Amelia B. Edwards

Often, when I read the better pre-M.R. James Victorian ghost spinners, what I wind up feeling is kinship of a kind; affection, almost. Remote as their worldviews can be, slow-moving as their voices sometimes are, they are magnificent and familiar and comforting to me. Grandparents, maybe.



But every time I read Amelia B. Edwards, what I feel is less affection than awe. Take her story, "Number Three," which I read for the first time last night. It's set in a sort of pottery factory, where a nightworker stokes and monitors the giant kilns alone, and where the mentor who has lifted him off the streets conducts a doomed love affair with the gentle daughter of the factory's owner. A charming and talented Frenchman arrives, threatens to steal away the daughter. And then, one night, the mentor appears by the kilns, walks into an adjoining room, and vanishes.

You'll think you know where this is going. You don't.

You'll think you'll understand what all the mystery means in the end. You won't.

And that final emotional chord this story strikes...it had to have been new, then. I'm not sure it's been repeated yet. And we have no name for it, still.

Read some of her stories here courtesy of the Gaslight Project.