Gothic Tales

Elizabeth Gaskell, the Victorian novelist best known for Cranford and North and South, turned to the uncanny in this collection of Gothic fiction. Its stories move between the everyday and the otherworldly, leaving an unsettling impression.

The title story "Disappearances" grows out of local legends about people who vanish without trace, and it weaves rumour together with fact. "Lois the Witch" is a novella inspired by an account of the Salem witch trials, and it follows how desire and jealousy can spread into collective hysteria. In "The Old Nurse's Story", an enigmatic child wanders the bitter, frozen moors of Northumberland.

Other pieces lean further into the strange. "The Poor Clare" is a darkly surreal tale in which a woman's bitter curse brings a malevolent double into being. "Curious, if True" takes a more mischievous route, playfully reshaping familiar fairy tales.

Taken together, these stories show a side of Gaskell that differs sharply from her social realism, with a darker and more disquieting style of writing.