The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

The Spooky Colliding with the Everday in Turn-of-the-Century America

Sep 2, 2009

Best known for social satire, American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Edith Wharton brought psychological acuity to her tales of supernatural phenomena.

As the autumn months approach, many a reader’s sensibilities veer toward the macabre and mysterious. There’s something about crisp breezes and lengthening nights that just begs for a good ghost story. And those with an interest in the dark side of human nature will find just what they’re looking for in the many ghost stories of turn-of-the-century writer Edith Wharton, who takes a decidedly psychoanalytic view of the ghostly experience.

Edith Wharton the Author

Edith Wharton was born in New York in 1862. Her family was aristocratic, and Wharton was immersed from the beginning in the rituals of high society. During her unhappy marriage, she published a steady stream of novels, the most well known from this period being The House of Mirth (1905). Many of her works took a sceptical and satirical look at upper-class life.

Following her divorce, Wharton settled permanently in France and devoted herself in equal parts to charity and to writing. After the war she completed The Age of Innocence; this work won the Pulitzer in 1921. She would continue to write novels and short stories until her death in 1937, forming during this time strong friendships with other literary figures of the era, among them Henry James and Sinclair Lewis.

Wharton’s writings have been acclaimed just as much for their sympathetically rendered characters as for their deft social commentaries. And it is this grasp of character psychology that makes her ghost stories--many of them published in 1910's Tales of Men and Ghosts--truly unique.

"Afterward"

In this slow-to-unfold tale, married couple Edward and Mary Boyne decide to move to a house in the English countryside. They want something antiquated – an old house with atmosphere to spare. A friend recommends Lyng, a mansion in Dorset - and, when pressed, does admit that it has a ghost. But, she adds, they won’t see it "till long, long afterward".

As the months progress, and nothing mysterious occurs, the couple lose interest in the ghost. However, one day Mary does realize that she recalls something strange – a vision with implications so dire as to lead to her husband’s disappearance. Mary must investigate her husband’s past in order to unravel the mystery in this unsettling story of a guilty conscience.

"The Eyes"

Beginning, much like Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, with an assembly of friends telling ghost stories after dinner, this tale is narrated by the party's host, Mr. Andrew Culwin.

The narrator is first visited by a strange apparition the night after promising to marry his young cousin, who he has presumably deflowered. The apparition takes the form of a floating pair of eyes, leering and reproachful. They so frighten Culwin that he abandons his cousin, and at this point they cease haunting him. But the eyes are soon to return to Culwin...

The identity of the apparition, and what this entails for a young protegé of Culwin's, is revealed at the climax of this story of identity and self-defeat.

"Kerfol"

This story, like "Afterward" begins with a prospective owner appraising a property - in this case it is Kerfol, an ancient keep in Brittany. But this visitor, rather than being taken on a tour of the property, finds it deserted but for a great many silent dogs...

When a friend tells him that there are only dogs at Kerfol one day a year, and that these are no dogs of flesh and blood, the narrator delves into the local history and so into a transcription of a grisly trial. These dogs all belonged to Anne de Cornault, first mistress of Kerfol, and they have every reason to be restless spirits.

Gender roles play a significant part in "Kerfol", a story that explores what it is to be truly subservient.