The Open Door and The Portrait

A woman confined to a nursery room for a rest cure begins to see someone creeping behind the wallpaper. A short, unsettling masterpiece of psychological horror you can read in 20 minutes.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Written for Dickens's Christmas issue of 1852, it follows a little girl lured out into the snow by a phantom child. A short, sad and genuinely eerie winter ghost story.

Elizabeth Gaskell

Four tales of the past refusing to stay dead, including Amour Dure and Oke of Okehurst. Vernon Lee's ghosts are seductive and strange, and these stories are among the finest supernatural fiction of the 1890s.

Vernon Lee

Ten stories by Edith Wharton where guilt, secrets and the supernatural blur together, including The Bolted Door and Afterward. Elegant, cold and quietly chilling.

Edith Wharton

Eight short horror stories from 1893, including Man-Size in Marble, where two stone knights leave their tomb on All Hallows' Eve. Proof that the author of The Railway Children could also be truly frightening.

E. Nesbit