Great Ghost Stories

The ten ghost stories reprinted here were first published in England and America between 1864 and 1912, a half-century that represents the golden age of this endlessly entertaining branch of popular fiction. So popular were ghost stories in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods that a selection such as this can only represent a sampling of the sub-categories of the genre-from the subtle and the humorous to the chilling and the macabre, from the fictional historical account to the tale set in the contemporary world of everyday life. All of these will be found here by a range of authors from Charles Dickens, for whom an occasional ghost story was an interlude in his main literary work, to J.S.LeFanu and M.R.James, surely the greatest, respectively, nineteenth-and twentieth-century practitioners of the form. In a collection that could have been expanded many times with no diminution in quality, the only principle of selection was that the stories should be entertaining in themselves, and representative of the best the genre has to offer.

Издание на английском языке.