The stories in this collection are very much their own thing–I would probably describe them as “allegorical medieval fantasies” or maybe “what short stories by William Blake might look like”. The publisher also has a good description - “There is nothing else quite like the short stories of Lady Dilke in the annals of English literature, and even readers who have little sympathy with their stylistic affectations, allegorical pretensions and harrowing conclusions are likely to admit that they have a peculiar fascination. Those who find some resonance in their psychological ambience might easily think them touched with genius”. I can definitely see these stories being the exact right thing for some readers. The author, born Emily Francis Strong and later known as Emilia, Lady Dilke, was a highly accomplished woman in the Victorian era, writing well-regarded books on French history and art, contributing criticism and philosophical articles to various periodicals, campaigning tirelessly for women’s rights and acting as president of the women’s trade union. However, she is unfortunately best known for the gossip surrounding her two marriages: at 21, she married the 48-year-old Mark Pattinson, the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford and a scholar (who studied and published a biography of Isaac Casaubon, a 16th century French classical scholar); her marriage was believed to the the model for Dorothea Brooke’s in Middlemarch, by her friend George Eliot. Her second husband, Charles Dilke, became embroiled in a scandalous divorce case (where he was falsely accused by a woman to protect her actual lover; she had been encouraged by her mother, who actually had a relationship with Dilke). The introduction notes these incidents, but there are a number of explanations and inspirations given for Lady Dilke’s stories–her scholarly interest in Renaissance history and French art, her “hallucinations” (which had started at a young age and which she seemed to systematically use for her works), older works like Le Morte d’Arthur and “Idylls of the King” and possibly works by contemporaries such as William Morris, M.P. Shiel, R. Murray Gilchrist and Vernon Lee.

The actual stories have a deliberately archaic style. There’s occasionally a concrete setting, like France, but sometimes it’s just a vaguely medieval Europe. The characters are never named–they’re referred to as “the woman”, “the mother”, “the king” etc. A common plot found in several of the stories is a character seeking some sort of insubstantial concept: Love, Death or Learning. The character often has to go on a journey and sometimes fails to find the object of their desire but other times acquires it after much hardship. A few stories have what seems like a medieval Christianity or supernatural elements. The stories are very much open to interpretation and occasionally mirror elements in the author’s life. The intro noted her disillusionment with institutions of higher learning (many doors were closed to her as a woman, even with her position as Pattinson’s wife), which may be reflected in “A Vision of Learning”. “The Physician’s Wife” is about a highly regarded doctor who marries a much younger woman and is a controlling husband; their relationship is threatened by the arrival of a younger man. There are unsatisfied wives and mothers, girls who persist in the face of insurmountable odds and women who are trapped in one way or another. But regardless of the hidden meanings or relationship to Lady Dilke’s biography, I found them enjoyable, compelling and certainly odd and would recommend them for anyone interested in stories off the beaten path. ( )

The plain and simple fact is that I just loved this book; then again, I'm strangely attracted to unique and previously-unknown (to me, anyway) tales written by Victorian women writers.

The back cover blurb of this book says that "there is nothing quite like the short stories of Lady Dilke in the annals of English literature," and although I can't rightly say that I'm familiar with the entire "annals of English literature," I can say that the stories inside this short book are delightfully different than anything I've ever read. This is one of the most strange and very best story collections I've ever experienced, heightened by the sort of dreamlike quality hovering around each and every tale. Don't let the fact that it's only a short 150 pages fool you -- this book is filled with some of the most complex tales I've ever encountered.

These stories in this book are highly allegorical, and most are downright disturbing when you stop to consider what you've just read. Some you'd swear were written during medieval times, and most all of them are filled with some sort of supernatural elements at play which differ from story to story.

I will say that the author's somewhat archaic language is not always easy to get through, and that if you think you can breeze through this book's short 150 pages in an hour or two and get the most out of it, you'd probably be wrong. It is, as I like to say, a thinking-person's book, one where I felt compelled to stop and consider what I'd just read after each story. And while I'm neither a true book reviewer nor even talented enough to come up with any sort of meaningful overall analysis of this collection, my casual-reader self knows exquisite work when I find it -- and this is definitely it.

I think the best way I can describe this book as a whole is to say that there's an ethereal quality at work here that sort of blankets the reader in a hazy atmosphere of unreality; the reward is in discerning the actual reality that is hidden beneath the surface. I don't often use the word "beautiful" to describe a book, but it actually fits in this case. Very highly recommended -- I live to find books like this one.

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