The Shadowy Third ~ Ellen Glasgow

Ellen Glasgow wrote only a handful of short stories during her long career. She doesn't appear to have liked writing them, and she preferred to devote her energy to writing novels. She wrote to Walter Hines Page in November 1897, 'I shall write no more short stories and I shall not divide my power or risk my future reputation. I will become a great novelist or none at all’, and she later informed her agent that the work involved in writing short stories was ‘so tiresome that I’d rather not have the money they bring than try to write them.’ It's a shame, because her short stories are very good. I certainly wish she'd written more. 

Seven of Ellen Glasgow's short stories were published in the collection The Shadowy Third: And Other Stories, which was published by Doubleday, Page & Company in October 1923. Though only four of the tales involve the supernatural, all of them have a rather eerie atmosphere. In fact, the most ghostly of the tales, 'Jordan's End', is not a ghost story at all.

In 'The Shadowy Third', Roland Maradick is a handsome surgeon at a New York Hospital; according to the narrator, he was ‘born to be a hero to women’ and has a voice that ‘ought always to speak poetry.’ His patients absolutely adore him, the nurses are all in love with him, and not even Miss Hemphill, the hospital’s superintendent, is immune to his numerous manly charms. The narrator, Margaret Randolph, is an imaginative nurse from Richmond, Virginia, who is just out of training (and wants to be a novelist). She can hardly believe her luck when she is called upon to become a live-in carer for the great surgeon's ill wife. Mrs Maradick suffers from ‘hallucinations’ of the ghostly variety.

'Dare's Gift' is the tale of an old haunted Virginian estate on the James River that has an odd effect upon those who live within it. Nobody lives in it for long; it has a bad history and a long memory. The sensitive in nature can't help but succumb to its influence; 'The spirit of the place is too strong for them.' Eventually they 'surrender to the thought of the house—to the psychic force of its memories’. 

In ‘The Past’, the ghost of the first Mrs Vanderbridge is haunting both the second Mrs Vanderbridge and her husband, to the point where the mental and physical health of both is deteriorating. Mr Vanderbridge doesn't realise that anyone but him is aware of the spirit, and the second Mrs Vanderbridge won't confide her distress in her husband for fear of causing him further distress. The first Mrs Vanderbridge wasn't a 'good' wife... so she doesn't make a very pleasant spirit.

In ‘Whispering Leaves’, the ghost of a black ‘mammy’, the very embodiment of maternal love, returns to protect a small white boy following the death of his mother. She comes to him when he is in distress or danger, having promised his mother when she was dying that she would never let the child out of her sight.

In 'A Point in Morals', a doctor is forced to choose whether to allow a murderer to suffer a drawn out and agonising death or provide him with a method to end his life quickly and painlessly.

‘The Difference’ is an atmospheric non-ghost story about Margaret Fleming, a woman who, having thought herself happily married for twenty years, discovers that her husband has a young mistress.

'Jordan's End' is a ghostly non-ghost story—the most ghostly that Ellen Glasgow wrote—set on a rundown old Virginian plantation, where the male members of the Jordan family are all destined to go insane. 

If I were asked to choose a favourite, I'd be torn between 'Dare's Gift' and 'Jordan's End'. Both—in fact all of the stories in the book—are enjoyably atmospheric... Perfect reading for this time of year.