Backlisted - Ghosts by Edith Wharton

Episode Date: October 29, 2018

It's Halloween and John and Andy are joined by novelist Lissa Evans and Backlisted's resident revenant, critic Andrew Male, to discuss Ghosts, Edith Wharton's selection of her best supernatural tales, first published in 1937. John also talks about Alan Garner's new memoir Where Shall We Run To? while Andy has been reading Daphne du Maurier's prophetic final novel Rule Britannia.6'57 - Rule Britannia by Daphne Du Maurier13'27 - Where shall We Run To? by Alan Garner17'40 - Ghosts by Edith WhartonTimings may differ due to variable advert length* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. what have you been up to that the man in the street can relate to or the woman i did have to do a talk last night and actually had had to give the Christopher Rick's lecture at King Alfred's Academy in Wantage.

So it was a bit of an honour to do it. And I, to be honest, I basically just did a... 50 minutes is quite a long time to speak. I mean, I can tell you it's nearly 6,000 words of a printed-out lecture. Had you written 6,000 words? I had written 6,000 words, yeah. And then they had students interview me. But I basically just did the books that made me, that classic thing. So starting with Great Northern by Arthur Ransom, which is the first book I remember choosing in a library and

taking home and reading, because I was nuts about birds. And it was the last of the Swallows and Ambersons, but a good place to start. And then there's quite a bit about Willa Cather, and I read a bit of Sarah Hall, and I read a bit of Sarah Hall and I read a bit of, I was basically putting five propositions on why reading is an important thing. You know, the kind of thing you do all the time. Why we should read books. Yeah, why you should read books, concentrate, finish them.

All those things. All the Puritan stuff. All that stuff. And did you use the opportunity? And I finished with a great thing about ambiguity and Dickens and that Christopher Ricks was the person who introduced to me the shocking fact that Great Expectations had an original ending, which is so much better than the one that most people know,

which is where he rather wimps out. He was encouraged by Bull Willetton to soften the ending so he sort of gets Estella and Pip back together in the end. And they were never parted. There's no shadow of another part. That was it. That was the final one. I paraphrase.

But in the original... Get it wrong, you know. He's in Piccadilly with little Pip, who Estella mistakes for being his own son, and it's obviously Biddy and Joe's son. And there's a fantastic sentence, which I won't paraphrase now, the last sentence, one of the great sentences, like sort of Gatsby-like.

She knew what she put me through and her heart knew what my heart had once been. And it's just brilliant, but sadly not the... So I was talking about how it's possible in fiction to do that, constant multiple reworkings of the same thing. I'm afraid somebody mentioned Priestley. Oh, Inspector Calls. So I just groaned loudly and said, what the fuck

are we doing pushing this kind of, it's not even the best of Priestley. What are we doing? Why are we forcing all these children from every kind of corner of the land to hate literature by getting them to read this stuff? I should think most English teachers have had enough of teaching

and inspector calls by now. God, I know. How much more is there to say? My son's doing it at the moment. It's not really... We had it last year. It is like some sort of weird, grisly ritual that you have to go through. I mean, I would imagine that's some sort of like,

if you were going to be cursed as a writer, that's exactly what you would, your worst fear is that you'd be on a GCSE kind of curriculum that's read and hated by everyone. Spoilers, everyone. As it's Halloween, he's a ghost. Oh, I am sorry. Is he, though?

Is he? Ah, is he? That's ambiguity. And that's ambiguity. Anyway, I didn't get heckled. It's all right. Of course, I'll get the usual questions about scoring in QI. It's only anyone ever cares about.

Mumble, mumble, mumble. Shall we start this thing? Hello and welcome to a special Halloween edition of Backlisted, the podcast that raises books from the grave. Today you find us in spectral mode, moving soundlessly through the cool autumnal air, from quiet

townhouses in New York to ancient Dorsetshire manors, to wind-battered cottages on the Breton coast, in search of who knows what. I'm John Mitchison, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today are two revenants from backlisted past.

Welcome back. The ghost of Lissa Evans. Hello. Hello. Helloans hello hello hello writer producer director and author of three children's books and five novels including most recently old baggage a book i have praised extravagantly and justifiably so on this very podcast lisa joined us on our very first episode and to talk about a month in the country by j Carr. And then she came back to talk about The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. And I ambushed her by then making her talk about Lincoln in the Bardot by George Saunders. And we're recording this on the evening of the announcement of the Man Booker Prize.

We don't know what it will be yet. Lyssa, is there a contemporary novel that you have enjoyed recently? Well, yes, and very appropriately, it's Sarah Perry's Melmoth, which is dark, it's whirling, it tosses you from story to story. It's about guilt, it's about despair. I really loved it. I read it in about three minutes. Was she published after the cut-off of the book?

I don't know how it was. I don't know. You know. Too popular. Sarah Perry, this novel seems to be attracting some excellent reviews, such as yours, Lisa, and some mixed reviews elsewhere. And the mixed reviews that I've read do seem to be very, very squarely in the bracket of we built them up last time

and now it's time to knock them down. So it's really nice to hear you enthusing about it. I really loved it i absolutely loved it and there are passages that you you reread and they they stir you up like a like a wand stirring oh my god i've run out of metaphors that's just a reminder this is it's our halloween episode we're also joined by and Mayall. Welcome back, Andrew. Hello. Fourth time. Fourth time for Andrew Mayall. The resident resident. He is our Halloween returnee. He's been on all our Halloween episodes and he's back again.

