One of two classics coming this October from Smith & Taylor Classics.

Hauntings (1890) is a collection of bewitching ghost stories from gothic short story writer Vernon Lee. 

Shipwrecked before a remote Italian coastal village, a young girl discovers the ability to command love and incite madness; a Polish historian is drawn to the enigmatic allure of a medieval Duchess with a deadly past; a painter, hired to capture the likeness of a reclusive couple, slowly uncovers a mysterious love affair; and a man with a voice that is as deadly as it is beautiful eats away at the health of those who hear him sing, troubling a composer years later. 

Once described by Henry James as being “as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent,” Vernon Lee’s ghost stories haunt as much as they reveal an obsession with art, architecture, and deadly, queer desires. Even the smallest vibration from the past signals danger for the characters in Hauntings: from the emanations of old houses and old books to the discovery of old portraits, objects come alive and worm into the minds of the living.

Vernon Lee (1856-1935)—the pen name of the writer Violet Paget—was a travel writer, novelist, musician, and critic. Primarily remembered today for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics, she spent most of her life in Florence, Italy, where she cultivated friendships with artists such as John Singer Sargent, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. One of the first to bring the concept of Einfühlung, or empathy, into English criticism, she was an outspoken follower of Walter Pater’s aestheticism and vocal pacifist until her death in 1935.