The Outcast Spirit

Emily Francis Strong (1840–1904) became an eminent art historian during her first marriage (to the rector of Oxford, Mark Pattinson), despite the contested status of women in Victorian British academia. After Pattinson’s death, she married Lord Charles Dilke and, writing as Emilia, Lady Dilke, published two books of short weird tales, The Shrine of Death and Other Stories (1886) and The Shrine of Love and Other Stories (1891). This collection contains all but two of the stories from both earlier books, and two additional stories published by Lord Dilke after her death. Both Dilke’s language and the scenes she depicts are pre-Raphaelite in the intense vividness of her imagery and her concentration on heroism and chivalric subjects, and she was, in fact, part of the pre-Raphaelite social circle, but her morality bears little resemblance to that movement’s intense Christianity. Dilke’s dark fables are heavily allegorical, strongly gothic, and deeply melancholy. “The Shrine of Death” depicts the horrific pseudo-marriage of a foolish woman; in “The Hangman’s Daughter,” a knight ensnared by witchcraft undergoes a complicated downfall. Her plots and characterization are elliptical, and her prose is intentionally archaic (“Hast thou done my bidding twice, and, at thrice, shalt thou say me, ‘Nay’?”), but her stories offer plentiful beauty and uncanniness. A new generation of literary scholars will be delighted that this collection makes Dilke’s work more easily available. (Nov.)