Art NouveauSome Lifted Tales

The Lifted Veil: The Book of Fantastic Literature by Women.

commentary by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

   

I was lately thinking of the excellent young adult anthologists Sean Manley & Gogo Lewis, who liked to call women's supernatural literature "Sinister Tales by the Gentler Sex." They presented, especially throughout the 1970s, a series of excellent volumes of women's weird tales. Despite these sister-anthologists' lack of academic pretension, & their young adult target audience, they in fact included a splendid array of original "finds" from out of the past, for they were very enamored of the literature, constantly rooting about for lost treasures, & just naturally conveyed their enthusiasm for the labor. By now, anthologies of the type that focus on women's vintage ghost & horror stories have been done, & done well, a great number of times, by such well-grounded devotees as Alfred Bendixen, Richard Dalby & myself. Still more volumes of the type have been done middlingly well by Peter Haining, Bill Pronzini & most recently A. Susan Williams, editor of The Lifted Veil.

Ms. Williams seems not as well grounded in the literature as might have been preferrable. Though consisting of older works, they appear to be taken all but exclusively from post-1970 reprintings, including a few that presented inaccurate texts. There seem to be four exceptions in thirty-four: long unavailable rarities by Sarah Wilkinson, L. T. Mead, Christina Stead & a rather poor tale by Florence Marryat -- but perhaps even these I have merely missed or forgotten in recent reprints. So, despite a nice percentage of lesser knowns mixed with classic authors, surprisingly little in The Lifted Veil has not been readily in print in other anthologies or in facsimile reprints. For instance, two stories come from the same Cynthia Asquith anthology available in a library reprint series, as though Ms. Williams did not have access to Asquith's innumerable but unreprinted anthologies. Asquith is our greatest pioneer anthologist, & had a genuine ear for feminist weird tales, so it simply seems odd that only one of her anthologies was mined for two tales. Clearly, then, the aficionado or the fanatical amateur scholars in our ranks (I include myself) can only be disappointed in a selection seemingly made on the basis of familiarity with a very small cluster of recent reprints. The base was not large enough to select uniformly excellent works.

For the newcomer, this anthology is large & serviceable. For the most part, it does not overlap messieurs Bendixen's & Dalby's, or my own similar volumes, so it cannot be faulted for redundancy. There are some thoughtful inclusions that intentionally avoid the too-often seen. For instance, even though Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "If I Were a Man" is trivial compared to her classic "The Yellow Wallpaper," the umpteenth reprinting of "Wallpaper" really wasn't needed. At several other points, the obvious inclusion by a given author was avoided in favor of something secondary. Yet even here I find myself with only faint praise, for had I been able to critique the selection before press, I might have suggested forgoing second-bests altogether. There are too many truly splendid stories by the likes of Katherine Fullerton Gerould, Marjory Bowen, Josephine D. D. Bacon, Stella Gibbons, & scores of others whose output includes numbers of ghostly horrors not reprinted in living memory.

Reading Ms. William's volume, I felt a sense of guilt for not liking it better. It is perhaps unfair that it came into the hands of a fanatic already familiar with the entire contents. I do think the volume will delight anyone new to supernatural literature, & it would make a lovely birthday or christmas gift for a teenager. We fanatics are all fools to a degree, being much too hard to impress & wanting everything to be a lot better than is usually the case. I was overawed by Bendixen's Haunted Women; so too Dalby's Victorian selection of women's ghost stories, when it appeared from Virago Press (with several stories I'd been trying to track down unsuccessfully) was perused with genuine excitement. It is understandable, then, that I would feel a deep disappointment in a lesser success -- one that may nevertheless deserve to be called a success.

Yet guilt over not being terribly enthusiastic about the present selection was outweighed by annoyance over the decorative matter of the Book. I always want "extras" in an anthology. The "extras" in The Lifted Veil consist of an Introduction scarred by senseless academese, & two appendices consisting of superficial notes on the authors, & a list of chiefly secondary sources for the texts. None of this is of any value. Only the Introduction attempts to be so. It begins in a scattered academic manner with a number of quotations (it is the fundamental weakness of academic style that it prefers to borrow its opinions from others). These quotes are sewn together confusingly, & highlighted by the pressing query, "What is fantasy?" followed by the word's derivation from the Greek.

Now if a book on horses begins, "What is a horse?" or a book on political theory starts out "What are politics?" it is a dead give-away that you are dealing with a dilettante. If the answer to the mysterious poser is a quote from Webster's Junior Collegiate, the editorialist's grave is dug all the deeper.

The Intro continues with increasingly murky & even silly thinking. We are told that E. Nesbit used her initial because she was "reticent about her horror stories, preferring to give the impression that they were written by a man." Yet she used the same byline in her fairy tales for children, so it is very unlikely that she was especially worried what people would think of a woman writing supernatural horror -- especially in England where women notably excelled in the genre.

We are offered squishy feminist thinking like, "female characters created by women are active, intelligent & fully clothed." As the area covered by this anthology is 1806-1936, I found myself eager to learn more about the great body of supernatural tales by men featuring unclothed women. The semi-naked women on the covers of the original Weird Tales were by Margaret Brundage, but they were not to be found in many of the stories per se, whether by men or by women. When the fantastic first began to have a "body awareness," it was commonly at the hands of such writers as Margaret St. Clair & Miriam Allen de Ford, the latter a noted suffragist as well as a science fiction writer whose interest in sexually charged fantasy exceeded any of her male contemporaries. It might prove interesting to locate a body of literature of all kinds from this long period, & see if any of it indeed shows categorically that men, but not women, have their female characters in the buff. I was unconvinced that men of the eras sampled in this book tended to portray women in the buff when writing supernatural short stories. The anthologist's assertion that clad women were a novelty restricted to women's fiction struck me as carelessly considered.

Every paragraph of the introduction has something equally dubious. But when I began to form further rebuttals, I felt as though I were already a bit savage, & must stop. Suffice to say the Introduction might productively be torn out of the book, or preserved for the sake of unintentional comedy.

The chief importance of an anthology is in the editor's taste & selection, not in the merits or demerits of an introduction. As an "introductory sampler" of women's ghostly writings, The Lifted Veil is more laudable than not. In most cases the reader can look forward to ferreting out an entire collection of even better weird tales by whichever sampled author is liked best. If you liked best Harriet Prescott Spoffard's often reprinted horror yarn "Circumstance," then you'll be delighted with the recent Bendixen-edited selection of her stories which includes the stunning rarity "Moonstone Mass." If you are moved by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "The Wind in the Rose-bush," you'll be delighted that in the easily obtained Arkham House selection of her work there are at least six stories that surpass "Rose-bush," especially "Luella Miller" & "Little Lost Ghost." As a sampler that will lead the reader very quickly to even better stories, The Lifted Veil is to be recommended to young adults, the more so because the Sean Manley & Gogo Lewis volumes have become scarce.

   

A. Susan Williams's The Lifted Veil: The Book of Fantastic Literature by Women: 1800 - World War II (Ln: Xanadu, 1992) contains these stories:

   

This review of The Lifted Veil first appeared
in The New York Review of Science Fiction.
Copyright © 1993, 2000 by Jessica Amanda Salmonson.

Read also J.A.S.'s essay
Two Centuries of Women's Supernatural Stories

Victorian women's ghost stories
are a veritable sub-specialty here at Violet Books.
You'll find a great variety of same throughout the
Catalog of Vintage Weird Fictions For Sale

Return to The Weird Review Index

   

   

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