ONE OF THREE BROTHERS who were all masters of ghost and horror stories, E(dward) F(rederic) Benson (1867–1940) was the most successful. Any of a dozen of his stories easily would have been welcome in the pages of this volume but “How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery” is unusual for him in that it has humor and has been slightly less frequently anthologized than such masterpieces as “Mrs. Amworth” and “The Room in the Tower.”
Born in Wokingham, Berkshire, England, Fred Benson had early success with a society novel, Dodo (1893), which remained in print for more than eighty years. Its continued sales enabled him to devote full time to writing and he produced a prodigious amount of work in social satire, notably the series about Emmeline “Lucia” Lucas and Elizabeth Mapp, which was adapted for TV by London Weekend Television as Mapp and Lucia, (1985–1986). He also wrote highly regarded biographies, including the standard one at the time for Charlotte Brontë. In all, he wrote more than seventy books. While most of his novels of manners and society are now predictably dated, his frequent forays into the realm of supernatural and horror fiction remain high points in the literature. Among his novels in the fantasy genre are The Judgement Books (1895), The Angel of Pain (1905), Across the Stream (1919), Colin: A Novel (1923), Colin II (1925), The Inheritor (1930), and Raven’s Brood (1934).
“How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery” was first published in the December 1911 issue of The Windsor Magazine; it was collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (London, Mills & Boon, 1912).