Isabella Bruschi

A cura di I. Bruschi 
 
 Six short stories having the world of the supernatural as their main theme.
 Disquieting and mysterious presences, suspense, the atavic fear of the unknown are the characteristic ingredients of these stories.
 They were written in a pre-freudian time where the irrational was still unknown and therefore enigmatic and threatening. Taken from top-level authors – E. A. Poe, J. K. Jerome, E. G. Swain, E. F. Benson, M. R. James, J. G. Lang – they are accompanied by inserts on supernatural entities and on cultural and historical aspects related to the contents of the tales. 
 
 Teacher's Resources available online: Answer Key - Transcripts - Summing-up Activities
 
 Sei racconti che hanno come tematica il mondo del soprannaturale.
 Presenze inquietanti e misteriose e la paura atavica dell’ignoto sono gli ingredienti di queste storie in cui, in un’epoca pre-freudiana, l’irrazionale risulta completamente sconosciuto e minaccioso.
 Tratte da autori di grande livello – E. A. Poe, J. K. Jerome, E. G. Swain, E. F. Benson, M. R. James, J. G. Lang – sono corredate dalle biografie degli autori, da schede sulle "short stories" e "ghost stories" e su aspetti storico-culturali collegati ai contenuti dei racconti.

Introduction

Edgar Allan Poe

Ligeia

Extension: A film director who loved Poe

Montague Rhodes James

The Rose Garden

Extension: What’s in a rose

Jerome Klapka Jerome

A Ghost Story

Extension: Supernatural company

John George Lang

The Ghost upon the Rail

Extension: Transportation to Australia

Edmund Gill Swain

Bone to his Bone

Extension: Ghosts, spirits or human imagination?

Edward Frederick Benson

The Confession of Charles Linkworth

Extension: The death penalty in the U.K.

Summing-up activities

The author Jerome Klapka Jerome Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859-1927), best known as the author of Three Men in a Boat, one of the great comic masterpieces of modern times, was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, on 2nd May 1859, the youngest of four children (he had two sisters and one brother who died at the age of 6). His name  Klapka  was derived from General George Klapka, a young hero of the 1849 Hungarian War of Independence, who had become a family friend and after whom JKJ was named en hommage. To avoid confusion between the two Jerome Jeromes, father and son, however, JKJ was known in the family as  Luther . His father, a minister and part-time farmer in Appledore, Devon, was well-off and well-respected. It was after some unsuccessful speculative mining on his land that things began to go wrong. The year of JKJ s birth saw the family rapidly pass from an unstable financial situation to total ruin. Jerome Senior s coal-mining venture proved a disaster. The family had to move to London s East End, where JKJ spent his childhood in abject poverty. Just before his tenth birthday he gained admission to the Philological School in Lisson Grove. Three years later his father died and at the age of fourteen JKJ left school to begin a succession of jobs, first as a clerk on the London and North Western Railway at Euston. The same year his mother died, his sisters had already left home and Jerome, at fifteen, was completely alone. He became involved with a theatre company and eventually left the railway. Jerome made his professional debut at the age of eighteen under the name of Harold Crichton, touring the country with a succession of third-rate outfits1. Three years of hard labour on the road left him demoralised and disillusioned. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, he was at the bottom of the social ladder. He drifted into journalism, spending all his spare time writing short stories, essays and satires and getting rejected. He tried different jobs and ended up as a solicitor s clerk. Then Jerome had the idea of writing about his experiences as an actor. The result was On the Stage and Off, The Brief Career of a 1. outfit: gruppo, compagnia. 52 

Would-Be Actor: it was published in a new magazine, The Play, and in 1885, in book form. It remains one of the most detailed, absorbing (and undervalued) portraits of late-Victorian theatre life. It is also very funny. A collection of humorous essays followed, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886). Two years later he married Ettie, who already had a five-year old daughter, Elsie. They were both twenty-nine years old. The honeymoon was spent on the Thames and Jerome began writing Three Men In A Boat on his return. The book appeared in 1889 and made him rich and famous. The Diary of a Pilgrimage followed Boat, then collections of short stories and essays at the rate of nearly one a year until Three Men on the Bummel (1900), in which the three protagonists of the book made their second and final appearance together. Only a dozen or so titles were published after that, the most distinguished of which is his autobiographical novel Paul Kelver (1902), widely-praised at the time and, indeed, considered by some critics worthy to be compared to Dickens  work. Jerome was also a dramatist: he had four plays produced in London and wrote a further fifteen. By far the most celebrated and successful of these was The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908), which was a huge success. There was Jerome the editor and prolific journalist: he became the editor of a new monthly magazine called The Idler, founded in 1892, the year when A Ghost Story was first published in the magazine. The following year JKJ founded the weekly To-Day which survived till 1905. Jerome was very requested as a lecturer, an occupation which complemented his love of travel, and he felt quite at home in Russia, America and especially Germany. The First World War came as a terrible blow to him. Another black event was the death of his stepdaughter, Elsie, in 1921 at the early age of thirty-eight. He and Ettie were returning to London from Devon when Jerome suffered a paralytic stroke2 and a cerebral haemorrhage. He survived the stroke in the Northampton General Hospital for two weeks, unable to move or speak, before dying on 14 June 1927, one year after the publication of his autobiography, My Life and Times, which is among Jerome s most vital and entertaining books; his personality is imprinted on every page. 2. stroke: colpo apoplettico. 53 

Sei racconti gotici con atmosfere inquietanti e figure misteriose da autori come E. A. Poe, J. K. Jerome, E. G. Swain, E. F. Benson, M. R. James e J.

Tales of The Supernatural - Collana Rainbows

Level B2 • Intermediate - Collana RAINBOWS

Tales of The Supernatural

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