Not to Be Taken at Bed Time (Swan River Press edition)

Introduction by Richard Dalby
Cover image by Brian Coldrick

"The lonely graveyard is far away, an’ the dead man is hard to raise—" — "Not to Be Taken at Bed-Time"

In the late-nineteenth century Rosa Mulholland (1841-1921) achieved great popularity and acclaim for her many novels, written for both an adult audience and younger readers. Several of these novels chronicled the lives of the poor, often incorporating rural Irish settings and folklore. Earlier in her career, Mulholland became one of the select band of authors employed by Charles Dickens to write stories for his popular magazine All the Year Round, together with Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Amelia B. Edwards. Mulholland’s best supernatural and weird short stories have been gathered together in the present collection, edited and introduced by Richard Dalby, to celebrate this gifted late Victorian “Mistress of the Macabre”.

Contents

• "Introduction" by Richard Dalby
• "Not to Be Taken at Bed-Time"
• "The Ghost at the Rath"
• "The Haunted Organist of Hurly Burly"
• "The Mystery of Ora"
• "A Strange Love Story"
• "The Ghost at Wildwood Chase"
• "The Lady Tantivy"
• "Acknowledgements"

Rosa Mulholland was born in Belfast on 19 March 1841. In 1891 she married the eminent Irish historian Sir John T. Gilbert (1829-1898). In addition to her two-volume Life of Sir John T. Gilbert (1905), Mulholland produced a long line of novels mostly set in rural Ireland, and featuring strong female characters, including The Wicked Woods of Tobereevil (1872) and Banshee Castle (1895). Many of her supernatural tales were collected in The Haunted Organist of Hurly Burly (1880). Mulholland died at her home Villa Nova on 21 April 1921.