Re: Less Familiar Weird Literature
Posted by:
jdworth (IP Logged)
Date: 21 February, 2012 03:32PM
Knygatin Wrote:
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> Do you see Oliver Onions in the "second" or "first
> tier"? Is he superior to E. F. Benson?
>
>
>
> *Hehe*... I'm having an ever harder time keeping
> all these mustachioed Victorian gentlemen writing
> ghost stories, apart! And there is a full score of
> them not even mentioned yet on this forum. It's
> become a muddle, my head is spinning. After all,
> you can't read them all!
Overall, I would say superior to Benson. Certainly, he has a more subtle, delicate touch and is less given to the Victorian taste for melodrama, generally speaking.
As for the second point... well, actually, you can... but you'd have one heck of a reading list ahead of you. And, of course, that doesn't even cover the women who wrote ghostly tales -- Rhoda Broughton, Charlote Riddell, Margaret Oliphant, Elisabeth Gaskell, "Veron Lee" (Violet Page) -- though she's Edwardian rather than Victorian, Dinah Craik (Dinah Mulock), Mary Braddon, Amelia B. Edwards, Edith Nesbit, etc., etc., etc. Or those on this side of the pond, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton....