The Bell in the Fog and other stories by Gertrude Atherton

Gertrude Atherton was born in San Francisco in 1857 and live to the grand age of ninety-one. She started writing at an early age, against her husband's wishes, and later became a protegee of Ambrose Bierce. However, I did not find that many of these stories show Bierce's influence, either in the writing style which is more straightforward and less verbose than Bierce, or the content, apart from a slight element of grotesqueness in The Striding Place.
Another more obvious influence on her was Henry James, to whom Atherton dedicates The Bell in the Fog, and it is easy to draw parallels between his ghost stories and hers, mainly in the way they are not really ghost stories.
This collection of stories (published by Wordsworth Editions, ISBN: 1840225408) is well written and engaging but, rather than being supernatural tales to send shivers down your spine, they focus on psychological aspects of people's lives. The characters are not haunted by spirits but rather by mistakes of the past or by lost opportunities.
One parallel that can be drawn between Bierce and Atherton is that there is a definite theme through many of her stories, as there was through his. For Bierce it was the futility of the Civil War and the horror that man can do to man; for Atherton it is the way in which lives can be wasted as people wait for love, money or opportunities until they realise too late how futile and pointless the waiting has been.
The strongest example of this was a very moving story, A Monarch of a Small Survey, where the companion to the sister of a rich man, disappointed of independence on his death, realises that she should have taken a chance earlier on in life and done anything rather than pass her days in this monotonous existence waiting for her life to begin. The sister of the rich man, who inherited everything from him, realises this too, and while spending the money on luxury and increasingly ridiculous attempts to look young, would give anything to be in her forties as her companion is, rather than in her seventies.
The most painful part of the story is the flicker of hope that the companion receives when a handsome young man pays her attention; although she knows that he is just being pleasant to her and has no romantic intentions, as he awakens this feeling in her she realises what she has missed in her life.

"When that letter came twenty-five years ago offering me a home, I wish I had flouted it, although I did not have five dollars in the world. I wish I had become a harlot - a harlot! do you hear? Nothing - nothing in life can be as bad as life empty, wasted, emotionless, stagnant! I have existed forty-three years in this great, beautiful, multiform world, and I might as well have died at birth for all that it has meant to me. Nature gave me abundantly of her instincts. I could have been a devoted wife, a happy mother, a gay and careless harlot! I would have chosen the first, but failing that - rather the last a thousand times than this! For then I should have had some years of pleasure, excitement, knowledge -"

My favourite story in the collection, although it took a little getting into, was The Dead and the Countess, and it is the nearest to being supernatural. A priest is concerned about his graveyard and the poor dead in it as a railroad has been built nearby and the noise awakens them; he hears them wailing and complaining every night. At the same time a countess who lives in the area, who has had a married life of neglect, is dying and she asks to be buried near the railroad to hear the trains that are travelling to Paris. The story is only near being supernatural because it implies that there is more than a chance that the poor and overworked priest is imagining things. Atherton's favourite theme is present here too, as the countess' life has been wasted and her husband, too late, is regretting the way in which he treated his young wife. The ending has a marvellous twist which made the whole story for me; perhaps, above all the others, this story does have a touch of Ambrose Bierce about it, but Gertrude Atherton is far kinder to her fellow humans.
With all the stories being of this psychological type, it seems strange that they are in a collection in the Mystery and Supernatural list of Wordsworth Editions, as they do not really fit the usual form of ghost stories, but it is good that they are being republished. She is a very good writer, and deserves more recognition than she has had. Although I drew similarities between her short stories and Henry James', I enjoyed these more; the characters are engaging and human despite the sadness that seems to weigh over all of them. She wrote a large number of books and after reading these short stories I would like to read her novels.