In addition to longer works, including “ The House of Mirth” and “ Ethan Frome,” she published some eighty-five short stories, many of them spectral. (“It was not the idea of noises that frightened her, but that inexorable and hostile silence,” she wrote.) One of Wharton’s biographers, Hermione Lee, in her doorstopper on the author’s life, described “All Souls’ ” as “a story about the terror of death.”įor a writer known mostly for incisive social novels about the old New York of her childhood, Wharton’s ghost stories make up a significant chunk of her œuvre. She is injured-a fractured ankle-and cut off from the outside world, and she drags herself through the rooms looking for help. In “All Souls’,” one of Wharton’s last stories, a rich old woman wakes to a mysteriously empty house, surrounded by deep snow. She had grown increasingly preoccupied with the past, having lost many friends to war or illness, and her own health was failing. A New Yorker by birth, she had been an expat for two decades by then. It was one of her final literary acts she died in August, 1937, at her lavish home in the north of France. Near the end of her life, in her mid-seventies, she spent time putting together a selection of her best ghost stories for publication. Wharton was a practical woman, as savvy about business affairs as social conventions, and she eventually overcame her fear of ghost stories enough to become a master of the form.
“I have frequently had to burn books of this kind,” she wrote, “because it frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library!” Only when she was nearing thirty-long after she became a “ ‘young lady’ with long skirts and my hair up,” as she wrote-and on her way to winning the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “ The Age of Innocence,” could she sleep in a house that contained a book of ghost stories. It was like some dark undefinable menace, forever dogging my steps, lurking, & threatening.” She was afraid of the dark and of being alone. “I had been a naturally fearless child now I lived in a state of chronic fear,” she wrote in “Life & I.” “Fear of what? I cannot say-& even at the time, I was never able to formulate my terror. The “perilous” story, and perhaps its link to her illness, stayed with Wharton for years. But “with my intense Celtic sense of the super-natural, tales of robbers & ghosts were perilous reading.” She relapsed, and when she woke, “it was to enter a world haunted by formless horrors.” “To an unimaginative child the tale would no doubt have been harmless,” she wrote. The book she acquired was a “robber-story,” and it sent Wharton into an unexpected panic. Her mother was particular about reading material-Wharton had to ask for permission to read novels until her marriage, in 1885-but on this occasion she got the goods. “During my convalescence, my one prayer was to be allowed to read,” she wrote in “Life & I,” an autobiography that was published posthumously. Confined to her bed, week after week, she wished most fervently not for recovery but for books. When Edith Wharton was nine years old she contracted typhoid fever and fell gravely ill.
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