Gothic Tales - Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn

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Résumé :
In Gothic Tales, Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), the eminent Victorian author, brings us nine chilling gothic stories. Collected here are tales that set a precedent for ghost and horror stories of the era. In The Poor Clare a young innocent girl named Lucy is haunted by an unrelenting ghost invoked by her aging grandmother. In the novella Lois the Witch the young Lois sails to America to join her distant family. She is greeted by a New England engulfed in the fever of the Salem witch trials. Soon all goes wrong when she is deemed one of the cursed. The reader confronts the peaks of suspense in The Grey Woman - a terrifying psychological thriller. These among others shape this well rounded collection of one of the most respected Victorian authors. Gaskell was championed and published by Charles Dickens in his literary magazine Household Words. Her style, vision, and delivery are seen at its best here in Gothic Tales.

Biographie:
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was an English novelist, short-story writer, and biographer whose fiction became one of the important achievements of Victorian literature. Born Elizabeth Stevenson in London in 1810 and raised largely in Knutsford, Cheshire, she drew on both provincial life and the industrial society of Manchester in works that combine social observation, moral intelligence, domestic detail, and sympathy for lives shaped by class, gender, labour, religion, and change. Her marriage to William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister in Manchester, placed her at the centre of a world where religious dissent, social reform, industrial conflict, and literary culture intersected.Gaskell's major works include Mary Barton, Ruth, North and South, Sylvia's Lovers, Wives and Daughters, and Cranford, as well as The Life of Charlotte Bront?, one of the landmark literary biographies of the nineteenth century. Her novels range from industrial fiction and social protest to domestic comedy, psychological study, and village portraiture. In Cranford, she turned her gift for close social observation toward a small community of women whose customs, economies, affections, and losses reveal both the comedy and dignity of ordinary life. Gaskell died in 1865, leaving a body of work central to Victorian fiction, women's writing, social realism, and classic English literature....