This collection includes nine stories in the genres of mysticism and horror by Elizabeth Gaskell, and among them— a classic work of the nineteenth-century gothic genre, “The Grey Woman.” Ghosts that haunt the living. Legendary witches and black magicians from New England. Mysterious portraits and manuscripts, powerful curses, vengeful doubles, and strange disappearances… Charles Dickens, who himself willingly and skillfully wrote in the gothic genre, admired Gaskell’s stories. Some of them are serious, others ironic. Some are slow and poetic, others are downright frightening. Yet all of them—every single one—are marked by an engaging plot and the feeling of a mystery lurking very close to ordinary, everyday life…