The stories themselves tend to belong to the sentimental Victorian ghost story tradition, in which ghosts are seldom malevolent but rather are intent on rectifying some unfinished business, such as exposing an injustice or attempting a reconciliation. Trafford, but subsequently adopted the Victorian convention of publishing under her husband’s name as Mrs J.H. Charlotte Riddell began writing under the pseudonym F.G. When Riddell died in 1880, Charlotte became the first pensioner of the Society of Authors, who paid her £60 a year from 1901 until her death from cancer four years later. A bibliography of her supernatural writings can be found at the excellent Guide to Supernatural Fiction.īorn in County Antrim, Ireland, in 1832, Charlotte Elizabeth Cowan was a prolific writer of novels and short stories and her income from writing helped to maintain her married life with the civil engineer Joseph Hadley Riddell, who was often in debt. Although it does not contain her complete supernatural writings, it was her only published collection of exclusively supernatural fiction. A classic of Victorian supernatural fiction, this collection contains some of the best of Riddell’s ghost stories.
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