The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

Five early short stories by Edith Wharton, American author of The House of Mirth. Includes “Kerfol,” “Mrs. Manstey's View,” “The Bolted Door,” “The Dilettante,” and “The House of the Dead Hand.”With one possible exception (“The Dilettante”), these early stories are dark tales about ghosts (canine and human), dark deeds of the past and present and how they haunt their perpetrators and victims, and narrators/central characters with a fierce determination to pursue their hearts’ desires at all costs.Even the one exception, which seems more like Wharton’s later tales of the complicated relationships between men and women, is haunted by the ghost of the past. (Summary by Winnifred Assmann)