Kerfol

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
From Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911–1937

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The ghostly tales of Mrs. Wharton (The Mount)

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Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911–1937

This selection has been reposted with a newly researched and more detailed introduction here.

World War I left Edith Wharton “haunted by the dead” and “Paris became for her a spectral and melancholy city,” remarks Hermione Lee in her recent biography. The decimation of Wharton’s beloved France affected and infected her writing, but the “strangest piece of fiction to come out of her war years was a story called ‘Kerfol’” (1916). A wealthy bachelor, urged by friends to purchase a home in Brittany, finds the estate of Kerfol devoid of human presence and populated instead by a pack of eerily silent dogs. Directed to a regional chronicle by a local resident, the narrator reads the 200-year-old account of a woman terrorized by her jealous husband, a mysterious and gruesome murder, and the sensational trial of the survivor—a mix that R.W.B. Lewis calls “one of Edith Wharton’s finest exercises in the imagination of violence, terror, and the erotic.”

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You ought to buy it,” said my host; “it’s just the place for a solitary-minded devil like you. And it would be rather worth while to own the most romantic house in Brittany. The present people are dead broke, and it’s going for a song—you ought to buy it.” . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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