The Grey Woman and other Tales

Weird, Strange, and Supernatural Stories. Eight chilling Gothic short stories that blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect.Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. An encounter with the supernatural in an everyday setting accentuates its strangeness; a truth used to eerie effect in Gaskell's short fiction. A portrait turned to the wall, a hidden manuscript, a mysterious child that lives on the freezing moors, a doppelganger formed by a woman's bitter curse: all of these things hint at male tyranny and woman as avenging angel—or devil. Whether darkly surreal or mischievous like "Curious, if True", a playful reworking of fairy tales, all the stories in this volume form a stark contrast to the social realism of Gaskell's novels, revealing a darker and more unsettling style of writing.THE GREY WOMAN CURIOUS IF TRUE SIX WEEKS AT HEPPENHEIM LIBBIE MARSH'S THREE ERAS CHRISTMAS STORMS AND SUNSHINE HAND AND HEART BESSY'S TROUBLES AT HOME DISAPPEARANCESAs interest in 19th-century English literature by women has been reinvigorated by a resurgence in popularity of the works of Jane Austen, readers are rediscovering a writer whose fiction, once widely beloved, fell by the wayside. British novelist ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL (1810-1865)--whose books were sometimes initially credited to, simply, "Mrs. Gaskell"--is now recognized as having created some of the most complex and progressive depictions of women in the literature of the age, and is today justly celebrated for her precocious use of the regional dialect and slang of England's industrial North. Friend and literary companion to the likes of Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë--the latter of whom Gaskell wrote an acclaimed 1857 biography--Gaskell is today being restored to her rightful place alongside them.

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