The Door Ajar
Nezu Press:
Exeter: 2025
Hardcover, New in dust jacket,
101 pp.
The Door Ajar, a collection of seven short stories of the weird and uncanny by Virginia Milward, was first published by William Rider & Son, Limited, in the spring of 1912. Two of the tales are premonitory, and three of them involve haunted objects-a book from the time of plague, a silver box that witnessed the French Revolution, and a painting from fifteenth-century Florence-that reveal the tragic ends of those who once possessed them. The atmosphere in all of the stories is oppressive; the women in them are haunted, desperate, tortured, abandoned or exhausted, and the cause for their sad state is usually a man, for 'where men go pain follows-pain and misery of mind.' These are tales in which 'woman suffers and the man sins, and the man shares all the sin, but not the suffering.' #75334
Price: $36.00