The Supernatural

In Edith Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed," the newly remarried widower, Kenneth Ashby, begins to receive letters from the ghost of his first wife, Elsie. Charlotte Ashby, Kenneth's second wife, believes at first that the letters are from a former lover of Kenneth's. When she realizes the truth about the letters, it is too late; Kenneth has gone to join Elsie, his first wife, in the afterworld. In the preface to her collection Ghosts, Wharton wrote that "the more one thinks the question over, the more one perceives the impossibility of defining the effect of the supernatural." In the absence of such a clear definition, she believed the ghost story "must depend for its effect solely on what one might call it's the rmometrical quality; if it sends a cold shiver down one's spine, it has done its job and done it well."

Flesh vs. Spirit

Tales of the...