![]() ![]() A new-born ghost wandering in ghostly spaces as yet unknown, might have felt it,” writes Hodgson Burnett.Īlong with forgotten works by women writers whom the British Library says “pioneered and developed the ‘weird tale’ in the early 20th century”, The Christmas in the Fog will be reissued by the library’s publishing imprint in the anthology Queens of the Abyss, out later this year. “The remoteness, the sense of being at once shut in and shut out from the world, from life itself, was an uncanny and spectral thing. A foghorn, for example, is described as having “a wild and hollow roar such as a Megatherium, as it rooted up and trampled down great trees in a primeval forest in darkest ages, might have bellowed in his lonely rage”. That a child’s face and eyes should look so was inhuman – unnatural,” she writes.ĭavidson said the story explores “how, in certain real situations, everyone becomes strange, ghostly, and comparable to an ‘actual’ supernatural ghost story”. “His face was white, and his eyes had that horribly bewept, almost blinded look one shudders before when one sees it in an older person. The story sees the author dealing with two incidents – a trip on a liner to New York surrounded by fog, and an encounter with a “shabby little boy, carrying a small bundle”. ![]() One of them, The Christmas in the Fog, published in April 1915, was recently found among the British Library’s papers. Published in Good Housekeeping magazine, the stories appeared under the title The Romantick Lady – a “cipher for the author’s imaginative and more fanciful side”, said British Library editor Johnny Davidson. But 10 years before she died in 1924, Hodgson Burnett began writing a series of sketches that mixed autobiography with fiction. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |