In these eight atmospheric Victorian tales, ghosts of love thwarted, innocence betrayed, or duties unfulfilled return from the shadowy borders of beyond to engage with the living. Penn’s ghosts are poignant rather than malevolent; they do not conjure terror, but instead a sense of the uncanny strangeness of the supernatural.
* * * *
This writer of supernatural and crime stories was a regular contributor to the British periodical
The Argosy beginning in the mid-1870s. After Penn’s last attributed story appeared in 1897, the author vanished from the literary world.
Nothing is known about Mary Elizabeth Penn. Scholars have been unable to find any details, including birth and death dates, or even gender. Alastair Gunn, in the introduction to
The Ghost Stories of Mary E. Penn (2017), advances a theory that this may have been one of the many pen-names of noted Victorian author Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood (1814-1887). [See:
http://synfinity.blogspot.com/2017/11/who-was-ghost-story-writer-mary-e-penn.html ]
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The contents of this book were first published 1876 ~ 1893 in
The Argosy.
This is my own compilation. Texts were obtained from magazine archives at the Internet Archive and HathiTrust. OCR errors were corrected; punctuation, diacritics, and italics formatted. Story titles are cross-linked to table of contents. Embedded font used for titling.
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A gentle segue into Halloween...
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