num_pages: 280
description: A widely held vision of nineteenth-century American women is of lives lived in naive, domestic peace—the girls of Little Women making do until father comes home from the war. Nothing could be less true of Harriet Prescott Spofford's stories. In fact, her editor at the Atlantic Monthly at first refused to believe that an unworldly woman from New England had written them. Her style, though ornate by our 20th century standards, adds to its atmosphere, like heavy, Baroque furniture in a large and creepy house. The title story presents a self-centered and captivating woman who ruthlessly steals her orphan cousin's lover. In "Circumstance," a pioneer woman returning home through the woods at night is caught by a panther; her husband, who has come to save her, can only watch from the ground as she sings for her life, pinned in a tree. A train engineer hallucinates again and again that he is running over his wife. And Mrs. Craven, who's a bit "weak" in the head, mindlessly repeats "Three men went down cellar and only two came up." These stories combine elements of the best ghost stories—timing, detail, and character —with just enough chill to make you think twice about turning out your lights at night. Collects seven stories, including her classic detective story "In a Cellar" (1859), her frightening tale of frontier adventure, "Circumstance" (1860), and her complex fantasy "The Amber Gods" (1860), considered "one of the most powerful short stories in the language" by Quinn. "The Romantic Gothic tales of Harriet Prescott Spofford have affinities with the frenzied monologues of Poe and the self-absorbed sinners of Hawthorne. The heroine of "The Amber Gods" is Giorgione Willoughby (called 'Yone'), an inversion of the dark lady of the Gothic, a sort of blond Ligeia. Perverse, vainglorious, blasphemous, she is a type of malign spirit who serves the strange gods symbolized by the beads of an amber necklace, a sort of Satan's rosary ... Bizarre, sensational, and cryptic in its macabre depiction of the fatal lady as a Venusian figure, 'The Amber Gods' is a connecting link between the physical Gothicism of Poe and the cerebral Gothicism of Henry James. Going beyond the extrinsic Gothicism of 'Ligeia,' Spofford's story [according to Barton Levi St. Armand] 'startled the American public into a confrontation with, if not tolerance for, the erotic nature of woman.'" - Frank, Through the Pale Door: A Guide To and Through the American Gothic 449. "Mrs. Spofford wrote in her long career two hundred and seventy-five short stories. She could not always be at her best, but she reflects in her career some of the most important phases of the short story. No one has better portrayed the relations of sound and color, the influence of glorious music upon the fates of human beings. Few except Poe and Hawthorne have established so well the mystic relation of gems and flowers upon their characters, and we have to go back to Cooper and Melville for her equals in describing the moods of the sea. The artist who wrote 'The Amber Gods' in 1860 and published THE ELDER'S PEOPLE in 1920, swinging the complete circle between romantic idealism and classic realism, remains a remarkable phenomenon in our literature." - Quinn, American Fiction, p. 214.
language: English
title: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
titlecomplete: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
genres: Literary Fiction, Fiction, Classics, Gothic, American, Horror, Literature, Short Stories
ratings_count: 66
publisher: Rutgers University Press