This episode we speak with two experts to better understand Eleanor Scott and her story Randall’s Round, Dr Vicky Margree and Prof Dan Orrells. We discuss what’s known about Eleanor Scott, her time at Oxford University in the early 1900s and the role of gender, folklore and imperialism in her writing.

Vicky is a specialist in literary fiction and feminist theory. Her book British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930: Our Own Ghostliness looks at stories by Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edith Nesbit, Alice Perrin, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt.

Dan focuses on the history of the interpretation of classical literature. He’s interested in the Greeks and Romans in the Victorian imagination, including how these inspired Gothic and ghostly tales at the turn of the 20th century.  He co-edited with Vicky a study of Richard Marsh, a fascinating late-Victorian author who wrote about “shape-shifting monsters, morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life.”

In our conversation we learn more about the folklore revival, Edward B Tylor’s ideas about primitive cultures and notions of “survivals” amd the experience of women at Oxford and Cambridge (Dan recommends the Dorothy L Sayers novel Gaudy Night!).

Massive thank you to Vicky and Dan for being such engaging and insightful guests and sharing their expertise with us!  If you want to read ahead, we’ll be back next time with The Weird of the Walfords by Louisa Baldwin.

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A BBC Ghost Story for Christmas is thankfully as traditional as quaffing eggnog and leaving out a carrot for Rudolph. And what a treat, as this year Count Magnus made the Black Pilgrimage onto our screens.  But has Mark Gatiss been naughty or nice? We give you our verdict.

Show notes

• A recent interview with Mark Gattis including his ambition to adapt Casting the Runes
• Our coverage of Count Magnus in episode 6, exactly 11 years before this adaptation aired!
• A rather splendid reading of the Innkeeper’s story, read by Jacqueline Simpson in episode 53

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Open your hymn books to episode 89, as we’re back in church for Christopher Woodforde’s “Cushi”: a tale of capering cats, sabotaged surplices and vengeful vergers. Don’t lose your head!

Show notes:

• Christopher Woodforde studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge before becoming an Anglican priest. He was later Fellow and Chaplain at New College, Oxford, and Dean of Wells (as was Richard Maldon of ‘The Sundial’ fame – Episode 80). He was an antiquarian with a love for stained glass, rather like MR James!
• ‘A Pad in the Straw’ was his only book of stories. It is currently out of print, but previously available from Sundial Press.
• Richard Dalby wrote that Woodforde based some of his clerical and antiquarian characters on himself, and many of the locations on the parishes in which he served.
• In his introduction to ‘A Pad in the Straw’, Lord David Cecil said that “A waft of the uncanny blows through these tales, just enough to make the spine agreeably tingle… The general atmosphere is at once eerie and friendly… The intimate apprehension of landscape and the past gives his tales an unexpected weight and depth. Slight and fanciful though their action is, they are the expression of an imagination soaked through and through in the English scene and in English history.”
• Hymn number 386 ‘The Sower Went Forth Sowing’ was written by William Bourne, a pastor, for a harvest festival in 1874. And very jolly it is, to: “And then the fan of judgment/Shall winnow from His floor/The chaff into the furnace/That flameth evermore.”

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