Lady Ferry and Other Uncanny People

Eedited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Jacket art is by Deborah McMillion-Nering

The supernatural plays a pivotal rôle in many of the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, whose 1896 novel The Country of the Pointed Firs was considered by Willa Cather to be among the very best novels in American literature. Although recent years have seen a growing reawakening of interest in Jewett's life and works, her supernatural pieces—which reflect the author's own fascination with worlds both seen and unseen—have largely been overlooked, ignored, or dismissed.

Ghosts, the afterlife, and telepathy all play their parts in many of Jewett's stories. However, the author was not interested in simply telling a neatly-resolved ghost story; and thus we find that her tales can be read on many levels, and contain a richness of language and an eye for the details of human life that place them on a level with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James.

In these stories—the collected supernatural writings of Sarah Orne Jewett—we meet the (possibly) immortal Lady Ferry; travel back to dark New England days for a tale of witchcraft; journey beyond the toll-gate with a little girl searching for unearthly delights; watch as Death himself comes to live in a haunted house; and encounter other uncanny people and places, all rooted firmly in the New England of a century ago, and in a way of life which was disappearing even as Jewett wrote about it, preserving it forever.

Contents

• Preface by Joanna Russ
• 'Sarah Orne Jewett's "Imaginative Realism"' by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
• 'Lady Ferry'
• 'In Dark New England Days'
• 'A Sorrowful Guest'
• 'The Captains'
• 'Captain Littlepage and the Waiting Place'
• 'The Landscape Chamber'
• 'The Green Bowl'
• 'The Foreigner'
• 'Beyond the Toll-Gate'
• 'The House that Ran Away'
• 'The Gray Man'.

Limited to 500 coies and sold out at the publisher