BleakChesneyWold

                                       A Vampire Story or Science Fiction ?           Mary Elizabeth Braddon  (1835-1915) is most famous for the novels   Lady Audley's Secret (1862)   and Aurora Floyd ( serialised in 1862; published as a novel in 1863 )  . Dozens more novels, short stories, children's tales, poems, followed. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was also an actress, and magazine editor.  The genres Braddon explored included ghost, horror, and crime fiction.  Pleased to have found the Classic Ghost Story Podcast version of  Good Lady Ducayne  read by Tony Walker. Originally appeared via installments in 'The Strand Magazine' in 1896. A year before Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' and Richard Marsh's 'The Beetle'.  Good Lady Ducayne appears to be set in the decade it was written. Fiction now and then is often placed slight...

                                                       A Pagan Connection ? One puzzling aspect of Thomas Hardy's 'The Return of the Native', first serialised in Belgravia  magazine 1878, was the depiction of Bonfire Night as some sort of Pagan festival with links to a tradition going back centuries. It must be noted straight away that the 'Wessex' depicted in Hardy's novels is a fictional creation, though obviously he was drawing on his extensive knowledge of rural Dorset when writing. However, at first reading it is strange to think that the main festival to commemorate the Protestant triumph over a Catholic attempt to seize power was somehow 'Pagan'.  On to the text; Clym Yeobright has returned to Egdon Heath and on the prehistoric mound 'Rainbarrow' we are offered a gorgeous description of a bonfire burning away  "It was as if the...

                                                             A ghost story by  Amelia B Edwards (1831- 1892)   Born in London in  1831,Amelia B (Blandford) Edwards was a novelist, musician,journalist,poet, travel writer and a leading Egyptologist.  Her contribution in the latter field was particularly noteworthy, being a founder of The Egypt Exploration Society in 1882. Miss Edwards travelled in to Upper Egypt, and her book of  observations and illustrations were first  published as A Thousand Miles Up The Nile in 1877- and republished in 1982 and 1986. Her account of travels in The Dolomites - Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (1872)    is not quite so highly regarded, but still highlighted a region that her readership was unlikely to have visited. Miss Edwards was also a member of...

                                                                                 Painting :   October (1878) by Jules Bastien-Lepage  * 'Return of the Native' was Hardy's sixth novel and is centred around an area he called Egdon Heath. As a physical location it is not easy to place. Edward Parnell in 'Ghostland' has proposed that geographically Black Heath and Duddle Heath in Dorset fulfil this role PARNELL .Mr Parnell has also cited Hardy's  own view of  his own  creation of 'Wessex' as being "partly real, partly dream country". Egdon Heath also features  in 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' and Hardy's short story 'The Withered Arm'.  The novel opens with an anonymous narrator offering a description of the Heath (  " heathy, furzy, briary wilderness-...

                                                         A Lost Occult Horror Classic                       John Atkinson Grimshaw 'Nightfall on the Thames' 1880 in the public domain courtesy of Wikipedia Richard Marsh was born Richard Bernard Heldman in London  on 12th October 1857. The son of a lace merchant who married a lacemaker. The Heldman family were Jewish converts to Christianity. His father went bankrupt not long after Richard's birth, and became a school master. From 1880 up to 1883, Richard Heldman had short stories published in boy's fiction and adventure magazines, but appears to have stopped writing in June 1883. For the rest of the year, Heldman drifted through Britain and France, living from the proceeds of forged cheques. In February 1884, he was arrested and th...

                                                         A Comparison      Les Foins (Haymaker)  by    Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), from 1877.Public Domain, courtesy of 'Wikipedia'. The purpose of this post is to look at the plight of two fictional characters 'Lady Dedlock' and 'Tess', created some 40 years apart, but dramatically  depict how a woman who had a child 'out of wedlock' could be 'ruined'. Both Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy were highly critical of the treatment of their plight. A great deal of  Charles Dickens's 'Bleak House' (first published via installments 1852-1853)  concerns hidden past, and how the power that those individuals who have discovered a secret  about another person can wield. Lady Honoria Dedlock,  has had an illegitimate child before her marriage. She...

                             The Thomas Hardy Connection?                                     Image: courtesy of  Shire Hall Museum (Dorchester) and Folio Creative (photographer) . Thomas Hardy 'Tess of the d'Urbevilles' (1891)  ends with the its tragic heroine being hanged for the murder of Alex d'Urbeville, a former lover. Hardy did not depict the trial or the execution of Tess in the novel, a black flag is hoisted above the prison at Wintoncester ( Winchester)  to show that the deed was done in the very last pages of the book. We learn that ' Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, ....had ended his sport with Tess.  At the age of 16,Hardy was a witness to the hanging of (Elizabeth) Martha Brown on 9th August 1856, who had been tried at the law court in Dorchester on 21st July 1856 and f...