As a popular writer, Wood was attuned to the issues that mattered to her readers, and in 1855-56 one of the issues dominating the news was the Crimean War. It provides an indirect background to this story, which also features — as does the later "Reality or Delusion?," linked below — an interest in those most Gothic of calendar days: All Saints'/All Souls' Days. Here, too, the connection is French, fittingly, since those days loom largest in Roman Catholic tradition. This story features no genuine supernaturalism, but clearly enjoys getting close to the ghostly.

Wood's take on a classic Gothic tale: a long-ago Italian setting, a protagonist whose very name references the villain in that most famous of Gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, a love triangle (well, actually a love quadrangle), jealousy, religious bigotry, deception, murder (by walling up someone alive, a la Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado"), a ghost and a family curse — it doesn't get much better than this.

Wood's fictional response to a real-life incident, the bloody Sepoy Rebellion in India in 1857 (see explanatory notes in this etext for more info). This tale is thus to be included among that large number of Victorian ghost stories that in some way engage the issue of British imperialism: see, for example, B. M. Croker's "To Let," or just about any ghost story by Rudyard Kipling.

One of the "Johnny Ludlow" stories, which were among Wood's most popular works and which many regard as her best material. This is one of the few Johnny Ludlow stories that are unabashedly supernaturalist, and how can you not love a decent guy who refers to himself as "a muff and a double muff"? Despite the title, this story is perhaps less concerned with questions of ontology or perception than it is with matters near and dear to a conservative Victorian heart: honesty, propriety, the class system, hard work, guilt, and morality.

Brief note regarding Wood's indebtedness to "sensation fiction." [A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection, Michael E. Grost]