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The Penguin Book of Classic Fantasy by Women
572 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 11, 2016
I really enjoyed this book.
Ghosts, alchemy, clairvoyance, aliens, pirates, other dimensions, family curses, fairy kidnappings, haunted houses, haunted abbeys, haunted carriages, haunted cars, haunted masks, haunted ships, haunted haunts...
Short stories are great because I can feel like I've read something meaningful before I fall unconscious and stab my face with my own glasses.
And this book made me discover some new great authoresses, and realise how OLD science fiction is while reading a western with white eyed Venusians in Mars that mixes aliens and mythology that was written in the 1930's (Shambleau, by C.L Moore).
Logically, as any compilation, I liked some stories more than others, some being more memorable for their writing or for being written by famous hands (Mary Shelley, George Elliot, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, amongst others), because they happen in foreign lands, or because the topic is fascinating or the characters are delicious.
So here is the list of my favourite stories, with a little resume with no spoilers.
*The Mortal Immortal, A Tale. Mary Shelley. (1833)
An alchemist's apprentice in a bad relationship fucks up an experiment and becomes someone that doesn't suffer the sickness of time.
*The Phantom Coach. Amelia B. Edwards. (1864)
"The girl of the curve" in phantom coach version. Though you are the one picked up. And the coach is the ghost. The title leaves no space for mystery, but I loved it.
*The Abbot's Ghost -or- Maurice Treherne's Temptation.
A Cripple. The cousin he saved from death by giving up his legs. The sister of the cousin he saved from death by giving up his legs and that he is madly in love with. Her friends. The friend of the cousin he saved from death by giving up his legs that is also madly in love with the sister. An old lover and her new sugar-daddy husband. The mother (his aunt) that wants him to give up pursuing her daughter because he is crippled (and of course that means no yo-yo). Another dude that hears behind curtains. Peacocks. And oh yeah... there is a ghost somewhere, but this mainly a Christmas soap opera. Like a victorian Love Actually without the catchy soundtrack. And Ghosts. Isn't it wonderful?
* The Ghost in Cap'n Brown's House. Harriet Breecher Stowe (1871)
A kid asks an old man (his Granddad or something) if ghosts are real. He tells him a tale of a ghostly situation through the eyes and opinions of several trustworthy people... You are the one to judge in the end.
*Behold it was a Dream. Rhoda Broughton (1873)
After a long time apart, a spinster goes to visit her best friend to the farm where she lives with her relatively new husband. But during the first night she has a terrible prophetic dream and she decides to leave, trying to avoid a chain of events that seems terrible...
The characters of this little piece were gorgeously built. From the first line of their letters to each other, you feel a true, tangible, funny friendship. Women that tease one another, and call themselves awful things, and ugly names, and show true sisterly love. They felt REAL.
* The Banshee's Warning. Mrs J.H (Charlotte Eliza Louson) Riddell (1894).
An Irish surgeon making a living in London after running away from the good high life he had in the Green Island receives the visit of a Banshee, a faery that predicts the death of a family member, or his own self.
*Sultana's Dream. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. (1905)
Fantastic little piece where Sultana has a siesta and is visited by a woman, that flies her to a world completely ruled by women, where the parts of women and men in society are inverted. A land of knowledge, friendship, love, and peace.
*If I Were a Man. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (1914)
A housewife pronounces those words, and finds herself travelling in her husband's mind, sharing his sensations, and tasting his freedom... and also giving him a little push into feminism.
*Kerfol. Edith Wharton. (1916)
A man goes to visit a house that he is planning to buy, but finds it empty, except for a group of dogs, that scrutinise him, but don't seem to do much. Later on, a neighbour provides him with some documents that tell the story of a trial the dog's owner suffered... more than a hundred years ago.
*The Nature of the Evidence. May Sinclair. (1923)
Oh this one is a funny one. Kinky erotic ghost story!
Widower marries second wife for the wrong reasons (lust). First wife comes back from death to remind him of his real duty as a husband.
Sometimes death does not do us part...
*The Unbolted Door. Mrs Belloc Lowndes. (1929)
This one is very bitter sweet.
A loving married couple gets distant after their only son is pronounced "missing" during WWI.
The father gives order to leave a door always unbolted in case his son comes back.
*The Buick Saloon. Mary O'Malley (1931).
A woman reunites with her husband in Shanghai after a long sickness.
She discovers a sweet lady's voice that speaks in french next to her in the back of the second-hand car she bought to move around the city. She is determined to play detective, and find out the story behind that sweet lady that last owned the car...
*The Supper at Elsinore. "Isak" Dinesen (Karen -Dinesen- Blixen). 1934
Two Danish spinsters are called to their old house in a very cold winter, when the ghost of a long-lost brother that abandoned the family to be a pirate in the Caribbean is spotted by one of the old servants.
Well, I showed you mine, hope you show me yours.
Thank you for reading!
Ghosts, alchemy, clairvoyance, aliens, pirates, other dimensions, family curses, fairy kidnappings, haunted houses, haunted abbeys, haunted carriages, haunted cars, haunted masks, haunted ships, haunted haunts...
Short stories are great because I can feel like I've read something meaningful before I fall unconscious and stab my face with my own glasses.
And this book made me discover some new great authoresses, and realise how OLD science fiction is while reading a western with white eyed Venusians in Mars that mixes aliens and mythology that was written in the 1930's (Shambleau, by C.L Moore).
Logically, as any compilation, I liked some stories more than others, some being more memorable for their writing or for being written by famous hands (Mary Shelley, George Elliot, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, amongst others), because they happen in foreign lands, or because the topic is fascinating or the characters are delicious.
