The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton

“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.

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton