BRASS Stacks

For this episode, we return to the English master of the short sharp shock, Saki, and a delightfully mischievous narrative about the sort of tales children really enjoy, “The Storyteller.”

The late 19th and early 20th century were the golden age of the ghost story. Some of the greatest tales of the supernatural were written at this time, including masterpieces by Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood and M.R. James, as well as short stories by such heavyweight novelists as Dickens,  George Eliot, and Henry James. A surprising name on this list is the Mistress of the Experimental Novel, Virginia Woolf.

What is a ghost? asks this exquisite and little-known story. In a few short pages, Woolf creates a comic, thoughtful, yet ultimately disturbing portrait of the woman always on the outskirts of the party, the ever-present but unknowable Miss V.

 

For our second BRASS Stacks, we are featuring one of the greatest short story writers of the pre-War years, H.H. Munro, who wrote as Saki.

This brilliant journalist-turned-short story writer was one of the great wits of the Edwardian age. Orphaned at age 2, Munro was raised by his grandmother and a household of puritanical aunts. (In both his comic pieces and his horror stories, aunts often end up being the victims.) His brilliant young wastrels like Reginald and Clovis inspired P.G. Wodehouse, and his stories of supernatural and natural horror place him squarely in the tradition of great British ghost writers like E.F. Benson and M.R. James. This story, Tobermory, is one of his best, and deftly combines both drawing room comedy and the fantastical to tell the story of the world’s first talking cat.

Our new series of narrated short stories begins with two early stories by Lord Dunsany.