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The Old Nurse's Story , about a beautiful ghost child intent on luring a warm-blooded child into the freezing nights on the moors; The Squire's Story , about a gentleman with a nebulous past who moves into a grand house and marries a local belle only to reveal a sordid secret; The Poor Clare about an old woman who casts a spell which results in a lovely young woman being followed by her evil and seductive double; Lois the Witch , a terrifying and heartbreaking reprise of the Salem witch trials... out of nine stories in all, seven of them held me captive in this collection, which is quite an excellent average in any short story collection.

I've read some of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels and been highly impressed with her social commentary and vivid portrayals of class conflicts, but here we see an altogether different side of Gaskell's writing, which is the one she felt more free to show with an assumed name, under the cover of anonymity. No longer constricted by propriety, she was able to show a world operating beneath that thin veneer that Victorian morals dictated and through the looking glass: curses which held their sway over many generations, women with witchy powers, or who were assumed to be witches because of their barely hidden sexuality, men who wreaked true evil and cruelty and death by overreaching their powers in a paternalistic society, and yet, also and always, a woman's love and nurturing as her strongest defence against many of those evils. Two sides then to Elizabeth Gaskell. Two sides very much worth discovering. I predict there will be more E.G. in my reading future, and that I will return to some of my favourites in this story collection too.