The first year you did Robert Aikman. Yeah. Last year you did... Shirley Jackson. Shaky Shirley. Our most popular episode ever. Still, yeah. Andrew is the Senior Associate Editor of mojo magazine and he writes

about film radio and tv for sight and sound and sunday times culture and if that listed has a resident ghost it would surely be andrew may also welcome back we're here to talk about ghosts by edith warden a collection of 11 stories she made and introduced shortly before she died in 1937. The book was published most appropriately, posthumously. But first, before we get on to the ghostly tales of Edith Wharton, let's gather a little closer around the fireside, for Andy has a tale to tell. What have you been reading, Andy? I've been reading... OK, so this week I have read

Daphne du Maurier's final novel novel published in 1972, Rule Britannia. Right, I'm just going to read you the blurb on the first The Hardback. I'd never read any of Daphne du Maurier's famous books. I've only read this and I'll Never Be Young Again, which was one of the most insane, it's her second novel, absolutely crackers. It was written when she was 25 and it seems, Andrew and I always say this,

it has not necessarily in a good way this time. It does seem to have been made up as she was 25, and it seems, Andrew and I always say this, it has not necessarily been in a good way this time. It does seem to have been made up as she was going along. She just thought, oh, I wonder what I should write about today. I don't know. Anyway, this is her final novel, The Other End, from 1972, and this is the first paragraph of the blurb of the original edition, the Harnback edition. Emma, who lives in Cornwall with her grandmother,

a famous retired actress, wakes one morning to find that the world has apparently gone mad. No post, no telephone, no radio, a warship in the bay and American soldiers advancing across the field towards the house. The time is a few years in the future. England has withdrawn from the common market and on the brink of bankruptcy has decided that salvation lies in a union, political, military and economic, with the United States. Theoretically, it is to be an equal partnership, but to some people it soon begins to look like a takeover bid. My word. So this is Daphne du Maurier's Brexitxit cassandra profit novel who knew she had one but she does it is and i'll tell you what it's not her best but i haven't read her best but it's

utterly mad it is one of the strangest um again she seems to occupy a really interesting zone in how she writes, where she feels her way towards what the next bit of action is going to be. It's clearly not very carefully plotted. She knows how she wants to start. She knows where she thinks she's going to end up. And then she just tosses anything she feels like into the pot and and pot as she's going along I found it really readable while also thinking what this is nuts this is properly nuts and what she tries to do is she tries to give you a picture of a Cornish village which under US occupation different shopkeepers and members of the community and children are affected in different ways. And one of the ways they're affected

is that one of the retired actresses, brood of adopted children, in a reprisal for a US Marine shooting their dog, shoots a different US Marine through the forehead with a bow and arrow. Well, that seems fair. I mean, he killed the dog, Andy. That explains the graphic cover of it.

And then the book becomes a moral discussion of how right or wrong it is to take life. Daphne DiMorio seems to say it's fine. It's fine. Shooting US Marines with arrows because they're Marines and they're Americans. And they killed the dog. And they killed the dog.

That's fine. It's fine. Nothing to worry about. So clearly when this book came out, it did get mixed reviews and also quite difficult for the marketing department to position. I'll just read you a paragraph. Spry, the farm collie, a wizard with his master's sheep but terrified of all explosive sounds from thunderstorms to aircraft flying low,

must have escaped from his safe lair at the farmstead over the hill and was now running as if for his life across the field in front of the advancing soldiers. One of the men paused and took aim but did not shoot. Then, as another helicopter roared low over the roof, Spry, in panic, turned at bay towards the advancing soldier, barking fiercely as was his want with strangers upon his territory, and this time the soldier fired. God rot his guts, cried Mad. Spry was no longer the guardian of his master's flock, but something bleeding and torn, not even a dog.

Are you trying to kill me, Andy. I mean, you know. You know, that's the thing. And is the lead character called Mad? Yes. How good is that? Right, no mucking about. So, by the time the paperback comes out, how are they going to sell this crazy book?

Crazy quotes from the hardback review. All right, I'm going to read you the blurb on the back. It's magnificent. You and I read the quotes on the back of this book and both went, there was some scraping going on here. Here we go. So you remember the previous one was quite thoughtful,

wasn't it? The American sees England and one woman defies them! US Marines land in Cornwall and Mad, a world-famous ex-actress, autocratic and irresistible, rallies her family, friends and neighbours to protect their heritage. This is what's going to happen in the next few months. This needs to be read in the To Ronnie's Charlie Farley and Peggy Maroon voice, doesn't it? Unforgettable characters from the enchanted pen of a favourite storyteller hold you spellbound as they live more dangerously, more excitingly, more spectacularly than any of Trelawney's

countrymen since danger last threatened these shores. Now somebody is over-egging quite a pudding with an unusual taste, can I just say. Anyway, so here are the review quotes. The Sunday Telegraph said, the spirit of Britannia embodied. The Observer noted, the Dumourieu touch still entices. Putting my elbow into the lukewarm bath. There's some giant butts after these, aren't there?

Consistently entertaining. Bellows the Sunday Times times and finally from the mirror du maurier's best-selling novel is a political thriller you know what i really i suspect there has never been a better time we need four we haven't got four we've got three at best. We need four. Well, just print it. It doesn't matter. They'll only read the first three. I'm going to look at the mirror. I reckon there's never been a better moment in history

than now to read Daphne du Maurier's Rue Britannia. I thought what I might actually do is read Rebecca next. John, what have you read? Loved her. Loved her. I hated her. Sorry. Spoiler.

Shut up. John, what have you been reading this week? I have been reading Pure Delight, which is a memoir, an unexpected late gift from Alan Garner, one of my favourite writers, as you will all know from previous podcasts. His memoir, Where Shall We Run To? Which is a short, exquisitely written book about his childhood. And I was puzzled because I thought in a way he'd kind of written about his childhood through Stone Book Quartet, The History of His Family.

He'd written beautiful essays in The Voice That Thunders. And I wondered what was left to tell. Well, I didn't really need to. I mean, if Garner's writing a book, there's got to be a reason for it. And it is a series of about 15 short anecdotes. Many of them are set during the war years because he was war generation. So there's a lot of gas masks. There are nettles being pushed into nettles. There's bullying. There is, you know, keeping a pet budgie that dies. It's very 1940s. There's fabulously comics, including one I'd never heard of. Stonehenge Kit, the ancient Brit who fights Whizzy the Wicked Wizard and the Brit Bashers. bashes. So I just think, I just love the idea of, you know, Cadellan the White started life as Whizzy the Wicked Wizard in some way. So he writes beautifully and brilliantly about his

classmates. He writes obviously about his illness. He fell very seriously, nearly died of diphtheria. And so he spent a lot of his early life, which is probably the making of him in Living on the Ceiling, one of the essays in Voice of the Thunders, he writes about how his imagination was allowed to, in this sort of semi-doped-up state, thinking he invented kind of worlds on his ceiling. But the thing I like most about it is that knowing how funny he is, you know, you're not overburdened with laughs in the fiction,

but there's some very very funny scenes and i'm going to read you just one quick one here this is about mr noon who is the moon-faced caretaker of the school who is he's got he's also a cobbler so it's classic sort of everybody's a craftsman of some kind this is about him and his wife and his the house that they live in and the bad thing that happened to them the bad thing that happened to them involves a man called Glyn Ridgeway. I don't know why. Glyn Ridgeway lived in the back streets and worked for the council. He did the jobs that didn't need him to be clever.

And one day he came to get rid of the rats that were in the main sewer down the middle of Trafford Road. He opened the manhole cover by turning a key on the end of a rod with a handle on top. There was a deep shaft to the water with iron rungs to climb on. But this day, Glyn Ridgeway didn't go down. He bought a sack of carbide and he lifted the cover outside our house and poured the carbide into the shaft so it would mix with the water and the gas would kill the rats. When he saw the water was bubbling and fizzing, he put the cover back and locked it.

But as he locked it, as he locked the cover, he dropped his cigarette end down the shaft. The gas exploded and the force of the explosion went along the sewer so fast it couldn't escape sideways into the house drains. It went all the way along Trafford Road to the end. But at the end, the very last house on the sewer in Tyler Street was Mr. Noone's. Mrs. Noone was sitting on the lavatory and the explosion came up the drain and lifted the lavatory off its base and threw Mrs. Noone into the air. Mr. Noone was at home and he heard the crash and Mrs. Noone screaming. When he got to her, he found her on the floor among the pieces of the bowl with the seat round her neck and her knickers round her ankles.

I don't remember how we knew this last bit, but that was what everybody said happened. Mrs Noon wasn't hurt, although she was under the doctor with nerves for a long time after, and Mr Noon retired. But by then the war was over, and the Chelford boys, that was the local bullies, didn't come any more.

It's just lovely. I mean, it's complete bliss. It takes no time to read. We're all Garner fans gathered here, aren't we, anyway? It's minor Garner, I suppose, in the overall scheme of things. It's some Garner. But the point is it's every word as usual in the right place. Great fun.

Okay, it's time now for an advert. So we've talked about Daphne du Maurier and we've talked about Alan Garner. Now let us turn our attention to Ghosts by Edith Wharton. So Edith Wharton, is she well known for her ghost stories? Do you think? She might be in our world, but I don't think she is generally. She's in every anthology I've ever seen. She is.

I think the thing is, it's a question that she is, if you like ghost stories, but not everybody seeks out and reads ghost stories, I don't think. No, they're a weird people don't. Yeah, I still think they're niche. And I think the people who've read Age of Innocence or Custom of the Country or Ethan Frome might not even know that she writes ghost stories. So I think if you're into ghost stories, you know of Edith Wharton

because probably one of the first ghost story anthology you read probably had an Edith Wharton story in it, and it was probably afterward. So I think if you know your ghost stories, you know about Edith Wharton. But I think conversely, if you know your Edith Wharton, you may not know about her ghost stories. So Lisa, when did you first encounter Edith Wharton's ghost stories? Well, I had probably the greatest present I ever had when I was about 12 or 13. It was a box set of the Fontana ghost stories. I think it was four of them in there.

And they infused my consciousness for years and probably prevented sleep for just as many years. But one of them was a story called Afterwood, as you said, by Edith Wharton. And it has stayed in my head for all these years. And therefore, you know, I carried on enjoying ghost stories and I therefore spotted her. I kept spotting her, you know, as I read on in future years. And do you think that is actually the first time that you had heard of Edith Wharton? About 12. Yeah. Well, I assumed you were precocious. Of course. in future years. And do you think that is actually the first time that you had heard of Edith Wharton? Was that your interest?

Well, I'm about 12, so I think so, yeah. Well, I assumed you were precocious, but yes, of course. Well, obviously, I'd already read The Age of Innocence. Yeah, yeah, that's a given. But it probably was the first time that you'd encountered Edith Wharton. Yes, yes. And so I find that fascinating because you're coming out the other way round where you think of her as this author of uncanny tales,

who you then discover actually has this huge body of literary work, which exists... We'll come on to this. They don't exist apart from one another. It seems to me that the ghost stories are very much in the continuum of the things that Edith Wharton writes about anyway, but she twists it slightly. Andrew, when did you first encounter Edith Wharton's ghost stories?

In this book that I've brought along here, The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, The 20th Century, Volume 2. I'd previously devoured The Virago Book of Ghost 1, because of the editor, a chap called Richard Dolby, who I had been following because he put together excellent compilations of ghost stories. And in my early 20s, late teens, early 20s, I was obsessed with reading ghost stories. And I have probably got Richard Dolby to thank for introducing me to Edith Wharton and

yes the story and the collection is afterward but also introducing me to Viraga because I was I read some women authors in my late teens early 20s but I'd been wary of Edith Wharton purely on the on the sound of her name it didn't sound like it was a lot of fun if he of Edith Wharton purely on the sound of her name. It didn't sound like it was a lot of fun to be called Edith Wharton. They sounded quite kind of... Tough. Yeah, I know. Give me a name that sounds exciting to you in your 20s. H.P. Lovecraft.

Exactly. And kind of, you know, Edith in the mid-80s, Edith wasn't the most popular name or the most exciting that and kind of so and i was and i was and i was a young man seeking thrills and adventure hormones running right yeah edith hey um and so thank you richard dolby for a making me realize that women write the best ghost stories um it is and also introducing me to the imprint of Virago, which has become probably my favourite fiction imprint. Is there a du Maurier in there, incidentally?

Because I think she's a superb... There is, The Pool. Oh, OK. Not one of my favourites, but she's an astonishingly good girl. I mean, just a quick rundown, the people in here. A.S. Byatt, Celia Fremlin, Rebecca West, Daphne du Maurier, Penelope L e nesbit gene reese ruth rendall yeah i used to live here once by gene reese yeah so i mean absolutely

fantastic invaluable book but that's the route i came to eat like you i came to edith wharton through the ghost stories so let's let me say a little bit about what this book is. It's a collection called Ghosts, and it was published in 1937. As John said earlier, it was actually published posthumously, but it was Edith Wharton's own selection of what she considered to be her best supernatural tales. And the only book she wrote an introduction for. Yes, and she also wrote a preface. Now, listeners, if you intend to read along with us the collection Ghosts,

you actually, it's not as straightforward as just buying or downloading a volume of Edith Wharton's Ghost Stories. There are at least four or five different editions and different versions, all of which have different stories in. I've worked out, it was actually quite difficult to discover what stories were included in Ghosts. And one of the things that I've realised about Edith Wharton, which funnily enough, our former guest,

I was listening to an interview with our former guest, Hermione Lee, biographer of Edith Wharton, and she was saying even 10 years ago, Wharton's, there is no collected edition of Edith Wharton's works. Interesting. Unlike her friend, Henry James, who I'm sure we'll talk about. She fell off, didn't she? Her reputation fell off quite sharply.

And still nobody has taken the time to publish a complete edition. So there's all sorts of different collections out there and variations. If you want to read Ghosts, the selection that Edith Wharton made herself, you will need the Virago edition of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton and the Wordsworth edition of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. Only the Virago one has her brilliant preface in it, which we'll hear a bit more of in a moment. But these are the stories that you need.

These are the stories that ring ghosts. They are The Lady's Maid's Bell, The Eyes, Afterwood, which we were just talking about, Kerfol, The Triumph of Night, Miss Mary Pask, Bewitched, A Bottle of Perrier, Mr Jones, Pomegranate Seed, and All Souls. And All Souls was the only original story in this collection. It's one of the last things that Wharton wrote. We might mention that later on as well, because it's fascinating in terms of how it lives in her work and her relation to her own work. So I'm sorry if that's all a bit, I mean, it's a bit complex, and you can always rewind it and write it down. But fundamentally, we are, because we're backlisted, we're concentrating on an actual book rather than just the ghost stories of edith wharton i didn't really have her down as ghost story writer but then i'm not i'm not um you know i'm not an obsessive consumer of the genre although i am interested in what you say about some people i love ghost stories and i'm always happy to read more i'm interested in what you say

people who don't like them i left this seemingly innocuous book on the table today and one of the members of staff asked me if I would move it because it was freaking her out. Wow. It just says, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton and there's a picture of a bell which is kind of hanging from a door fixture. It's about as scary as a Screwfix catalogue. I would find that scary.

There is an Edith Wharton link there. Go on. Because she used to be terrified by books containing ghost stories. Yes, she did. In The Backward Glance autobiography, she writes that until I was 27 or 8, I could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghost story. I had to frequently burn books of this kind. Burn them?

Because it frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library. Oh, my goodness. Stop me if I've told you the terrible Dave Trott story about the exorcist. Did I tell this in the back? Listen, no. He had a friend who'd been completely so freaked out by reading The Exorcist he said, you know what I'm going to do?

I can't have it in my house I can't have it anywhere in my life. I'm going to drive to go to the end of the pier in Brighton throw it in the sea this weekend. I never want to see it again. So Trotty got a copy of it the weekend second hand copy, ran it under his tap and left it in the guy's desk.

And the guy's dead now. Great story. There is something about getting freaked out, isn't there? But that's one of the fascinating things about Wharton, that she kind of writes that out of her system. But also, and I know it's kind of a cliché to give Freudian readings of ghost stories, but there's so much about unearthing the subconscious in these stories

and all this stuff that she'd kept buried, especially during her marriage. So once she leaves her husband, this all comes to the surface. Well, this wouldn't be backlisted if we weren't joined by the shade of Anita Bruckner. What's the timing on that? 22 minutes in? Bruckner said this about Wharton's writing.

She said, the enormous power of sex, a phenomenon to which no overt reference is made, is apparent in everything Edith Wharton wrote. I froze that down! I know! There is so much sex in this story! Sex to her was not merely

an affair of the body, but the untrammeled enjoyment of the will and of destiny. As long as men and women seek to use each other and to use each other badly, Edith Wharton can be counted upon to provide the ideal commentary.

Damn it, because I've written something down and now I've got to compete with Anita Brutner. Because what I wrote was, in some ways, these stories are the antithesis of M.R. James. Yes. Where you've got someone sear, dry, academic, who's trying to cope with elemental, impersonal forces. Because these are corporeal.

They are about lust, they are about power, they are about love and they always involve people, real people. There's nothing ethereal about these. Well, James's sexuality and his fear of sex is buried so far down in those stories. I mean, occasionally there is a hairy mouth with teeth that grabs, you know. It's so subsumed, but it's just below the surface, isn't it?

It's like the ghost is the subtext in these stories. Let's just talk about the story afterward a bit, because we mentioned that earlier. It seems a good way in. Which is utterly magnificent. So that was written in 1910. I have my notes in front of me so I can offer a synopsis,

which, without spoiling the story, Mary Boyne and her husband are Americans who have profited in speculation at the Blue Star Mining Company, and they buy a house in England, in Dorsetshire, called Ling, and they're told it's haunted, as all English country houses must be, and you'll see the ghost, but you won't realise you've seen the ghost till afterward. Long, long afterward.

