The Ghost Stories
Psychological Supernatural Fiction of Haunted Houses, Repressed Desire, and Moral Aftershock in Gilded Age SocietyBy Edith Wharton
Length14h 13m
About this audiobook
Edith Wharton's The Ghost Stories gathers tales in which supernatural disturbance becomes a precise instrument for examining memory, guilt, desire, and social confinement. Rather than relying chiefly on sensational apparitions, Wharton builds unease through implication, psychological ambiguity, and the slow violation of apparently secure domestic spaces. Her elegant, controlled prose, sharply observant dialogue, and finely calibrated narrative perspectives place these stories within the tradition of the American and European Gothic while also linking them to literary modernism's interest in subjective experience and uncertain reality. Haunted houses, uncanny encounters, and returning presences often reveal less about the dead than about the living, exposing the emotional costs of privilege, repression, and self-deception. A major American novelist, short-story writer, and cultural critic, Wharton brought to fiction an intimate knowledge of inherited wealth, rigid social codes, and the restricted opportunities available to women of her class. Her cosmopolitan life between the United States and Europe, together with her engagement with architecture, art, and wartime experience, enriched her sensitivity to spaces shaped by history and silence. The supernatural offered her a compelling means of rendering pressures that conventional realism could only indirectly express. This volume will reward readers interested in Gothic fiction, psychological realism, and the relationship between social criticism and the uncanny. It is especially recommended for those who value atmosphere, formal subtlety, and stories whose mysteries deepen rather than resolve their understanding of human behavior.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 4.2 (6.7K)
Includes Goodreads, LibraryThing, StoryGraph, Amazon
GenreLiterary Classics
Length14 hrs 13 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateOct 20, 2025
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1A Tapestry of Home Life: 27 Domestic Fiction Books
2The Complete Works of Frances Hodgson Burnett (Illustrated Edition) (Annotated)
3The Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Novels, Short Stories and Autobiographical Writings
4The Complete Works of Charles Dickens: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays, Articles, Speeches, Travel Sketches & Letters (Illustrated)
5The Complete Works of Mark Twain
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6The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
7All Souls’
8Afterward
9Kerfol
10The Eyes
11The Triumph of Night
12Miss Mary Pask
13Bewitched
14Mr. Jones
15Pomegranate Seed
16A Bottle of Perrier
17The Looking-Glass
18The Duchess At Prayer
19A Journey
20The House of the Dead Hand
21The Fulness of Life
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