The Ghost Feeler

PRAISE FOR
THE GHOST-FEELER

‘Edith Wharton described herself as having an “intense Celtic sense of the supernatural.”
The Ghost-Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural,
selected and introduced by Peter Haining, contains nine stories that Wharton wrote between 1893 and 1935. While they display the elegant prose of her novels, these tales revolve around supernatural manifestations (vampires, doppelgangers) made credible by Wharton's superb storytelling skills.' –
Publishers Weekly

‘Wharton is rich in implication ... the selection here is an excellent one.' –
Scotland on Sunday

THE GHOST-FEELER
Stories of Terror and the Supernatural

Diagnosed with typhoid fever at age of nine, Edith Wharton was beginning a long convalescence when she was given a book of ghost tales to read. Not only setting back her recovery, this reading opened up her fevered imagination to ‘a world haunted by formless horrors.' So chronic was this paranoia that she was unable to sleep in a room with any book containing a ghost story. She was even moved to burn such volumes. These fears persisted until her late twenties.

She outgrew them but retained a heightened or ‘celtic' (her term) sense of the supernatural. Wharton considered herself not ‘a ghost-seer' – the term applied to those people who have claimed to have witnessed apparitions – but rather a ‘ghost-feeler,' someone who senses what cannot be seen.

This experience and ability enabled Edith Wharton to write chilling tales that objectify this sense of unease. Far removed from the comfort and urbane elegance associated with the author's famous novels, the stories in this volume deal with vampirism, isolation, and hallucination, and were praised by Henry James, L. P. Hartley, Graham Greene, and many others.

EDITH WHARTON

THE GHOST-FEELER

Stories of Terror
and the Supernatural

Selected and Introduced by
Peter Haining

PETER OWEN
London and Chicago

Contents

Introduction

The Duchess at Prayer
(1901)

The Fullness of Life
(1893)

A Journey
(1899)

The Lady's Maid's Bell
(1904)

Afterwards
(1910)

The Triumph of Night
(1914)

Bewitched
(1926)

A Bottle of Perrier
(1930)

The Looking-Glass
(1935)

What gives a ghost story its thrill? First I think its
physical
sense and, secondly, a moral twist.

Graham Greene
The Spectator
, 1937

Introduction

It is a strange fact that for the first twenty-seven years of her life, a woman who is today regarded by several authorities on ghost fiction as one of the foremost writers of supernatural stories of her time, was quite unable to sleep in any room that contained so much as a single book of such tales. So unnerved was Edith Wharton by supernatural fiction that she later admitted to destroying any that she came across at home. But it was from her childhood traumas and anxieties that Wharton drew the inspiration for her stories of ghosts and terror to produce a steady flow of work that spanned her entire literary career and which today is worthy of the highest praise.

Born into a wealthy New York family in January 1862, this sensitive, responsive and obedient young lady led a cosseted and strictly disciplined life until a cathartic experience in the summer of 1870. On holiday in Europe in the Black Forest, Wharton suddenly collapsed and was diagnosed with typhoid fever. For several days she was close to death before finally rallying and beginning a long period of convalescence. To pass the time she asked for some books to read, and among those given to her was one from two friends which she could only later describe with a shudder as a ‘robber story'. This book, with its tales of robbers and ghosts, deeply affected her ‘intense Celtic sense of the supernatural' and not only caused a set-back in her recovery but opened up to her fevered imagination ‘a world haunted by formless horrors'. For years thereafter, she said, a dark undefinable menace dogged her footsteps. ‘I had been a naturally fearless child,' she explained, ‘now I lived in a state of chronic fear. Fear of
what
? I cannot say – and even at the time I was never able to formulate my terror.'

Wharton also had a fear of old houses. One of her aunts, a stern, humourless spinster lady who had also suffered a death-threatening illness as a child, lived in almost reclusive isolation in a twenty-four-roomed Gothic mansion at Rhinecliff, New York. The building was ugly, dark and uncomfortable and the little girl could never visit the place without having nightmares afterwards.

Both of these influences contributed to Wharton's overwhelming fear of ghost and horror stories, a fear that persisted through her childhood, into her teens, and even her early twenties. ‘I could not sleep in a room with a book containing a ghost story,' she confessed later. ‘I frequently had to burn books of this kind, because it frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library!' When, however, the urge to write possessed the young woman, she determined to exorcize the ghosts and goblins that haunted her.

Later in her life when Wharton was firmly established as a famous novelist and double-winner of the Pulitzer Prize, she could write freely of the terrors that had so affected her imagination as well as her convictions about the supernatural world.

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 pre-natal 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.

For this very reason, Edith Wharton considered herself not a ‘ghost-seer' – to use the term so often applied to those people who claim to have witnessed a spirit – but rather a ‘ghost-feeler', someone who
senses
what cannot be seen. It is this fact which determined my choice of a title for this collection.

Between youth and old age, Wharton had plucked up the courage to read the works by the great masters of the genre and listed among her favourites three British authors, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Walter de la Mare, and two fellow Americans, Francis Marion Crawford and Fitz James O'Brien. At the very pinnacle, though, she placed Henry James and his novel,
The Turn of the Screw
; she considered no other writer had come near to equalling its imaginative handling of the supernatural. She might be considered biased, however, since James had, in fact, become her friend and the guiding light of her literary career.

Wharton has, in turn, earned her own coterie of admirers. The American critic George D. Meadows, for example, says that, ‘Mrs. Wharton works with the sure touch of an Emily Brontë, although with more restraint'; while the English novelist Anita Brookner believes she had ‘an abiding fascination for the comfortably established world of haunted houses and revenants, wives or husbands betrayed, or dead too soon'.

As I belong to this circle of admirers, assembling this collection has for me been a special pleasure. It has provided some surprises, too. For example, I spent one day wading through dusty copies of the early issues of
Harper's Monthly Magazine
, to which Wharton contributed a number of her short stories, in the hope that I might come across some undiscovered gems. And there, in the index to volume II (1851), I found an essay entitled ‘The Ghost That Appeared to Mrs. Wharton'. Of course, it had been published ten years
before
Wharton was born, but in succeeding volumes I came across a number of other supernatural stories by anonymous writers. I could not help wondering whether this magazine, popular with her parents and always to be found in the family library, had been another – until now – unacknowledged source of her inspiration?

In the stories that follow, Edith Wharton demonstrates her feeling for the supernatural and her knowledge of terror, both garnered from personal experience.

* * *

‘The Duchess at Prayer' is a story of terror and punishment that could just as easily have been written by Edgar Allan Poe, whose work clearly influenced Wharton. Both writers shared a love for the town of Newport, where both of them spent periods of their lives. It was here, during the summer of 1900, that ‘The Duchess at Prayer' was written, and according to an anonymous reviewer in the American magazine,
Independent
(June 1901), the tale might have been based on an incident ‘which Balzac once developed somewhat differently'. In the same year,
Harper's Monthly Magazine
called it a tale about ‘the brute facts of sin' and added that ‘it could only have been written by one who has truly known horror'. In her recent study,
Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life
(1994), Eleanor Dwight suggests that the story reflects a plight familiar to Wharton and many young wives of the period, that of ‘The woman abandoned by her husband for long periods of time and then expected to be sexually available to him when he returns'.