part0015

Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920) enjoyed a horror connection from the very start of her career, when her first novel Not Wisely but Too Well (1867), a controversial exploration of female desire, was championed by her uncle Sheridan Le Fanu after being serialised in his Dublin University Magazine . Her later books, such as Red as a Rose Is She (1870) and Belinda (1883), returned repeatedly to the economic restrictions placed on women within Victorian society, with free-spoken heroines deemed shocking in more conservative literary circles. Anthony Trollope, for instance, complained that in her “determination not to be mawkish and missish, she has made her ladies do and say things which ladies would not do and say.”

Maintaining a household with her sister, Broughton hosted literary salons enlivened by afternoon tea, her family of dogs, and her witty conversation. She counted Henry James among her close friends, but was allegedly snubbed by a young Oscar Wilde after her reputation for wit grew; her satirical portrait of aesthete Francis Chalconer in Second Thoughts (1880) may have been an act of literary revenge.

A prolific writer who could finish a novel in six weeks, Broughton turned her hand to supernatural fiction with her eerie anthology Tales for Christmas Eve (1873). Her stories of honeymoons, house rentals and other idyllic scenes of mid-Victorian family life taking an unexpectedly chilling turn allowed her to examine the potential horrors of domesticity through a more overtly macabre lens. The collection’s opening tale, “The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth”, originally published in Temple Bar magazine, unfolds over a series of letters exchanged between old friends Cecilia Montresor and Bessy De Wynt. Cecilia’s excitement on finding a Mayfair house to rent at an enticingly low price soon turns to suspicion as she realises that her bargain may not be all it seems.