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mabith's review
2.0
This was part of a series of anthologies (some larger than others) focusing on female writers of mystery, crime, fantasy, supernatural, etc... stories. My dad brought this home when the library he worked at discarded it, probably in 1986. He never read it. I kept it in my collection because of the title and the Edward Gorey cover.
This is a really mixed bunch of stories, two of which I don't feel fit with the theme at all. The last story didn't have any eerie or odd element in the least and the preface to it referenced Freud and "Oh it's hard to write about mothers and daughters and they're competitive with each other" which really turned me off.
The stories I liked best were rather Thurber-esque tales by Shirley Jackson and Sheila Burnford. There's a terrible one in here by E. Nesbit, which is just a kids' camp fire story in my opinion and more attempting to be horror rather than just eerie.
It includes a literary fairy tale by Madame d'Aulnoy. Also includes a somewhat silly story by Elizabeth Gaskell and a bit of an odd one by Edna St. Vincent Millay
A quick read, with a few highlights, but not a well thought-out collection by any means. I think perhaps the editors had a few stories they really liked which they were unable to fit into the other collections. So they whipped up another title and padded it out with whatever they could find (at least one third were in the public domain).
This is a really mixed bunch of stories, two of which I don't feel fit with the theme at all. The last story didn't have any eerie or odd element in the least and the preface to it referenced Freud and "Oh it's hard to write about mothers and daughters and they're competitive with each other" which really turned me off.
The stories I liked best were rather Thurber-esque tales by Shirley Jackson and Sheila Burnford. There's a terrible one in here by E. Nesbit, which is just a kids' camp fire story in my opinion and more attempting to be horror rather than just eerie.
It includes a literary fairy tale by Madame d'Aulnoy. Also includes a somewhat silly story by Elizabeth Gaskell and a bit of an odd one by Edna St. Vincent Millay
A quick read, with a few highlights, but not a well thought-out collection by any means. I think perhaps the editors had a few stories they really liked which they were unable to fit into the other collections. So they whipped up another title and padded it out with whatever they could find (at least one third were in the public domain).
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