Couching at the Door

Dorothy Kathleen Broster (1877-1950) is best known for her historical novels. But there is a darker side to her writing, glimpsed in her early poems- 'The Second of September 1792' is a fine example-and finding full expression in the stories she wrote after she had become a highly successful novelist. Sometimes-as in 'The Window', or 'The Pestering', or 'All Soul's Day'-these are what we might call 'explainable' ghost stories: apparitions or hauntings whose origin is to be found in some violent or unjust action in the past. Other stories, 'Couching at the Door' and 'From the Abyss,' have little or no explanation, even in supernatural terms. Add to these an elegant reworking of the 'Persephone' myth, 'The Taste of Pomegranates', the downright bloodthirsty 'Clairvoyance,' and the psychological studies, 'The Promised Land' and 'The Pavement' which so well merit the heading "Madness and Obsession", and you have a collection to disturb and unsettle the strongest nerves. AUTHOR: Dorothy Kathleen Broster 1887-1950 was born in Liverpool, England and served as a Red Cross nurse during WWI with a voluntary Franco-American hospital. Following the war she worked as a secretary to the Regius Professor of History and senior civil servants in Oxford. She wrote stories and reference books and historical novels which were successful and much reprinted in their day, of which the Jacobite Trilogy, featuring the dashing hero Ewen Cameron is the best known.