And so we've got a clip here from a Granada series called Shades of Darkness, which was broadcast in the mid-1980s. We're at the point in the story where Mary Boyne, the house's owner, is waiting for a visitor, and then she sees a stranger. Oh, yeah. I didn't see you. Excuse me. I came to see Mr. Boyne. Ah, yes, about the hot water pipes.

Well, my husband's working in his study but you'll find our gardener in the greenhouse I'll show you the way you're not from Gloucester are you about the pipes in the greenhouse I came to see mr. Boyne personally have you an appointment with my husband I think he expects me well I'm afraid he doesn't see anyone in the mornings. It's his working time and he doesn't like to be disturbed. May I ask, have you come a long way? Yes, I have come a long way.

Well, then I'm sure he'll make an exception. If you go in by the front entrance, you'll find him in the library. It's the first door on the left. Thank you. Excuse me if I don't come with you, but I am waiting for someone from Gloucester. The dialogue, they're very faithful to the dialogue. That dialogue is lifted directly from the story.

It's quite hard talking about it, isn't it? Because you don't want to totally give away the ending. I will say about this story, and it's typical of Edith Wharton in that her stories are atypical of ghost stories often. It's suffused in sunlight. If you think about afterwards, it's about a sunlit, beautiful landscape. There isn't a shadow in it.

That's it. Everything takes place in broad daylight. Extraordinary. But the other brilliant thing about it is, I mean, because obviously Edith Wharton wrote about houses. She wrote about interiors. She wrote about interior design. And she writes about houses beautifully.

And she designed and sort of built. Yeah, absolutely. And the way in which the house becomes a character. And there's a bit, can I just read a bit from afterward, because we're on it, just in terms of how the silent house becomes this thing of terror. No, she would never know what had become of him. No one would ever know. But the house knew. The library in which she spent her long lonely evenings knew.

For it was here that the last scene had been enacted. Here that the stranger had come and spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him. The floor she trod had felt his tread. The books on the shelves had seen his face, and there were moments when the intense consciousness of the old dusky walls seemed about to break out into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation never came, and she knew it would never come. Ling was not one of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets entrusted to them. Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised.

And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by any human means. I mean, that's fantastic, isn't it? And also the other great thing is that so many of these stories are about how threatening and evil silence is, of not saying. Well, she writes about that in the introduction, doesn't she? She does. She writes, now, I did write this quote down. Ghosts make themselves manifest require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind, silence and continuity. Yeah. Now, I did write this quote down. Ghosts make themselves manifest, require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind, silence and continuity.

And do you know what made me think, actually? Just off sideways was how many modern films use CCTV footage which have both those qualities of silence and continuity. Absolutely. It's so good, that introduction, isn't it? Yeah. You knew the beginning of it it it's witty as well do you believe in ghosts

is the pointless question often addressed by those who are incapable of feeling ghostly influences to I will not say the ghost seer always a rare bird but the ghost feeler the person sensible of invisible currents of being in certain places and at certain hours.

The celebrated reply, I forget whose, no I don't believe in ghosts but I'm afraid of them, is much more than the cheap paradox it seems to many. To believe in that sense is a conscious act of the intellect and it is in the warm darkness of the prenatal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with the gift of seeing. You know, Bruckner said that Wharton was incapable of writing a bad sentence. And every single bit that we're reading out in these stories, which were written to be published in magazines, this is one of the things about water. They were casual stories.

They are intended to, and yet they're so perfectly turned. Further on, she just, I'd love this, no-one ever expected a Latin to understand a ghost or shiver over it. To do that, one must still have in one's ears the hoarse music of the northern Urwald or the churning of dark seas on the outermost shores. Ah, that's a beast. One of the things I really liked about Ghosts as a collection and the fact that it's called Ghosts is that it contains, well, we'll talk about one in a moment, but it contains actual ghost stories where you unambiguously see a ghost. actual ghost stories where you unambiguously see a ghost.

And it contains stories that have seemingly no ghosts in them at all, where the ghostly presence is purely psychological or purely imagined. And if anything, she goes from The Lady's Maid Bell, which is the earliest story in this collection, which is one of the ones in which the ghost appears. But at the same time, that story, I don't know how you felt. I'd never read it before. It was one of the stories where I said to you, Andrew, I ended it and went, what?

Yeah. Talk about ambiguity. I had to go back and read it again. And even then. One of the brilliant things is so many of her narrators are ill. They're sick or they're weak. We like with typhoid, and they've been to sanatoriums and they are not to be trusted.

So there's a point all the way through where you think, well, how much of this is an unsound mind telling you this story? And the ladies' maid, the heroine of the lady... Well, it's not the heroine, the lady of the ladies' maid, is bullied, is an abused wife. And in fact, there is a rape in the book. It's absolutely, in the story, it's absolutely extraordinary. Of course, alluded to, of course, between the lines,

but there is no doubt that's what happens. But also there is the implication that how he treats her, you know, contributes to her death as well. It's a real, I mean... Let me give the synopsis. Hartley, the narrator, a lady's maid employed by Mrs. Brimpton to replace her former maid,

the now dead Emma Saxon, played in the Granada TV adaptation by June Brown, a.k.a. Dot Cotton. No! Emma Saxon's ghost appears to Hartley unambiguously to do what? I'm asking my colleagues around the table. What I think is so fascinating about the story is having presented you

with the unambiguous presence of the ghost, she then throws it on the reader to decide what is the ghost trying to tell us. I mean, that's the great thing, because at the end, you have questions about Mr Brimpton, you have questions about Ranford, like, is Ranford a weak character? Does he bottle it? What's been going on? What's been going on?

Did, you know, was Mr Brimpton going to murder Ranford? You know, is there... She also uses those hoary clichés of the ghost story, which is what's brilliant about it, which is, oh, ladies' maid, they don't last ten minutes round here. Oh, you won't last long in that job. And the other one, there's the door. I wouldn't come into that room.

But she is reworking those clichés of the Gothic novels, you know, and the Gothic short story. Can I read it? It was very little bit because I was talking about the relationship at the heart of it, which is Mrs Brimpton and her ghastly husband. And, I mean, listen to this for a description. This is nothing to do with ghosts. This is pure character.

About seven, Agnes called me to my mistress's room and there I found Mr Brimpton. He was standing on the hearth, a big, fair, bull-necked man with a red face and little, bad-tempered blue eyes. The kind of man a young simpleton might have thought handsome and would have been liked to pay dear for thinking it. He swung about when I came in and looked me over in a trice. I knew what the look meant from having experienced it once or twice in my former places. Then he turned his back on me and went on talking to his wife and I knew what the look meant from having experienced it once or twice in my former places. Then he turned his back on me and went on talking to his wife. And I knew what that meant, too.

I was not the kind of morsel he was after. The typhoid had served me well enough in one way. It kept that kind of gentleman at arm's length. Oh, that is nice. But I want to quickly get back to the thing that John was saying about the kind of the Gothic cliches. I think kind of I think you're absolutely right. It was interesting. One of the good book people on Twitter

who calls himself Biblioclept, Edwin Turner. And he was saying that in American literature, the gothic is inescapable. It's this thing that kind of writers are trying to escape from, but they never can, especially male writers, the domestic and the gothic. And I thought that's really fascinating in relation to Wharton's ghost stories,

because they often seem to be about the inability of the modern to free itself from the gothic but also she uses the gothic to unearth these hidden silent repressed things and to punish men a lot of the time i mean it's so obvious look how many women are in her stories compared to the average ghost story i mean it's packed with them and not just servants you know they're women of every profession and every trade almost every story is also concerned

to some degree or other in marriage or the relationship between men and women it's a different kind of shade I mean some of the ones that weren't in this book the Duchess at Prayer

which is I mean that's a that's pure Poe that story yes absolutely about the statue with the well the Duchess at Prayer, which is, I mean, that's pure Poe, that story. Yes, absolutely. About the statue with the... Well, the Duchess at Prayer, she wrote before she wrote The Lady's Maid's Bell. So it's kind of, I don't think it's kind of strictly categorised as a ghost story,

but it kind of almost is. It's got the same story at the heart of it as well. Well, exactly, yeah. Yeah, exactly the same. I'm just going to say a bit about Wharton, because I think I thought before I started reading around for this episode, I think I thought I knew who Edith Wharton was or I thought what type of writer she was or what type of person she was.

And actually, when you look at the biography, I'm going to give you a few things in the biography which are fascinating and surprising. So she's born Edith Newbold Jones in New York in 1862, and the Jones family legendarily give their name to the phrase keeping up with the Joneses. She's a member of a distinguished New York family. She was educated privately in the United States and abroad,

and in 1885 she marries Edward Robbins Wharton, disastrously, who was 12 years her senior and from whom she was divorced in 1913. When she was a child, she used to walk around with a book in front of her doing this thing that the family called making up, which was she would read out her own story that she was making up as she went along. No one in that society group knew what to do with this prodigious talent, because it wasn't the sort of thing that would help get you the right husband. Her mother famously forbade her to read novels until she was married. It's not a thing, that is.

So she had to write fiction in secret. Yeah, and it was referred to as the family disgrace. Age 15, Edith Wharton wrote a 30,000-word novella called Fast and Loose. That fact alone, right? So her first published book was a huge success called The Decoration of Houses. It's an interior decoration book, which she co-wrote. She's divorced in 1913.

She spends long periods in France and in Europe. And she's in France during the First World War. She ran a workroom for unemployed, skilled women workers in her quarter. She fed French and Belgian refugees in her restaurants. She took entire charge of 600 Belgian children who had to leave their orphanage at the time of the German advance. And in 1915, the French government gave her the cross of the Legion of Honour. in advance and in 1915 the French government gave her the cross of the Legion of Honour. Meanwhile she's writing 15 novels, seven novellas, 86 short stories, poetry, travel writing, memoir,

literary criticism. She's the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for the Age of Innocence. She makes the equivalent of $5 million in royalties between 1921 and 1925. And yet by the time she dies, just over 10 years later, she is little red and is having to flog stories to magazines again because she's totally fallen out of favour. She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times, 1927, 1928 and 1930. And she never won it. And did her reputation lie fallow, as it were, for a long time after she died?

Yes. And was it sort of the Virago revolution that brought her back into it? She is almost rediscovered in the 1980s yeah and then of course in the early 90s and again in 2000 there are films made of the age of innocence so a little bit like yes actually very like willa cather we did willa cather in the year of course and actually the differences and similarities that are striking amazingly om. And they make amazingly omnicompetent, brilliant women who are not just good at writing but also good at running things and doing things and, you know, kind of commercially astute.

I said earlier that Wharton was famous for her interior design. This is a clip from a PBS documentary which explores one of Edith Wharton's estates and I want you to pay particular attention to the experts that they have brought on to discuss Edith Wharton's food. Edith Wharton loved to entertain and she also liked to entertain outside and with a garden like this why not. I'm with Francine Segan, who is a food historian. Hi, Francine. Hello, Bill.

It's so lovely to be with you today in this gorgeous Edith Wharton. It is gorgeous here. So you can tell me that at a picnic in the late 1800s, the early 1900s, what they were really eating and what was popular and what was in vogue. Exactly.

Oh, fun. So let's kind of look at this wonderful array we have. And when they came to a picnic, all the elegance of the time period would have come with them. So they would have brought things like beautiful silver salt and pepper shakers. Nice. And even little sandwich picker-uppers. Yeah, exactly.

