The Ghost Stories of Lettice Galbraith
WIMBOURNE BOOKS 2023
Edited by Alastair Gunn
My previous reviews of classic or older works: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/24/links-to-some-of-my-recent-reviews-of-miscellaneous-and-older-ghost-or-horror-stories/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
THE CASE OF LADY LUKESTAN
“Legally a ghost has no existence.”
A story that features two pages of a wedding register being found stuck together, in the church of Slumber-le-Wold, Yorkshire. A complex plot, but easily accessible and compelling, a plot of marital matters of due process, suicide and revenge by a dead lover, matters of dark disguise and the nature of the legal system’s attitude to spectral intervention in our lives.
I note “there was not the slightest trace of mucillage on the edges of the paper” – a presumed fact which creates a number of thoughts in my mind about the nature of ghosts.
Front page version of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/03/03/the-case-of-lady-lukestan-by-lettice-galbraith/
THE TRAINER’S GHOST
Much dark skullduggery and revenge amidst trainers, jockeys and owners of race horses called the Ghoul, Blue Ruin, Cream Cheese, The Rocket, with plotting in pub and field, involving a scary ghost that accompanies an elbow-trigger as part of its first presence! Well-written, perhaps deliberately confusing?
THE GHOST IN THE CHAIR
In some strange preternatural link with the stuck-together pages above, here we have paper playing a different part to evoke the substance of a ghost — here an erstwhile businessman who has had the ‘luck’ in a successful mining company, a company now on the brink of collapsing — and, via more than his usual doodles (“…annoyed his own clients during important interviews by adorning his blotting-pad with minutely detailed presentments of cutters and yawls”), but later words of contract on a blank paper by which he sells his soul to the devil to allow his appearance at the last crucial shareholders’ meeting after his death, a contract with a signature he saw as fire later becoming blank itself! A fiery redaction for y’all. More than just a cutter? Or even blotter.
“— the only thing he has to carry out of this world into the blank Beyond.”
IN THE SÉANCE ROOM
From Muddlesham — through an inevitable, perhaps predictable, downward spiral of arrogance, murder, greed and counterfeit séances — to a final come-uppance, this doctor of ladies effectively destroys two good ladies along the way.
A way that lay between…
“a letter from which he had taken a slip of printed paper — an untidy letter, blotted and smeared and hastily written on poor, thin paper.” (Smeared by tears.)
and, after much narrative inevitability,…
another letter “written firmly, though pale-blue stains…”, still damp with tears. (Both burnt in the firegrate.)
via
‘a little sheaf of papers’ created by one of these ladies as well as the ‘slips of paper’ with questions from those alive to those departed, as used in a séance that turned out to be as ridiculously predictable as it was highly powerful.
cf the blotting-pad and blank or fiery signature on paper and noted lack of mucillage on paper in previous stories above.
‘ŒNONE FORSAKEN’
THE MISSING MODEL
“‘Avenged’, said a clear voice at his elbow, ‘No. 112.’”
Much intriguing skullduggery in the art world of canvases, of artist models and an artist who had only painted potboilers so far who scolds a world where it is possible his beautiful model wastes herself on a ‘shopwalker’ and he is left with an unfinished painting, till another fascinating attractive model arrives, one who seemingly, it turns out, had gone missing and once worked as a model in the same art studio as his. Many synchronicities with unknowables, but I sensed something going on beyond the craquelure. A detective story, of sorts, as well as a ghost story,
A GHOST’S REVENGE
“Accept the possibilities of terrestrial elementaries and left-hand magic if you like; but the common or garden ghost, never.”
Despite (or because of?) its melodramatics and coincidences, the skilled prose of this story makes a compelling, suspenseful ghost story with a chase across the country in a train, to save a friend in a large legend-haunted house in the back of Creamshire’s beyond. Featuring a ghost sceptic who becomes a dogged rescuer of one his gentleman friends from an actual vengeful ghost, resulting in some catharsis that makes me forget the repeat of number 112 from the previous story and the ‘cart tract’ in the snow, let alone the letters and wired telegrams that were received (almost?) too late! Upon an (almost?) endless turning of the old year into the new! A story that was said to be repeated, ‘turned it inside and out and discussed it threadbare…’
A front page version of the above review: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2023/03/09/a-ghosts-revenge-by-lettice-galbraith/
THE BLUE ROOM
My previous review of the next story, as taken from here https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/21/womens-weird-more-strange-stories-by-women-1891-1937/#comment-26521, is as follows:
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Strangely in the light of the wording I happened to use yesterday above, the next story below, just now read, contains these words …. “They could not make head or tail of the context for some time, and then Mr Maxwell discovered that a leaf had been cut out.”
The Blue Room
by Lettice Galbraith (1897)
“Something occurred then of which, since it has nothing to do with this story, I need only say that it wiped out for ever any idea of marriage on my part,…”
Yet this young lady as narrator becomes by the end of the story an old woman called Mrs Marris, or am I confused? As much as she is confused by the word ‘incubate’ and ‘incubus’ in the different connections with poultry farming and witchcraft! That makes this otherwise effective but standard tale of haunted-room-for-guest-overflow bedroom-with-a-backstory in a large house intriguing and even more creepy! Not forgetting the lethal crease left by a body in bedcovers….”testing the ghost-theory” of Sprenger?
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Upon re-reading it just now, I found it even more frightening in the context of this collection, and I was further intrigued by *Mrs* Marris as narrator telling us at the beginning: “Mertoun had been my home from the time I was eighteen. Something occurred then of which, since it has nothing to do with this story, I need only say that it wiped out forever any idea of marriage on my part,…” as if a leaf or page has also been torn out of this story not necessarily by a modern unreliable narrator, but possibly by a creatively mock-unreliable author, a severe crease in the bedcovers of the reader’s mind, as Mr Maxwell pencils his notes into a paper notebook following the climax. Also, one must factor in the references here to contemporary social concerns of most women and poor folk in general being downtrodden…and the conflict between Catholic and Protestant in the Mertoun family history.
The vision of the ghost as a blend of a hard-edged burglar and a spectral entity, whatever the motives of Mrs Marris’s possible secret collusion with Miss Erristoun, is most frightening as one tries to untangle all the implications still resonating in my mind…
Arris /Erris
Erristoun / Mertoun (to the latter of whom Mrs Marris is distantly related by blood)
THE GHOST OF VITTORIA PANDELLI
“The thing remained. His will was powerless to shake off the impression of that shadowy third.”
This novelette is thus remarkable by
arguablybeating Elizabeth Bowen to the concept of the ‘shadowy third’ that Bowen since made into a literary gift for us all!Much of this Galbraith work is effective in portraying the anguish, obsession and madness of a man visited by the ghost of Vittoria Pandelli who had pursued him before he married his current wife, and Pandelli had killed herself soon after this marriage. His wife discovers him talking to himself as if he is talking to Pandelli, and she believes he still loves Pandelli, but he claims he had never loved her.
There is, then, for me, some confusing dealings of exorcism involving, inter alia, a missing photograph and a panther skin with yellow glass eyes, dealings of the wife’s brother and a German occultist who speaks in a ridiculous attempt to mirror the words of his accent when speaking in English.
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In addition to Lettice Galbraith’s stories, there is much material original to this book about Lettice Galbraith and her work. I shall now read this material.
end
I have since discovered that the Pandelli story above is a previously unpublished tale, having been extracted from her novel Burnt Spices (1906). So, please ignore the word ‘arguably’ above.