Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories by Sims Michael

Author:Sims, Michael [Sims, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

Anne Crawford

(1846–?)

ANNE CRAWFORD CAME FROM an American family distinguished in the arts. Her father was the sculptor Thomas Crawford, whose public works include the robed and plumed bronze figure atop the dome of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Her aunt was the poet Julia Ward Howe, author of the rousing abolitionist anthem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The artistic Crawford family produced a trio of writers—F. Marion, who wrote memorable horror stories such as “For the Blood Is the Life”; Mary, who, under her married name, Mrs. Hugh Fraser, wrote novels and memoirs and travel books; and Anne, who became Baroness Von Rabe and wrote under the pseudonym Von Degen. Both Marion and Mary were more prolific and successful writers than Anne, but neither wrote a better ghost story than “A Mystery of the Campagna.” Although there is also a small Italian town called Campagna, Crawford’s title refers to a populous region in southern Italy now usually spelled Campania. On the peninsula south of Rome, it is an area rich in history that dates well before the Roman Empire.

This elegant tale first appeared in late 1886, in The Witching Time: Tales for the Year’s End, a compilation edited by Sir Henry Norman and published around Christmas as Unwin’s Annual for 1887. The volume also included her brother Marion’s story “By the Waters of Paradise,” as well as “The Hidden Door,” by a great writer of supernatural stories, Vernon Lee (the pseudonym of another important woman in the field, Violet Paget). Unwin’s Annual was a noble venue. The year before, it had included Marion’s now famous horror story “The Upper Berth,” as well as “Markheim,” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Unwin’s was published by the firm of T. Fisher Unwin, who in 1891 reprinted the following story and one other by Crawford in a double volume entitled A Mystery of the Campagna and A Shadow on the Wave. It was the nephew of this Unwin who founded the famous twentieth-century British publisher Allen and Unwin, who published such books as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

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