And then the sandwiches. I love rediscovering the delicious foods that they had. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They would have made sandwiches with a wonderful minced pineapple and ham. I like that idea, pineapple and ham. It's delicious. What happened to that?

I know. I think we should rediscover some of these delicious, delicious foods of the past. That's one recipe, and you're going to love this one. some of these delicious, delicious foods of the past. That's one recipe, and you're going to love this one. Jams were something that were adored in Edith Wharton's time and in the Gilded Age in the late 1800s. She invented the pineapple and ham pizza. Why don't they call it the Edith Wharton?

The Wharton. Still, I could do with a sandwich picker-upper, because God knows on a picnic that's what you need. It's when she says, I'm so excited to be here amongst this beautiful Edith Wharton. So I'm sorry, you know, I'm sorry for mocking your American listeners anyway. Can I just say what the Age of Incense beat

when it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921? Yes, please. For the year, it beat Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, which was supposed to win, but the judges decided it was too political. Wow. How about that? Perhaps decisions like that are being made across the country.

Yes. I thought this might be quite interesting. Perhaps decisions like that are being made across the board. Yes. I thought this might be quite interesting. All these wonderful women writers, Hermione Lee, Anita Bruckner, and here Penelope Lively, write about Wharton. And, John, you were saying what had happened to Wharton's reputation. And this is Penelope Lively on that subject. I think you might find this very interesting. She says, Edith Wharton's reputation has undergone interesting vicissitudes. In her own lifetime, she moved from small beginnings to bestsellerdom, enjoying both wide readership and

high literary esteem, and enabled by her earnings to make the well-meant but grand delinquent clandestine gesture of diverting part of her own royalties from Scribner's to Henry James as a hefty advance on a new novel. James was astonished, deceived and gratified. That's lovely. But she was always an uneven writer. Her large oeuvre reveres from the accomplishment of masterpieces like Ethan Frome, The Reef, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, to secondary works like Hudson River Bracketed and Some of the Stories. She was prolific, writing travel books, a manual on interior decoration, and even a startling fragment of unpublished pornography. But by the end of her life in 1937, she had fallen victim to swings in literary taste and social preoccupations. Her novels were seen as old-fashioned and her concerns as elitist and of minimal interest.

It was the age of Lawrence and Joyce. She was relegated to the ranks of lesser writers. In England, indeed, she remained a fairly unknown name until a recent revival of interest in the appearance of her work in paperback. So that's Virago. Her biographer felt constrained to wonder in the first comprehensive examination of her work in paperback so that's virago her biographer felt constrained to wonder in the first comprehensive examination of her life and work whether her reputation might today stand even higher if she had been a man she had been seen indeed as a poor man's henry james a comparison that is inevitable given their relationship and her undoubted debt to his advice and criticism with its consequent reflection in her style and approach. This, though, is both to underestimate and misinterpret her work.

Edith Wharton was her own woman, and at her best, she combines muscularity and dash with an individual perception and strong psychological insight. That's pretty good. I think that's a really good, and that's really true, I think, of the stories in Ghosts. Yeah. You know, they're often, the thing about psychological insight

is the engine of the story less than the scare. Yeah, absolutely. Right? I wonder, it's really interesting why she was motivated to collect them at that stage in her life, whether it's a sort of, because actually as a collection, they do work brilliantly together. And I suppose, you know, if you've written a lot,

if you've written, what was it, 89 stories? 86. Sorry, 86 stories. And, you know, the problem is how do you make collections of stories add up to more than the sum of their parts? And actually you could argue that, you know, they all echo the same themes. And obviously the ghost is the idea that links them together.

There is a quote in A Backward Glance where she specifically talks about the two worlds that she exists in and she describes the world of literature as the supernatural world and the normal world as everyday life. And so I think she definitely saw that kind of transportive and transformative kind of quality of the supernatural also if you look at her childhood it's like that of a gothic heroine you know she was trapped in these kind of suffocating interiors she was restrained and criticized by her mother she was

left alone in these big huge houses you know it's kind of and i think she identified with that and i think also her coming to terms with the supernatural as the story in terms of a thing that used to terrify her and another thing that she uses as a way to write about class and the relationships between men and women. I think its importance grows as she gets older. It also struck me that you can't really do ghost novels in the same way. There's something about the short form that is

perfect. Except Beyond Black. Yes, but that is... Turn of the Scrooge? It's a novella. A novella. Beyond Black is in its own league, I think. It's invented its own genre, Beyond Black, I think.

I mean, but point taken. In fact, that in a way is a praise, there's just more praise heaped on beyond black. There's nobody else. I can't think of a book where there's supernatural. I think the rule has just been proved. Yeah. Very quickly, there's another quote from A Backward Glance

which relates to the pomegranate seed before we move on to it, and it's her talking about writing. And she says, Words lured me from the wholesome noonday air of childhood into some strange supernatural region where the normal pleasures of my age seemed as insipid as the fruits of the earth to persephone after she had eaten of the pomegranate seed ah well you see i'd rather read The Pomegranate Seed than the whole of Lawrence's oeuvre, frankly. Sorry, Mitch. Down the dumper he goes.

One day, one day, I think. It's a tremendous story. It's relentless. It's like the slow approach of a shunting train, you know, when you're tied to the track. Of course we know pretty much straight away what the letters are. The plot is that there is a young woman called Charlotte Ashby, who is married a widower called Kenneth Ashby.

