Blackthorn Berries The hedgerows flame with fruit of sombre hue, Each berry set like embers in the thorn; The summer’s green has faded into rue, And autumn wakes to sing the day forlorn. Yet in the hush a robin strikes his chord, A steadfast hymn against the mist and chill; No choir of men, no … Continue reading Autumn’s Witness
Category: Writing
The Party on the Stairs: Ghosts in Petticoats and the Stumble of Innocence
Adelaide Sophia Claxton, The Party on the Stairs (c. 1875). Watercolour with bodycolour, 50 × 45 cm. Public domain. Image via Wikimedia Commons. The staircase is one of those odd places in a house where something uncanny always threatens to happen. One’s neither in the drawing room nor the bedroom, but somewhere in the thin … Continue reading The Party on the Stairs: Ghosts in Petticoats and the Stumble of Innocence
The Man in the High Castle: History as Hallucination
Some novels ask ‘What if?’ and there are novels that ask ‘What is?’ Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle manages the perverse trick of doing both at once. Set in a United States divided between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan after an Axis victory in the Second World War, it ought to … Continue reading The Man in the High Castle: History as Hallucination
The Ghost That Wasn’t There: On Hughes Mearns’ Antigonish
“Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.” Thus begins one of the most famous fragments of verse ever to slip through the cracks of English literature - part nursery rhyme, part ghost story, part psychological confession. Hughes Mearns’ Antigonish (1899) was written in the playful spirit of nonsense, yet like all … Continue reading The Ghost That Wasn’t There: On Hughes Mearns’ Antigonish
A Ghost in the Glass: Charlotte Brontë and the Churchyard Photograph
Haworth Churchyard photograph, John Stewart, c.1856–57. © Brontë Society. Sourced via annebronte.org. There’s a photograph - albumen print, sepia-toned, crisp with the shadows of headstones - that has set imaginations aflame for more than a century. It shows Haworth churchyard, with its lichen-bitten tombs and overhanging sky, a place where the dead vastly outnumber the … Continue reading A Ghost in the Glass: Charlotte Brontë and the Churchyard Photograph
Wording 