The Virgin of the Seven Daggers: and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)

I entered the church…It struck me suddenly that all this crowd of men and women standing all round, these priests chanting and moving about the altar, were dead…

Vernon Lee was a polymath whose copious writings include deeply learned studies of art, music, literature, and history, but also a small but exquisitely crafted group of Gothic tales, most of which first appeared in fin de siècle periodicals including the iconic Yellow Book. In these stories of obsession and possession, transgressive desire reaches out from the past – through a haunting portrait, a murdered poet's lock of hair, the uncanny voice of a diabolical castrato – dragging Lee's protagonists to their doom. Among those haunted by Lee's 'spurious ghosts' was Henry James, who praised her 'gruesome, graceful…ingenious tales, full of imagination'.

This new edition includes Lee's landmark 1890 collection Hauntings complete, along with six additional tales and the 1880 essay 'Faustus and Helena', in which Lee probes the elusive nature of the supernatural as a 'vital…fluctuating…potent' force that resists definite representation. Aaron Worth's contextual introduction, drawing upon Lee's newly published letters, reassesses her place in the pantheon of the fantastic.