Volume 22, Number 20 · December 11, 1975
A Tail of Terror
By Alison Lurie
Two innocent children in late-Victorian England encounter a strange, attractive young woman who may be either a devil or a damned soul. She tempts them to disobedience, promising to reveal ambiguously sexual secrets, gradually leads them further and further into evil, and then disappears abruptly. This is not Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, but a tale for children written sixteen years earlier by James's dear friend Lucy Clifford. Her story, 'The New Mother,' originally published in Anyhow Stories (1882), is one of the oddest and psychologically most disturbing in Victorian juvenile fiction, which is full of such tales. (Even the works of the best-known writers like Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald contain characters and happenings that might haunt an adult reader, let alone a child.)
Feature, 1550 words
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