All Souls'

All Souls'

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1935

Ghosts (by D. Appleton-Century)

The Supernatural

New England, New York City

The I-narrator, Sara Clayburn, Agnes, the strange woman, Dr. Selgrove, the new doctor, Jim Clayburn, the Presley boy, Prince (the butler), Mary the housemaid, Nixon, the other servants (the cook, the gardener and the chauffeur)

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Whitegates (a colonial house)

New England and the Connecticut River, New York City and Lexington Avenue, the Scottish Hebrides and Isle of Skye, Boston, Baltimore, Switzerland, West Indies, Norrington (fictional), Shaker's Wood (fictional)

All Souls’ Eve, the Mary Celeste, the Coven, chickweed, cuttlefish, Connecticut mutton

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All Souls’ is expressed by an I-narrator of unspecified gender, who is also the cousin of the story’s protagonist, Sara Clayburn . Sara Clayburn is a widow, who lives with her servants in a large colonial house. The house is called Whitegates and is located in New England .

On All Souls’ Eve Sara , returning from a walk, overtakes a strange middle-aged woman , who is unknown to her. The strange woman tells her she is only going to see one of the girls working as servants at Sara’s house . A little later Sara slips on a patch of ice and fractures her ankle. Her servants call Dr. Selgrove , who orders her to bed and prohibits her from walking.

Following a sleepless and painful night, Sara ’s servants do not appear in the morning as usual. After Sara waits for a while, she decides to drag herself around her house, in order to find out what is wrong.

While dragging herself through Whitegates , she notices a deep oppressive silence and that the radiators are not working. Later, she discovers that all the servants have disappeared over night, she is all alone at Whitegates .

In the kitchen she hears a man’s voice speaking in a foreign language. Sara becomes afraid and tries to flee, but then finds out that the voice is coming from the radio. After she makes her way back to bed, she eats the sandwiches her faithful maid Agnes left against her orders. The next morning, Sara awakes when a young doctor , who has replaced Dr. Selgrove , is bending over her. Agnes has also returned, behaving as if nothing has happened and denies that Sara was alone for the previous thirty-six hours. Because Dr. Selgrove , who could have proved Sara ’s statement, does not return, and the servants behave as usual, Sara decides not to question Agnes or the other servants about the incident further. Sara also calls her cousin, the narrator , to keep her company. Her cousin stays with Sara at Whitegates until early October of the following year. On All Souls’ Eve , Sara Clayburn meets the strange woman again. The woman terrifies Sara and she flees to her cousin’s flat in New York .

At the end of the story, the narrator explains that Agnes comes from the Isle of Skye, the largest island of the Scottish Hebrides. Furthermore, the narrator claims that the Hebrides well known for supernatural phenomena and that the strange woman was possibly possessed by a witch, who may have summoned Agnes and the other servants to a coven at midnight. Sara Clayburn never returns to Whitegates.

• Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Studies in short fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 116 – 146.

• Fedorko, Kathi. Gender and the Gothic in the fiction of Edith Wharton. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995, 157 – 164.

• Zilversmit, Annette: “All Souls’: Wharton’s Last Haunted House and Future Directions for Criticism.” In Edith Wharton. New critical essays, edited by Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit, 315 - 328. New York: Garland, 1992.

"The Breakfast Room" by Edmund C. Tarbell, ca. 1902. Public Domain.