Craftlit - Serialized Classic Literature For Busy Book Lovers

(Apologies although I blathered quite a bit anyway...) This week, chapters 2-3! from Dawn, some victorian pruditry, more wonderful emails from y'all, how to be an ostritch rather than a governess, and on our author. His dad was a (say THAT three times fast) and I thought--when working through the "ghost" question-- was ellucidating: Although James had rejected in the beginning of his career "spirit-rappings and ghost-raising", in the 1880s he become interested in the unconscious and the supernatural. In 1908 he wrote that "Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not 'ghosts' at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for whichcraft; if not, more pleasingly, fairies of the legendary order, wooing their victims forth to see them dance under the moon." Virginia Woolf thought that Henry James's ghost have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts - "the blood-stained captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy