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Castle Dismal; or, The Bachelor's ChristmasAntebellum Period | Novella | Burgess, Stringer & Co. | 1844 A gothic tale of ghosts, infidelity,
murder, and love, Castle Dismal follows
the protagonist Ned Clifton, a “veteran bachelor” who fears the bonds of
marriage, in his holiday visit to the home of married friends. Set during the Christmas season in South Carolina,
Simms’s story illustrates the southern custom of bringing together family
around a table to feast; and while Clifton eventually marries Elizabeth
Singleton—freeing him from the “melancholy dependencies of bachelorism”—Simms
subverts naïve nineteenth-century notions of marriage and domesticity.[1] Marked ... |
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Helen Halsey, or The Swamp State of Conelachita: A Tale of the BordersAntebellum Period | Novella | Burgess, Stringer & Co. | 1845 While one of the lesser-known of
Simms’s border romances, the novella Helen
Halsey is nevertheless a strong work, indicative of the overall project the
author undertook in that series. The
first mention of Helen Halsey in the Letters was in June 1843. By September, Simms told James Lawson that the
work was “nearly ready.” Helen Halsey was “to follow up” Simms’s
ghost story Castle Dismal, a work he
announces in the same letter to be sending to “the Harpers.”[1]
Letters to Lawson from this time period
indicate that the author was interested in shopping ... |
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Matilda: or, The Spectre of the Castle. An Imaginative Story.Antebellum Period | Novella | F. Gleason | 1846 Carl Werner was published in December 1838 by George Adlard of New
York.[1] In the author’s advertisement, Simms classified
the collected stories as “moral imaginative” tales, a form of allegory
illuminating the “strifes between the rival moral principles of good and evil.”
Such stories, according to John C. Guilds,
may often exploit supernatural elements, although it is not necessary. Simms attributed the origin of the title
story to “an ancient monkish legend,” as he set “Carl Werner” in the deepest parts
of the German forest where the narrator and his friend ... |