A new recording of a classic public domain text from 1879. Narrated/performed by me, Simon Stanhope, aka Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, there are a few ways you can support me:
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00:00:00 Introduction & brief author biography, written and read by Simon Stanhope
00:01:20 The Story begins
00:58:58 Credits and thanks
About the story: Michael Bascom, scientist and scholar, considers himself superior to the local legends of ghosts haunting his ancestral home, Wildheath Grange. But when his elderly servants ask him to employ a new maid, he finds himself obliged to investigate.
About the author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) was born in London. She was privately educated, although her childhood was disrupted by her parents' separation when she was five years old. Her older brother Edward emigrated aged 16, and later became Premier of Tasmania. She worked as an actress in her early 20s, and was successful enough to support her mother and herself, before turning to writing fiction. She had an early success with 'Lady Audley's Secret' (1862), one of the best known of the "sensation novels" which were hugely popular in the mid-Victorian era and she is most closely associated with that genre. It's the work for which she is best remembered today and has never been out of print. In addition, she also wrote a number of supernatural short stories, the best known of which include 'The Cold Embrace' and At Chrighton Abbey'.
Braddon married John Maxwell (1824–1895), a publisher and property developer, in 1874, although they were in a relationship and living together for more than a decade prior to this. At the time they met in 1860, he had a wife who was confined to a mental asylum in Ireland. Braddon and Maxwell had six children together, including Fanny Margaret Maxwell, Gerald Melbourne Maxwell (who became an actor) and William Babington Maxwell, a successful novelist and playwright. The family lived in Richmond, Surrey, where a number of the streets are named after characters in her fiction (thanks to her property developer husband).
At one stage, Braddon also served as editor or Temple Bar magazine, and 'The Shadow in the Corner' was first published in 'Temple Bar' in 1879.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2021/22.