Edith Wharton

Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York on 24 January 1862 into one of the city’s old, rich families, the narrow world she later dissected in her novels. She was educated at home by governesses, spent much of her childhood in Europe, and married Edward “Teddy” Wharton, a Boston banker’s son, in 1885. The marriage was unhappy and ended in divorce in 1913. She designed and built a large country house, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, and her first book, written with an architect, was about interior decoration.

Her first major novel, The House of Mirth (1905), was a best seller. She followed it with Ethan Frome (1911) and The Custom of the Country (1913), and she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence in 1921, the first woman to receive the fiction prize. By then she had long been living in France. She began spending winters in Paris in 1907 and settled there permanently in 1910. During the First World War she organized relief work for refugees in Paris and was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1916. Later she divided her time between a house north of Paris and one at Hyères, on the Mediterranean. She died at Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt on 11 August 1937.

Wharton wrote ghost stories throughout her career, and she gathered the best of them in Ghosts, published shortly after her death. They are written with the same social precision as her novels, which turns out to be an excellent tool for horror. Afterward (1910) is about an American couple who buy an old house in Dorset and are told that it has a ghost, though nobody knows it was one “till long, long afterward.” The Eyes (1910) is an after-dinner story by an aging bachelor that turns, in the last pages, into something much less comfortable for its listeners. Kerfol (1916) is about a manor in Brittany, a pack of silent dogs, and a seventeenth-century trial.

All three are long and slow and reward patience. Start with “Afterward,” whose last line is the whole story turned inside out.