The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

This collection from Wordsworth Editions includes fifteen stories by Edith Wharton. The themes were deeper than I expected, and I thought that the prose in most of the stories was absolutely beautiful. 

Edith Wharton is best known for her fiction about upper class society during the Gilded Age and for winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence. While her work includes social satire and comedy she also wrote about the conflict between individual desires versus society’s expectations, conflict in marriage, stifled passion, greed, and loneliness. Those themes also show up in her ghost stories. 

Some of these stories have ambiguous endings. I didn’t like this at first. After reading “The Maid’s Bell,” I was left wondering what had just happened. After reading an essay on the story I learned that some things had gone over my head and my appreciation of the story grew, especially regarding the ambiguousness of the ending. The essay doesn’t provide an explanation for what happens but instead gives possibilities based on the time period and based on what Wharton says and does not say. I agree with this David Stuart Davies quote from his introduction, which I read after finishing all the stories, “The challenging open-ended climax forces the reader to contemplate the story with more thought and decide for themselves.” Sure enough, the stories with ambiguous endings had me thinking about them long after finishing them. 

While it’s titled a collection of ghost stories, two of the stories, “A Journey” and “A Bottle of Perrier” are tales of suspense. New York Review of Books also has an edition of Wharton’s ghost stories titled Ghosts. I decided on the Wordsworth edition instead as it has four more stories than the NYRB edition and it was cheaper. I enjoyed this collection a lot and I’ll be seeking out her other work. 

Some of Wharton’s stories were adapted for the 1983 Granada television series Shades of Darkness. Three of her most popular stories were adapted, “The Lady Maid’s Bell,” “Afterward,” and “Bewitched.” As of this writing they’re available on YouTube in the U.S. 

My ratings:

The Lady Maid’s Bell (5/5)

The Eyes (4/5)

Afterward (5/5)

Kerful (5/5)

The Triumph of Night (2.5/5)

The Duchess at Prayer (5/5)

Miss Mary Pask (5/5)

Bewitched (5/5)

The Fullness of Life (4/5)

Mr. Jones (5/5)

Pomegranate Seed (3/5)

The Looking Glass (3/5)

A Journey (5/5)

All Souls’ (4/5)

A Bottle of Perrier (4/5)