FERELITH at 120

The other day I was discussing with a friend some modernist aspects of ghost stories, and I thought of Ferelith, by Lord Kilmarnock, in which a woman has a ghostly lover, and the affair produces a child who lives in between the worlds of the earthly and unearthly--an interesting and seemingly modern take on the ghostly. It was published in February 1903, so is now 120 years old. It has been admired by Andre Gide, Geoffrey Grigson, and Julian Green—not names one usually associates with weird literature.

I reprinted it a few years ago with an introduction by Mark Valentine, and I quote his opening paragraph here:

Ferelith is a lost classic of supernatural fiction, up until now known only to a few enthusiasts. In its time, the early Edwardian period, it received little attention in Britain: but later it was enthusiastically acclaimed in French literary circles, praised by André Gide and Julian Green. The book is a strange mixture: it was written in a fairly staid, measured style, yet its subject matter was daring and unusual. It was, said The Times in the obituary of its author, “a weird and rather gruesome ghost story;” and one literary guide compared it to Wuthering Heights in its power to evoke evil.

Mark’s essay is reprinted in his volume A Wild Tumultory Library. The Nodens Books reprint of Ferelth is available from the usual sources.