Lost Ghosts

This volume presents the weird fiction of the American writer Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930). Better known for her mainstream writings focusing on the lives of men and women in New England, Freeman was frequently attracted to the weird, and her work culminated in the notable volume The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903). But that book contained only a small number of her weird tales, and this volume for the first time reprints all the weird work written over her long career, including a rare play about the Salem witchcraft, Giles Corey, Yeoman.

The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, supernatural horror has been a slender but provocative contribution to Western literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the “titans” of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions.

S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.