Books by Catherine Crowe

Ghosts and Family Legends is a collection of 26 horror stories and supernatural tales told by a group of people closed in a large country mansion, during one cold winter, over several scary nights. Round the Fire Stories: The Lover's Farewell The Appointment Kept The White Cat Passing Spirits The Garde Chasse The Carrier Rehearsals, etc Prophetic Dreams The Vigil The Strange Dog The Scotch Minister The Radiant Boy The Prediction Haunted Houses The Justification The German Inn The Benighted Traveller My own Visit to a Haunted House Mr. G.'s Adventure Conclusion to First Part Legends of the Earthbound: The Italian's Story The Dutch Officer's Story The Old Frenchman's Story The Swiss Lady's Story The Sheep Farmer's Story My Friend's Story

Shipwrecked as a young girl, middle-class Lilly Dawson is kidnapped by smugglers and forced to work as their servant. Terrified by the prospect of a forced marriage, this Victorian Cinderella flees captivity and has to navigate an outside world she finds both oppressive and dangerous. The Story of Lilly Dawson is a romping tale of pirates, outlaws, murder, mistaken identity, lust and betrayal.Best known for The Night Side of Nature, Crowe was one of the most successful women novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. Through her memorable heroine, Crowe insists that woman can "play a noble part in the world's history, if man would . . . not treat her like a full-grown baby to be flattered and spoilt on the one hand, and coerced and restricted on the other, vibrating between royal rule and slavish serfdom".As Ruth Heholt argues in her introduction, The Story of Lilly Dawson places Crowe in the vanguard of the emerging sensation genre and shows her to be a visionary and radical thinker and writer.

Crowe's collection of ghostly and psychic tales was a nineteenth-century best-seller. Volume 1 includes stories on presentiments, traces, wraiths, doppelgangers, apparitions and the after-life. It is a wonderful example of early Victorian spiritualist writing and marks the apogee of the nineteenth century's fascination with the supernatural.