And the first Mrs Ashby was quite a powerful figure. And the husband was supposed to be very in love with her. But nevertheless, he seems to be very, very happy in his second marriage. There are two children from the first marriage they come back off honeymoon and there is a letter waiting in the hall in the squarish grey envelope and the letter distresses the husband in some indefinable way and the letters keep coming they're always hand delivered they're always on the hall table waiting and And every time he gets one, it changes him. She's worried it is slowly killing him. And in the end, she spies on him one night when he's opening it and she sees him read it and she sees him kiss the letter. And Charlotte Ashby accuses

him of having an old lover that he's still in contact with and he denies it absolutely. He says it's a business, a business acquaintance from the past. And eventually, Charlotte tries to break the spell and suggests they should go away on holiday. And the husband says, yes, I will arrange that. We'll go tomorrow. And then he disappears and one last letter turns up. And I'm going to just just read a bit. The first time she opens it. She tried to slip her finger under the flap of the envelope, but it was so tightly stuck that she had to hunt on her husband's writing table for his ivory letter opener. As she pushed about the familiar objects, his own hands had so lately touched, they sent through her

the icy chill emanating from the little personal effects of someone newly dead. In the deep silence of the room, the tearing of the paper as she slipped the envelope sounded like a human cry. She drew out the sheet and carried it to the lamp. Well, Mrs Ashby asked below her breath. Charlotte did not move her answer. She was bending over the page with wrinkled brows, holding it nearer and nearer to the light. Her sight must be blurred or else dazzled by the reflection of the lamplight on the smooth surface of the paper for strain her eyes as she would she could discern only a few faint strokes so faint and faltering as to be nearly undecipherable She went back to the table and, sitting down close to Kenneth's reading lamp, slipped the letter under magnifying glass. All the time she was aware that her mother-in-law was watching her intently. Well, Mrs Ashby breathed.

Well, it's no clearer. I can't read it. You mean the paper is absolutely blank? No, not quite. There is writing on it. I can make out something like... Mine. Oh, and come, it might be. Come. Lisa.

Yes. Right. I love this story. Yes. I understand why it's your favourite. But, and spoilers, everyone, you can fast forward, say, a minute and a half. I didn't understand the ending. I put my hand up and say, I don't understand the ending.

Tonally, I think I got it. But the gathered experts around the table, what happens is, in a nutshell, the wife and the husband's mother seem to me to say to one another, we are women, we have no option but to carry on. Is that right? For me, it's keeping up appearances yeah basically that that who could they ever explain this to they have to act as if he's going to come back they have to act as if this is in some way normal which of course the symbolic level there is pretty straightforward right but i also think there's a there's a thing an ongoing thing in all the

stories which i kind of mentioned earlier this kind of moving into the modern to escape the gothic and i think there's a definite theme running through this story that's about that because there's that quote outside there she thought skyscrapers advertisements telephones wireless airplanes movies motors and all the rest of the 20th century and on the other side of the door something i can't explain i can't relate to them something as old as the world as mysterious as life and i think that's what it's about it's about because i think when wharton was kind of critiqued after her death, a lot of the time it was by the modernists, wasn't it?

Yeah, that's right. But in a sense, she is a kind of modernist, you know, and she is reworking old classical tropes to new ends. And she is kind of questioning kind of the role of these old tropes within a modern era. As a book, that she's taken a selection of stories written throughout her life and made them into some kind of statement, something that's greater than the sum of its parts. It really ought to be imprinted in its own right. It actually rather reminded me of what Alan Garner did with his book of goblins, where

he edited, you know, that idea of a really thought through anthologyology kind of redefines what a goblin is through that anthology it's the same thing isn't it the ghosts in this book as we say that the bottle of perrier isn't really a ghost at all but it's a it's it's the idea that that is the go i'd go so far as to argue that they are some of her most autobiographical stories, informed by her own story, her own shifts in terms of her romances, in terms of her kind of emotional development. And I think the supernatural is key because she starts off as a woman terrified of the supernatural. And then she comes to use them as this way of writing about herself, but a way of writing about women in the turn of the century and class and men. I mean, yes, she's doing that in the other books as well, but the fact that there is, as Lyssa says, there's so much sex and threat

and things that she wasn't writing about as explicitly in the novels, I don't think. I don't know what Virago are planning. I know they're planning to reissue it. Would they not just reissue it as Ghosts by Edith Wharton? I mean, it just seems like... Come on, Donna, I know you're listening. It just would seem like an absolutely brilliant thing to do.

Indeed. I would also like to add, before we wrap up, that I had one of those lovely things when preparing for this episode, where a reminder that sometimes a book is in the canon not because a cultural gatekeeper has insisted it be there, but because it's really good. And so I read several books in the run-ups to this episode,

including The Age of Innocence. And the reason why The Age of Innocence is widely referred to as a masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the earliest 20th century is because it's a masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the earliest 20th century is because it's a masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the earliest 20th century what an incredible book that is I've never read it, I must say

see that's what I mean, because it seems too obvious I agree with that it's amazing because she's called Edith Wharton isn't it it's a bit of a buzzkill she was good on names as well. Can I just say that The Custom of the Country, another of her greatest books,

contains one of the greatest anti-heroines of all time, sort of like Becky Sharp, but dimmer, called Undine Sprague. And it is so worth reading. Undine Sprague. Okay, that's, I'm afraid, all we have time for. Huge thanks to Lissa and Andrew, to our producer, Nicky Birch, and to our spirit guides at Unbound.

Sorry. Bring it back around to Halloween, everybody. Shake some chains. You can download all 77 backlisted. John, why not write this in a way I can say it? You can download oh Heaven to Heaven

Backlisted plus follow up all the links clips and suggestions for further reading on our website backlisted.fm and of course

you can contact us on Twitter Facebook and Boundless we hope you've enjoyed this episode as much as we all have we always love

the Halloween episodes thanks Lissa thanks Andrew for rising from the grave back to the plot with you We hope you've enjoyed this episode as much as we all have. We always love the Halloween episodes. Thanks, Lissa. Thanks, Andrew, for rising from the grave. Back to the plot with you. If you've enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review with stars if you feel so moved on iTunes or whichever platform lights your tallow candle. Oh, I say. It's all about sex, Lissa.

It's all about sex. Well. It's all about sex. Well, that's it. See you in a fortnight. Good evening, Lisa. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

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