Violet Books

Inspired by the Victorian Christmas annuals, The Christmas Greeting (1902) served as a catch-all for Marie Corelli's essays, poems, fairy tales, ghost stories, exhortations, & even a song. It was given a particularly elegant art nouveau binding, rendering it the ideal holiday gift for friends or families of the Edwardian era.

The Love of Long Ago (1921) published between (by this decade nostalgic) art nouveau boards gathered the majority of Marie Corelli's later short stories (her early tales are mostly in Cameos). Included is one of her finest eerie stories, "The Sculptor's Angel." With its mystic sculptor & atmosphere of decaying Bohemian elegance, it is an ideal example of the Decadent weird tale both in style and theme.

Many readers of The Sorrows of Satan (1896) have responded to it as something of an "homage" to the Evil One, against whose tragic & seductive beauty only one can stand: Mavis Clare, author & saint, whose initials, tellingly, are Marie Corelli's. She took a bruising in the press for seeming to like the character of the Fiend, & for seeming to mistake herself for an archangel. But the public quite properly ate it up & the book has only rarely been out of print.

This is a Grosset & Dunlap reissue, in a lovely embossed art nouveau binding, of Marie Corelli's first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds: A Novel (1886), the tale of an electrically rejuvenated woman's cosmic quest for divine enlightenment. It was first of the "Heliobas trilogy" which included Ardath (1889) & The Soul of Lilith (1892), in their totality the most impressive saga of occultism & weird science ever composed.

Marie Corelli popularized the theme of the "elixer of life" in women's literature. San Francisco author Gertrude Atherton entered the scientific rejuvenation or Immortal Maiden genre with Black Oxen (1923). The story, alas, is not the ideal expression of Atherton's usual genius (her ghost story collection The Bell in the Fog (1905), product of the San Francisco Decadence, is a vastly more thrilling volume). But the Photoplay edition's dustwrapper, designed around an attractively tinted film still, renders even this minor science fiction tale collectable.

Bertha Ruck, a popular novelist in her day, was the wife of the great ghost story writer Oliver Onions. The titular heroine of The Immortal Girl (1925) begins her tale as a village old maid, until the Elixer of Life transforms her into a desirable flapper. The baroque weirdness of Marie Corelli's tales of immortal maidens have by the Jazz Era degenerated into blithe shopgirl romances with an overlay of science fantasy.

The appropriately colored dustwrapper for Born to the Purple (1938) might not strike the modern observer as indicative of a fantasy story, but Marie Corelli's Ardath helped to define wildly overblown marriage sequences as part & parcel with occult romance, meaning this illustration indeed invoked an air of the supernatural for its target audience. Margaret Ward's tale of love & reincarnation sends us everywhere from the splendrous Chinese & European imperial courts to a little railroad town in the American West, with characters ranging from a Hindu mystic to cowboys & mechanics.

One of the greatest of this century's authors of supernatural tales was Marjorie Bowen, who also wrote superior "crime & crinoline" murder mysteries under the pseudonym Joseph Shearing. Her "Shearing" books always have flashes of the macabre, but The Spectral Bride (1942), issued in England as The Fetch, goes all the way into the realm of supernatural costume adventure.

One of the great Victorian ghost story writers, Rhoda Broughton's Twilight Stories was a 1947 edition of her 1873 collection Tales for Christmas Eve adding a preface by its publisher (& Arkham House author) Herbert Van Thal. This evocative dustwrapper is unfortunately rarely seen.

The weird gothic Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest, Founded on Facts was written by Romanticist Lawrence Flammenburg [pseud of Karl Fredrich Kahlert] & first translated from the German for the Minerva Press in 1794. The edition shown here (London: Holden, 1927) adds an introduction by the eccentric fraud priest Montague Summers, in a binding imitating Victorian yellowbacks. Packed with extravagant supernaturalism & violent action, Neil Barron's Horror Literature calls it "outrageous" & Ev Bleiler in his Guide to Supernatural Fiction declares it "one of the most interesting" of all Gothic novels, & which was on Jane Austin's list of extreme gothics.

The popular preference for horrific supernatural stories has allowed some of the finest authors of gentle ghost stories to fall into comparative neglect among collectors of the fantastic, though Annie Trumbull Slosson does retain a following among collectors of Victorian local color tales. The finest of her several collections is Dumb Fox-glove & Other Stories (Harpers, 1898). The title story regards the ghost of a crippled child. Another tale, "A Transient," depicts the ghost of someone who died in childhood but whose spirit has nevertheless continued, over the years, to age at a normal rate. Her tales were regarded "gift worthy" in her day, hence several have fine bindings like this one.

This thrilling dustwrapper for The Bracelet & Other Stories (London: Morgan Laird, n.d., but from the 1930s) illustrates the titular bracelet warding off the cowled figure of death. The book is a rare collection of weird & criminous tales of seedy London & south Asia. It's author Gervee Baronte was a popular medium in the 1930s & wrote a weekly column on spiritualism for Pearson's Weekly.