So here is the list of my favourite stories, with a little resume with no spoilers.
*The Mortal Immortal, A Tale. Mary Shelley. (1833)
An alchemist's apprentice in a bad relationship fucks up an experiment and becomes someone that doesn't suffer the sickness of time.
*The Phantom Coach. Amelia B. Edwards. (1864)
"The girl of the curve" in phantom coach version. Though you are the one picked up. And the coach is the ghost. The title leaves no space for mystery, but I loved it.
*The Abbot's Ghost -or- Maurice Treherne's Temptation.
A Cripple. The cousin he saved from death by giving up his legs. The sister of the cousin he saved from death by giving up his legs and that he is madly in love with. Her friends. The friend of the cousin he saved from death by giving up his legs that is also madly in love with the sister. An old lover and her new sugar-daddy husband. The mother (his aunt) that wants him to give up pursuing her daughter because he is crippled (and of course that means no yo-yo). Another dude that hears behind curtains. Peacocks. And oh yeah... there is a ghost somewhere, but this mainly a Christmas soap opera. Like a victorian Love Actually without the catchy soundtrack. And Ghosts. Isn't it wonderful?
* The Ghost in Cap'n Brown's House. Harriet Breecher Stowe (1871)
A kid asks an old man (his Granddad or something) if ghosts are real. He tells him a tale of a ghostly situation through the eyes and opinions of several trustworthy people... You are the one to judge in the end.
*Behold it was a Dream. Rhoda Broughton (1873)
After a long time apart, a spinster goes to visit her best friend to the farm where she lives with her relatively new husband. But during the first night she has a terrible prophetic dream and she decides to leave, trying to avoid a chain of events that seems terrible...
The characters of this little piece were gorgeously built. From the first line of their letters to each other, you feel a true, tangible, funny friendship. Women that tease one another, and call themselves awful things, and ugly names, and show true sisterly love. They felt REAL.
* The Banshee's Warning. Mrs J.H (Charlotte Eliza Louson) Riddell (1894).
An Irish surgeon making a living in London after running away from the good high life he had in the Green Island receives the visit of a Banshee, a faery that predicts the death of a family member, or his own self.
*Sultana's Dream. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. (1905)
Fantastic little piece where Sultana has a siesta and is visited by a woman, that flies her to a world completely ruled by women, where the parts of women and men in society are inverted. A land of knowledge, friendship, love, and peace.
*If I Were a Man. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (1914)
A housewife pronounces those words, and finds herself travelling in her husband's mind, sharing his sensations, and tasting his freedom... and also giving him a little push into feminism.
*Kerfol. Edith Wharton. (1916)
A man goes to visit a house that he is planning to buy, but finds it empty, except for a group of dogs, that scrutinise him, but don't seem to do much. Later on, a neighbour provides him with some documents that tell the story of a trial the dog's owner suffered... more than a hundred years ago.
*The Nature of the Evidence. May Sinclair. (1923)
Oh this one is a funny one. Kinky erotic ghost story!
Widower marries second wife for the wrong reasons (lust). First wife comes back from death to remind him of his real duty as a husband.
Sometimes death does not do us part...
*The Unbolted Door. Mrs Belloc Lowndes. (1929)
This one is very bitter sweet.
A loving married couple gets distant after their only son is pronounced "missing" during WWI.
The father gives order to leave a door always unbolted in case his son comes back.
*The Buick Saloon. Mary O'Malley (1931).
A woman reunites with her husband in Shanghai after a long sickness.
She discovers a sweet lady's voice that speaks in french next to her in the back of the second-hand car she bought to move around the city. She is determined to play detective, and find out the story behind that sweet lady that last owned the car...
*The Supper at Elsinore. "Isak" Dinesen (Karen -Dinesen- Blixen). 1934
Two Danish spinsters are called to their old house in a very cold winter, when the ghost of a long-lost brother that abandoned the family to be a pirate in the Caribbean is spotted by one of the old servants.
Well, I showed you mine, hope you show me yours.
Thank you for reading!
July 3, 2020
Interesting; mostly enjoyable; a few too many ghost stories, perhaps. And some very annoying proof-reading errors - I expect more from Penguin.
January 15, 2013
Mostly ghost stories of varying quality (gave up halfway through The Abbot's Ghost by Louisa May Alcott wisely using the pseudonym A.M. Barnard as it was like an interminable episode of what I imagine Downton Abbey to be like (no I have never seen it and don't want to read stories like what I imagine it to be like) with no sign of the Abbot's Ghost) the best stories, none of which feature guh guh guh ghosts, were "Sultana's Dream" by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain which could have come straight out of Gulliver's Travels, "Shambleau" by C L Moore and "The Mask of Sacrifice" by Margery Lawrence, the latter two being STRAIGHT OUTTA LOVECRAFT.
November 29, 2015
This is a fantastic anthology of weird fiction written by women from 1806-1936. It was really interesting to stumble across authors whose classic fiction I was already familiar with (such as George Eliot, E. Nesbit, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and Virginia Woolf), and most of the stories were well-written and entertaining. I especially loved 'The Mortal Immortal' by Mary Shelley and 'The Abbot's Ghost' by Louisa May Alcott, and 'The Secret Chamber' by Margaret Oliphant terrified me!
May 22, 2009
Some great stories in here by women writers spanning over 100 years, from the early nineteenth century.
Olive Schreiner's "In a Far Off World" spurred me to ideas for a short story of my own, and "The Banshee's Warning" tugged a few heart strings.
Some great reading.
Olive Schreiner's "In a Far Off World" spurred me to ideas for a short story of my own, and "The Banshee's Warning" tugged a few heart strings.
Some great reading.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews