Curious, If True: Strange Tales - Hardcover

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell's Curious, If True: Strange Tales gathers five unsettling Victorian stories of ghosts, curses, witchcraft, danger, and uncanny transformation. Best known for the social realism of North and South, Mary Barton, Cranford, and Wives and Daughters, Gaskell also wrote with remarkable force in the Gothic and supernatural tradition. This collection brings together "The Old Nurse's Story," "The Poor Clare," "Lois the Witch," "The Grey Woman," and "Curious, If True," tales first published across the 1850s and early 1860s and collected under this title in 1861.

These are strange tales in the full Victorian sense: domestic yet haunted, morally serious yet shadowed by terror, rooted in family history, memory, persecution, secrecy, and the uncanny persistence of the past. Gaskell's supernatural fiction does not rely on mere sensation; it draws its power from atmosphere, conscience, social pressure, and the frightening ways hidden wrongs return to claim the living. For readers of Victorian Gothic fiction, classic ghost stories, nineteenth-century women writers, supernatural tales, and literary horror, Curious, If True reveals a darker and less familiar side of one of England's great novelists.