Lost in the snow on a bleak, wide moor in northern England, a newlywed husband begins to despair he will ever see his wife again. He finds refuge with a pair of mysterious strangers, who direct him to a remote crossroads where the night mail coach is due to pass by...
A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio.
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Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831–1892) was a prolific journalist, traveller and Egyptologist, as well as a hugely popular English novelist of the Victorian era. Born in London she was well educated at home by her Irish mother, and showed early promise as a writer as well as demonstrating skill in several other areas, including painting and musical composition. She devoted herself to writing professionally from the early 1850s, producing novels including 'My Brother's Wife' (1855) and 'Barbara's History' (1864). She also travelled widely and published several travelogues, including 'A Thousand Miles up the Nile' (1877), which is still widely read and admired today. Aside from her travel writing she is best remembered today for her many short stories with ghostly, supernatural and mysterious themes, many of which were contributed anonymously to literary magazines. Charles Dickens regularly invited her to compose seasonal tales for his annual Christmas numbers of 'All the Year Round' between 1860 and 1866. It's unclear why she didn't contribute any stories to the publication between 1866 and 1870 – it's possible Dickens rejected her 1866 story 'The Four-fifteen Express', as she took it elsewhere – but his son, Charles Dickens junior, invited her to return after Dickens's death in 1870.
'The Phantom Coach' is perhaps her best known (and most reprinted) ghost story, and first appeared in the Christmas issue of 'All the Year Round' in December 1864. It was republished the following year in book form with some other stories by Edwards, under the title 'The North Mail'; the story sometimes appears in ghost story anthologies under this alternative title.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2021.