‘Kerfol’ by Edith Wharton

With so much room for ambiguity, mystery and the purely subjective, ghost stories are perfect for short fiction. This one begins with the standard trope, with a house so cheap there’s bound to be a supernatural catch. This house is an ancient French chateau, haunted by a pack of dogs that don’t attack the narrator, when she comes to view the property, but simply stand their ground in silence. The legend unfolds, of an aristocrat who strangles his wife’s dogs one by one, until suddenly, and mysteriously, the dogs wreak their revenge. We never find out if the narrator makes an offer on that house, and there’s much else about the framing story that’s unresolved or hinted at, an affinity perhaps between the visitor, the chateau and the ‘deep, dark memory’ attached to the dogs. Wharton captures that strange mixture of unknowability and empathy behind the dogs’ eyes. And, dead or not, those are real dogs, carefully observed.

First published in Scribner’s,1916. Read it here

‘The Day of the Funeral’ by Edith Wharton

“His wife had said: ‘If you don’t give her up I’ll throw myself from the roof.’ He had not given her up, and his wife had thrown herself from the roof.”

If these opening lines don’t make you want to read on, I can’t help you.

First published in Human Nature, D. Appleton and Company, 1933 and variously collected including in The Collected Stories 1911–1937, Library of America, 2001

‘Souls Belated’ by Edith Wharton

Set in her customary milieu of upper-class East Coast American society, Wharton’s story is the saga of Lydia and Gannet, their illicit affair, and Lydia’s divorce from her husband. As they travel though Italy with Lydia’s divorce papers in her luggage, the way ahead to a blissful married future seems clear. Except it’s not – complicated emotions, doubts and fears cloud any vision of harmony, as Wharton painstakingly dissects their relationship. While the story is in one sense a sober satire of late nineteenth-century society, with its strictures and constraints, it’s more an exploration of the how unknowable people are, even those closest to us. Wharton reinforces this with the constantly shifting POVs – never a very successful tactic in short stories, given the concentration of the form – exposing just how differently Lydia and Gannet see each other and the world. At the end, this distance is deftly bridged by the sound of the steamboat that is to take Lydia away: ‘He and she, at that moment, were both listening to the same sound: the whistle of the boat as it rounded the nearest promontory’. The story’s closing moments when they part and seem to reconsider are tortuous and beautiful in their fidelity to lived experience.

First published in The Greater Inclination, Scribner, 1899. Collected in The Reckoning and Other Stories, Phoenix Orion, 1999