A powerful tale of a family curse.

In many ways an exemplary Victorian ghost story, this tale was first published anonymously in the 1852 Christmas issue of Dickens' Household Words. It is, according to Angus Easson (author of Elizabeth Gaskell [1979]), "[o]ne of her best short stories" (24) and "a splendid ghost story . . . in a class with 'Turn of the Screw'" (219-220). Personally I might quibble with the last part of that, since Henry James's classic story is of rather a different sort than Gaskell's overtly supernatural tale, and that makes me wonder about what sort of "class" we're talking about, but it's a very fine piece of work no matter how you slice it. It's also been said to have "strongly Wordsworthian overtones: the story of the rejected mother and her child, cast out onto the fells to die is a latter-day Lyrical Ballad" (Alan Shelston, "The Supernatural in the Stories of Elizabeth Gaskell," Exhibited by Candlelight [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995], 142). Add to all this the fact Gaskell had 4 daughters of her own, and 2 sons who died in infancy, and it leads to the inevitable conclusions that you must read this story if you have not yet done so.