From the Dead Dark Tales

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) is principally remembered for her books for younger readers, among them Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Railway Children (1906), all of which have been republished and represented to subsequent generations through a reassuring lens of Edwardian nostalgia.

However, there was a dark side to Edith Nesbit’s imagination, and in this volume we have collected twenty-three short stories in which she explored the more macabre and sometimes downright horrific side of her imagination. From the Gothic ‘A Strange Experience’ (1884) and the classic ‘Man-Size in Marble’ (1887), through to ‘The Detective’ (1920) written almost four decades later, Nesbit turned time and time again to the supernatural. Her life-long fascination for ghosts and spectres appears to have been a direct result of her own childhood experiences, and these are discussed in a new Introduction to this volume of her collected Dark Tales.

Contents: Introduction, ‘A Strange Experience’, ‘Man-Size in Marble’, ‘John Charrington’s Wedding’, ‘The Ebony Frame’, ‘The Mass for the Dead’, ‘Uncle Abraham’s Romance’, ‘The Mystery of the Semi-detached’, ‘From the Dead’, ‘Hurst of Hurstcote’, ‘The Letter in Brown Ink’, ‘The Haunted Inheritance’, ‘The Power of Darkness’, ‘The Portent of the Shadow’, ‘The House of Silence’, ‘The Head’, ‘The Third Drug’, ‘The Five Senses’, ‘Number 17’, ‘In the Dark’, ‘The Violet Car’, ‘The Haunted House’, ‘The Pavilion’, ‘The Detective’, Publication history.

Limited Edition: limited to 300 hardcover copies