The Past is not dead. It is waiting to possess you.

“The greatest… of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction.”–Montague Summers

In this landmark collection of Victorian supernatural fiction, the acclaimed intellectual and writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) redefined the ghost story, moving it from creaking corridors to the dangerous realms of the human mind. Her tales are not merely of spectres, but of the magnetic, malignant power of history, art, and obsession.

Across four mesmerising stories, Hauntings explores how the passions and wickedness of the past return to contaminate the present:

• Amore Dure: A historian researching a 16th-century Italian noblewoman, infamous for the ruin and death of her many lovers, finds his obsession escalating until he fears he will become her next victim.

• Dionea: The arrival of a mysterious girl washed ashore in a remote Italian village unleashes a wave of violent, chaotic desire, suggesting she may be a pagan goddess reborn.

• Oke of Okehurst: A wife’s pathological obsession with her ancestral past (a notorious murder of a lover) drives her husband to distraction and madness, as he battles a phantom rival for her soul.

• A Wicked Voice: A composer in Venice is drawn into the fatal legend of an 18th-century castrato whose singing was said to be so exquisite it could literally kill, raising the question of whether a voice can truly haunt the living.

Lee’s ghosts are not caught in chains, but in the deepest recesses of the mind. She offers a brilliant, chilling study of aesthetics, female agency, and the terrifying line where artistic obsession ends and psychological collapse begins.