Catherine Crowe

The novelist and children's author Catherine Crowe (c.1800–1876) published The Night Side of Nature in two volumes in 1848. This lively collection of ghostly sketches and anecdotes was a Victorian best-seller and Crowe's most popular work. Sixteen editions appeared in six years, and it was translated into several European languages. The stories are intertwined with Crowe's own interpretations and commentaries which attack the scepticism of enlightenment thought and orthodox religion. Crowe seeks instead to encourage and re-invigorate a sense of wonder and mystery in life by emphasising the supernatural. The stories in Volume 1 centre on dreams, psychic presentiments, traces, wraiths, doppelgängers, apparitions, and imaginings of the after-life. Crowe's vivid tales, written with great energy and imagination, are classic examples of nineteenth-century spiritualist writing and strongly influenced other authors as well as providing inspiration for later adherents of ghost-seeing and psychic culture.

The novelist and children's author Catherine Crowe (c.1800–1876) published The Night Side of Nature in two volumes in 1848. This lively collection of ghostly sketches and anecdotes was a Victorian best-seller and Crowe's most popular work. Sixteen editions appeared in six years, and it was translated into several European languages. The stories are intertwined with Crowe's own interpretations and commentaries which attack the scepticism of enlightenment thought and orthodox religion. Crowe seeks instead to encourage and re-invigorate a sense of wonder and mystery in life by emphasising the supernatural. Volume 2 probes the mysterious phenomena of troubled spirits, haunted houses, spectral lights, apparitions and poltergeists. Crowe's vivid tales, written with great energy and imagination, are classic examples of nineteenth-century spiritualist writing and strongly influenced other authors, including Charles Baudelaire, as well as providing inspiration for later adherents of ghost-seeing and psychic culture.

Catherine Crowe (1790–1872) was a successful author of fiction, non-fiction and plays, who moved in literary circles and corresponded with the prominent authors of her day, including W. M. Thackeray and Harriet Martineau. Her interest in the supernatural and the spiritual dimension, and her frustration with the narrow-mindedness of her generation, are evident in this work, first published in 1859. A strong believer in the possibilities of spiritual planes and of forces beyond contemporary human knowledge, she suggests that much is still unknown to the human race, and that the advance of scientific materialism may hinder the search for spiritual insight. Unusually for her time, Crowe also questions the literal truth of the Bible, suggesting metaphorical interpretations of scripture, and asks how modern miracles or prophets might be recognised, in a society so closed to the possibility of the physically impossible.

This classic werewolf anthology was picked as a Gothic Book Club Award Winner. In general, transformation of the werewolf in literature made its greatest strides in the 19th century when the shape-shifting monster leaped from poetry to the short story. It happened when this shorter form of literature was morphing into darker shapes thanks in no small part to Edgar Allan Poe, Honor de Balzac, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Prosper M rim e, James Hogg, and so many others in Europe and the United States. The fifty year period between 1800 and 1849 is truly the cradle of all werewolf short stories. For the first time in one anthology, Andrew Barger, award winning author of Coffee with Poe: A Novel of Edgar Allan Poe's Life and The Best Horror Short Stories 1800-1849: A Classic Horror Anthology, has compiled the best werewolf stories from this period.1831The Man-Wolf by Leitch Ritche (1800-1865)1846 A Story of a Weir-Wolf by Catherine Crowe (1790-1872)1828 The Wehr-Wolf: A Legend of the Limousin by Richard Thomson (1794-1865)1839 The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains by Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848)1838 Hugues the Wer-Wolf: A Kentish Legend of the Middle Ages by Sutherland Menzies Mrs. Elizabeth Stone] (1806-1883)