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The Lifted Veil: Book of Fantastic Literature by Women, 1800-World War II
George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, and others give free play to their imaginations in stories designed to satisfy fantasy, fiction, mystery, and literature fans alike
566 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1992
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May 17, 2023
The Lifted Veil: The Book of Fantastic Literature by Women, 1800-World War II [1992] - ★★★★
This book is a wonderful collection of short stories of the fantastic, supernatural and the unexplained written by women. There are stories in this book by such authors as Edith Wharton (author of The House of Mirth), Charlotte Bronte (author of Jane Eyre), Virginia Woolf (author of Mrs Dalloway), George Eliot (author of Middlemarch), Elizabeth Gaskell (author of North and South) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (author of The Yellow Wallpaper), among others. For example, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) writes in her short story The Mortal Immortal [1833] about a young man who drinks an elixir of immortality and that grants him eternal youth. Now aged three hundred and twenty-three, he realises the true cost of his once hasty decision to drink something to forget his beloved. Willa Cather (Death Comes for the Archbishop) in her eerie story Consequences [1915] talks about two acquaintances, Henry Eastman and Kier Cavenaugh, who meet on a rainy day and one tells the other of "a ghostly man" stalking him. This tale of missed signs of distress culminates in a horrific death. Amelia B. Edwards' The Phantom Coach [1864] starts with a man lost in snowy wilderness, looking for any shelter so he can stay alive and see his wife again. One mysterious man in one mysterious house directs him to the path of a mail coach that may help him to find a way home. Little the man suspects he may catch "the wrong" mail coach.
This book is a wonderful collection of short stories of the fantastic, supernatural and the unexplained written by women. There are stories in this book by such authors as Edith Wharton (author of The House of Mirth), Charlotte Bronte (author of Jane Eyre), Virginia Woolf (author of Mrs Dalloway), George Eliot (author of Middlemarch), Elizabeth Gaskell (author of North and South) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (author of The Yellow Wallpaper), among others. For example, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) writes in her short story The Mortal Immortal [1833] about a young man who drinks an elixir of immortality and that grants him eternal youth. Now aged three hundred and twenty-three, he realises the true cost of his once hasty decision to drink something to forget his beloved. Willa Cather (Death Comes for the Archbishop) in her eerie story Consequences [1915] talks about two acquaintances, Henry Eastman and Kier Cavenaugh, who meet on a rainy day and one tells the other of "a ghostly man" stalking him. This tale of missed signs of distress culminates in a horrific death. Amelia B. Edwards' The Phantom Coach [1864] starts with a man lost in snowy wilderness, looking for any shelter so he can stay alive and see his wife again. One mysterious man in one mysterious house directs him to the path of a mail coach that may help him to find a way home. Little the man suspects he may catch "the wrong" mail coach.
February 16, 2009
International anthology of short fantastic literature by women.
This was a tough book to get through; it is quite long and has a grab-bag quality to it, as if the editor put in everything she could find that wasn't widely anthologized. There are some excellent stories in here though, including many that I'd never read by authors I'd never heard of before. Some highpoints were "The Buick Saloon" and "Kerfol," both excellent creepy stories. "The Sultana's Dream" gave a nice nonWestern spin on a genderplay utopia, and there are some fine stories by Edith Wharton and others. Overall, worth reading.
This was a tough book to get through; it is quite long and has a grab-bag quality to it, as if the editor put in everything she could find that wasn't widely anthologized. There are some excellent stories in here though, including many that I'd never read by authors I'd never heard of before. Some highpoints were "The Buick Saloon" and "Kerfol," both excellent creepy stories. "The Sultana's Dream" gave a nice nonWestern spin on a genderplay utopia, and there are some fine stories by Edith Wharton and others. Overall, worth reading.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews