The house of silence, p.1
The House of Silence, page 1
The House of Silence
More Handheld Classics
Betty Bendell, My Life And I. Confessions of an Unliberated Housewife, 1966–1980
Henry Bartholomew (ed.), The Living Stone. Stories of Uncanny Sculpture, 1858–1943
Algernon Blackwood, The Unknown. Weird Writings, 1900–1937
Ernest Bramah, What Might Have Been. The Story of a Social War (1907)
D K Broster, From the Abyss. Weird Fiction, 1907–1940
John Buchan, The Runagates Club (1928)
John Buchan, The Gap in the Curtain (1932)
Melissa Edmundson (ed.), Women’s Weird. Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940
Melissa Edmundson (ed.), Women’s Weird 2. More Strange Stories by Women,1891–1937
Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me The Waltz (1932)
Marjorie Grant, Latchkey Ladies (1921)
A P Herbert, The Voluble Topsy, 1928–1947
Inez Holden, Blitz Writing. Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time (1941 & 1943)
Inez Holden, There’s No Story There. Wartime Writing, 1944–1945
Margaret Kennedy, Where Stands A Wingèd Sentry (1941)
Rose Macaulay, Non-Combatants and Others. Writings Against War, 1916–1945
Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures. Essays on Enjoying Life (1935)
Rose Macaulay, Potterism. A Tragi-Farcical Tract (1920)
Rose Macaulay, What Not. A Prophetic Comedy (1918)
James Machin (ed.) British Weird. Selected Short Fiction, 1893–1937
Vonda N McIntyre, The Exile Waiting (1975)
Elinor Mordaunt, The Villa and The Vortex. Supernatural Stories, 1916–1924
Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, Business as Usual (1933)
John Llewelyn Rhys, England Is My Village, and The World Owes Me A Living (1939 & 1941)
John Llewelyn Rhys, The Flying Shadow (1936)
Malcolm Saville, Jane’s Country Year (1946)
Helen de Guerry Simpson, The Outcast and The Rite. Stories of Landscape
and Fear, 1925–1938
J Slauerhoff, Adrift in the Middle Kingdom, translated by David McKay (1934)
Ann Stafford, Army Without Banners (1942)
Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills (1983)
Amara Thornton and Katy Soar (eds), Strange Relics. Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895–1954
Elizabeth von Arnim, The Caravaners (1909)
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin (1977)
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Of Cats and Elfins. Short Tales and Fantasies (1927–1976)
Sylvia Townsend Warner, T H White. A Biography (1967)
This edition published in 2024 by Handheld Press 16 Peachfield Road, Malvern WR14 4AP, United Kingdom.www.handheldpress.co.uk
Copyright of the Introduction © Melissa Edmundson 2024.
Copyright of the Notes © Kate Macdonald 2024.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
ISBN 978-1-912766-83-3
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Series design by Nadja Robinson and typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro and Open Sans.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press, Exeter.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Man-size in Marble
2 John Charrington’s Wedding
3 Uncle Abraham’s Romance
4 The Ebony Frame
5 From the Dead
6 Hurst of Hurstcote
7 The White Lady
8 The Haunted Inheritance
9 The Power of Darkness
10 The Shadow
11 The House of Silence
12 Number 17
13 In the Dark
14 The Violet Car
15 The Marble Child
16 The Haunted House
17 The Pavilion
18 The Detective
Notes on the stories
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press, for commissioning me to curate the stories in this book. I also wish to thank Jeff Makala for his feedback on the introduction and for his editorial assistance. And my gratitude, as always, goes to Murray, Maggie, Sofie, Simone, and Remy for their furry support.
Melissa Edmundson is Senior Lecturer in British Literature and Women’s Writing at Clemson University, South Carolina, and specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British women writers, with a particular interest in women’s supernatural fiction. She is the author of Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013) and Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire (2018). Her critical editions include Alice Perrin’s East of Suez (1901), published in 2011, Avenging Angels: Ghost Stories by Victorian Women Writers, published in 2018, and Charlotte Riddell’s The Uninhabited House (1875), published in 2022.
She has edited these Handheld Press titles: Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940 (2019), Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891–1937 (2020), Elinor Mordaunt’s The Villa and The Vortex: Supernatural Stories, 1916–1924 (2021), Helen de Guerry Simpson’s The Outcast and The Rite: Stories of Landscape and Fear, 1925–1938 (2022), and D K Broster’s From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907–1940 (2022).
Introduction
By Melissa Edmundson
The name ‘E Nesbit’ most likely brings fond memories of the Bastable children in The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), the sand fairy in Five Children and It (1902), or of Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis in The Railway Children (1906). These books for children, which have never been out of print, were inspired by Nesbit’s own childhood. Before she was the famed author ‘E Nesbit’, ‘Daisy’ Nesbit was an imaginative and precocious child who enjoyed exploring the outdoors with her brothers and who felt miserable and confined while at school. This zest for life, and a flair for disregarding convention, continued into her adulthood. Edith Nesbit refused to follow the cultural norms of the Victorian period. She campaigned for social reform to help improve the lives of others and chose to live her own life as freely and independently as possible. In private, she dealt with personal losses and domestic troubles. Throughout her life, she formed deep attachments and suffered great disappointments. Yet she had an irrepressible spirit that drew people to her. The many sides of Edith Nesbit’s personality found their way into her fiction. Before becoming a bestselling author of children’s literature, Nesbit was a pioneering writer of ghost stories. She began writing these stories in the 1880s, with the story that many consider to be her best, ‘Man-size in Marble’, published in 1887. Most of her supernatural and macabre fiction appears in the collections Grim Tales (1893), Something Wrong (1893), and Fear (1910). These three collections contain her most well-known stories, while other stories appeared regularly in popular literary magazines of the day, such as The Strand. She would continue to write supernatural fiction until the 1920s.
The House of Silence: Ghost Stories, 1887–1920 collects E Nesbit’s best ghost stories spanning thirty-three years. Taken together, these stories showcase Nesbit’s unique contributions to the genre. Her fiction reflects the dangers of romantic attachment – which often becomes romantic entanglement – that in turn leads to dire results. As a writer, E Nesbit was not afraid of an unhappy ending, and readers are frequently left just as unsettled as her protagonists. Her stories explore what is known as the unexplained supernatural, in which the ghosts are very much ‘real’ within the context of the stories, as well as the explained supernatural, where there is some sort of rational explanation behind the hauntings. Yet readers never feel cheated or dissatisfied with this latter kind of tale because of the unique way that Nesbit blends unexpected plot twists, dark comedy and occasionally the hand of fate in these narratives. Her troubled and sometimes flawed narrators are forever changed by their encounters with the supernatural, but this is only ever part of the story. Her characters are always hiding something, and their attempts to bury something from their past – whether it be a disappointment, a regret, a fear, a secret, or a crime – is often directly tied to the return of that past represented in the form of a ghost. Nesbit’s ghost stories suggest that memories can betray us and no matter how much we try to escape from the past, it has a way of catching up with us. There are not only a wide variety of ghosts in these pages, but also just as many ways to be haunted.
☙
Edith Nesbit was born on 15 August 1858 to John Collis Nesbit, an agricultural chemist, and Sarah Green Alderton Nesbit. Edith’s father owned the College of Agriculture and Chemistry in Kennington, south London, and the family lived in relative comfort until his death in 1862. After this Sarah Nesbit assumed the responsibilities of running the college for a short time, but she and her children were forced to move after Edith’s sister Mary became increasingly ill with tuberculosis. They first moved to Brighton and then relocated to the south of France. During this period, Edith and her brothers were sent to various boarding schools. She later recalled feeling lonely while away from her mother and siblings. These periods were interspersed with happier times when the family, including Edith’s older half-sister, Saretta, were together for the summers. Edith recalled one summer when her mother rented a farmhouse in La Haye, Brittany, a place where she and her brothers were allowed ‘to run wild’ (Nesbit 1966, 99). Ever the imaginative child, Edith enjoyed discovering different areas around their home. After Mary’s death in 1871, Sarah and her children moved to Halstead in Kent (Fitzsimons 38). Edith, who was affectionately known in her family as ‘Daisy’, was happy to once again be in the countryside. A few years later, the family moved back to London and here Edith met Hubert Bland, who was working at a London bank. Edith left home in 1879, aged 21, and moved in with Alfred Knowles and his family. During this time, she was known as ‘Edith Bland’. Nesbit and Bland were married in April 1880, by which time Edith was already pregnant with their first son Paul (Fitzsimons 52–53, 56).
Edith Nesbit became interested in socialist causes through her relationship with Hubert Bland, and they were among the founding members of the Fabian Society upon its creation in 1884. Nesbit was an active member of the Society from the beginning. The social reformer and fellow member Annie Besant remarked that ‘Sidney Webb, G Bernard Shaw, Hubert and Mrs Bland, Graham Wallas – these were some of those who gave time, thought, incessant work to the popularising of Socialist thought, the spreading of sound economics, the effort to turn the workers’ energy toward social rather than mere political thought’ (quoted in Fitzsimons 81). Havelock Ellis described Nesbit as ‘[a] woman, young and beautiful it seemed to me, and certainly full of radiant vitality; she turned around and looked into one’s face with a frank and direct gaze of warm sympathy which in a stranger I found singularly attractive so that I asked afterwards who she was’ (quoted in Fitzsimons 85).
In 1884, Nesbit was elected to the Fabians’ pamphlet committee. Two years later, she was elected to the Fabian Society Conference Committee. She also wrote for and helped edit the society’s journal, To-Day (Fitzsimons 86). During this period, Nesbit became what she called an ‘advanced’ woman, spending time working in the British Museum Reading Room with other female members of the society. She cut her hair short, wore more comfortable clothing, and smoked (Briggs 67–68). In an undated letter to her friend Ada Breakell, she wrote of her new appearance: ‘It is deliciously comfortable […] I have also taken to all-wool clothing which is also deliciously pleasant to wear’ (quoted in Briggs 67).
While Nesbit was enjoying a newfound freedom and independence, she was at the same time dealing with Bland’s numerous extramarital affairs. While he was courting Nesbit, Bland’s relationship with Maggie Doran had already produced a child (Fitzsimons 50). In 1881, after opening a letter Doran had written to Bland, Nesbit discovered the affair. The letter revealed that Doran knew nothing of Bland’s marriage to Nesbit or of Nesbit’s two children with Bland (Fitzsimons 64).
Nesbit turned to writing in order to support her growing family, which now included Mary Iris, born in 1881, and a second son, Fabian, born in 1885. She also raised two of Bland’s children by Alice Hoatson, a manuscript reader for the woman’s magazine Sylvia’s Home Journal, whom Nesbit had met and befriended in 1882. By 1886, Hoatson was having an affair with Bland, and she eventually moved in with the Blands as Nesbit’s housekeeper and companion (Briggs 113). Accounts differ over the extent to which Nesbit approved of this situation. The unusual living arrangements were commented on by many of the Blands’ friends and acquaintances. George Bernard Shaw, a friend of the Blands and for whom Nesbit had a romantic attachment, described Bland as a man ‘who sported fashionable clothes, wore a monocle, and maintained simultaneously three wives, all of whom bore him children. Two of the wives lived in the same house. The legitimate one was E Nesbit’ (quoted in Briggs 108). In 1886, Hoatson gave birth to a daughter, Rosamund, and in 1899, gave birth to a son, John. Hoatson’s official role was ‘aunt’ to the children, who she referred to as her niece and nephew (Fitzsimons 114, 186, 325).
Nesbit and Bland wrote collaboratively under the pseudonym ‘Fabian Bland’. In 1885, they published The Prophet’s Mantle and the following year Something Wrong. In an April 1884 letter to Ada Breakell, Nesbit described their habitual process, saying, ‘In all stories Hubert and I “go shares” – I am sure it is much better when we write together than when we write separately’ (quoted in Briggs 61). Some of their co-written fiction had supernatural content. ‘Psychical Research’, published in the Christmas Number of Longman’s Magazine in December 1884, incorporates new photographic technology with the possible sighting of a ghost in a graveyard. ‘The Fabric of a Vision’, published in the Argosy in March 1885, is a premonition story in which a woman sees a nightmarish vision of another woman being pushed to her death. Other stories, such as ‘A Strange Experience’, published in Longman’s Magazine in March 1884 under Nesbit’s own name, show her early interest in macabre narratives. Eleanor Fitzsimons suggests that the plot of this story, involving a young woman who refuses to be separated from the body of her deceased sister, was possibly inspired by the loss of Nesbit’s sister Mary (36–37). Throughout her career, Nesbit’s Gothic fiction ranged from horrific to comedic. In the 13 March 1895 issue of the Sketch, she, along with friend and fellow Fabian Society member Oswald Barron published ‘Poor Basinghall’s Chambers’, a light-hearted tale of a man who is mistaken for a ghost.
Edith Nesbit also published poetry collections throughout her life. These include Lays and Legends (1886), Leaves of Life (1888), A Pomander of Verse (1895), Songs of Love and Empire (1898), Garden Poems (1909), and Many Voices (1922). Several of her poems incorporate the supernatural, and, as in her ghost stories, revolve around a lingering sense of loss and emotional distance. ‘The Dead to the Living’ focuses on the need to escape from life’s troubles and the pain that comes from losing someone. Likewise, the mother in ‘Haunted’ worries that her child will be taken from her by the ghosts whose ‘sad voices on the wind come thin and wild’ (Nesbit 1898b, 124). The desire of the dead to reconnect with the living – and vice versa – is a recurring subject. The speaker in ‘The Ghost’ is tortured by the return of a lost love who remains forever out of reach: ‘I hear the silken gown you wear / Sweep on the gallery floor, / Your step comes up the wide, dark stair / And passes at my door’ (Nesbit 1895, 46). ‘The Ghost Bereft’, originally published in The Yellow Book in January 1897, describes a ghost’s return to his home to find that his beloved has herself died. However, the woman has gone to heaven, ‘where memories cease’, and the couple remains apart (Nesbit 1898a, 53). A similar journey occurs in ‘The Return’, in which a woman’s spirit journeys to her former home only to discover another woman in her place. She returns to her grave but cannot find rest, lamenting, ‘I cannot sleep as I used to do’ (Nesbit 1922b, 11). In these poems, the ghosts are unable to find peace because they cannot let go of their former lives, a theme that Nesbit would also explore in her stories. Other poems, such as ‘Ghosts’, tread a fine line between the ghostly and the real in their descriptions of troubled relationships. ‘Fear’ is even more enigmatic:
If you were here,
Hopes, dreams, ambitions, faith would disappear,
Drowned in your eyes; and I should touch your hand,
Forgetting all that now I understand.
For you confuse my life with memories,
Of unrememberable ecstasies
Which were, and are not, and can never be…,
Ah! keep the whole earth between you and me.
(Nesbit 1922a, 78)
In these poems, fear, memory, and haunting are interconnected. They provide intriguing comparisons to Nesbit’s short stories, and we can recognize hints of her fictional plots within the poetry.
By the 1890s, Nesbit was writing the works for children that would make her a bestselling author. These popular works include narratives about the adventures of the Bastable children which appear in The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). Nesbit often incorporated fantasy elements in her children’s fiction, such as in the trilogy Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). These fantasy elements can also be found in The Book of Dragons (1899), Nine Unlikely Tales for Children (1901), The Enchanted Castle (1907), and The Magic World (1912). The Railway Children (1906) became Nesbit’s most popular book and was adapted into several films, including the 1970 version written and directed by Lionel Jeffries.
