting the tidbits about Nesbit’s own encounters with the supernatural, including her very own haunted house and her proclivity for keeping a human skull around to inure herself to the macabre. Edmundson’s introduction is followed by eighteen of Edith Nesbit’s tales, some of which are straightforward ghost stories, some of which play around with the genre’s common tropes, and a few of which stretch the definition of the term “ghost story” to its limits.
Romance features heavily in Edith Nesbit’s works, often quite tragically as in “John Charrington’s Wedding,” a prime example of the ghostly bridegroom folkloric trope. But a few of my favorite tales were actually quite sweet. One is an excellent Christmas ghost story, “The White Lady.” In this tale, the narrator is spending the Christmas holiday at the home of her beloved and hopes to receive a proposal. But Julian explains that he cannot formally propose unless she receives the blessing of the family ghost, as per tradition. With a little help from her mother-in-law-to-be, the narrator decides to take this Christmas haunting into her own hands to ensure her future. Similar fake-haunting shenanigans occur in “The Haunted Inheritance,” in which a young man decides to dress up as one of the murdered lovers that allegedly haunts his family estate in order to dissuade his cousin from taking an interest in the house, only to discover that his (very attractive) cousin had the same idea.
The kind of humorous irony touched on in “The Haunted Inheritance” is on full display in “Number 17.” The plot of this tale is almost identical to a story I covered in my post on humorous ghost stories: “Ye Goode Olde Ghoste Storie” by Anthony Boucher. Nesbit’s story was written nearly two decades earlier (and, in my opinion, with a great deal more subtlety and skill), so either Boucher plagiarized her or the premise was a well-known running joke of that era. Both stories parody the typical ghost story, beginning with a tale of a haunted chamber where any man who sleeps there is found with his throat slit in the morning. The big reveal at the end of the profession of the story-teller calls into question the veracity of his entire story.
Apart from widely varying the tone of her stories, Edith Nesbit also does not limit herself to traditional ghosts in her spooky stories. One story in this collection belongs to a very specific subgenre of turn-of-the-century horror fiction—one which explores the horrors of hypnotism, in an era when the limits of this practice were little understood. The premise of “Hurst of Hurscote” reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Both tales suggest that hypnotizing someone before death can keep the soul tied to the body, suspended in a hellish limbo. In Nesbit’s story, a practitioner of hypnotism is so in love with his wife that he doesn’t want her soul to leave the earth before he does. But after her untimely death, he is visited by her spirit, begging for release. Two of Nesbit’s other stories are somewhat vampiric in nature. “The Haunted House” features a mad scientist who experiments with human and animal blood transfusions in his attempts to create the elixir of immortal life. In “The Pavilion,” a Tudor-era structure is “haunted” by a blood-sucking plant.
If you, too, love ghost stories, whether of the traditional sort or further down the path of strange and bizarre, I highly recommend picking up this collection of E. Nesbit’s tales. You can find The House of Silence on shelves now at select retailers or order online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. You can also order directly from Handheld’s website until June 2025. Have you read any of E. Nesbit’s ghost stories before? Let me know your favorites in the comments!