A Night On The Borders Of The Black Forest

A Night On The Borders of The Black Forest

Episode A Night On The Borders of The Black Forest.mp3

Amelia B Edwards

Born in 1831 in London and died in 1892 aged 60 in Weston Supermare at the seaside near Bristol. She was a novelist, traveller and enthusiastic amateur Egyptologist. Her mother was Irish and her father had been an officer in the British Army and then became a banker. She was married, but her emotional attachments were with women and she lived with and was apparently in love with Ellen Braysher, widow, and Ellen Byrne a school inspector’s wife.

A Night on The Borders of the Black Forest was recommended by Nadia Astorga in May 2022

This is the third story by Amelia B we’ve done, the other’s being The Phantom Coach and Salome. This is the first of hers that is less a ghost story (if fact not a ghost story at all) and more an adventure. The collection of stories is also entitled A Night On The Borders of the Black Forests and was published in 1890.

For comparison Le Fanu’s Carmilla set in Styria in Austria was published in 1872 and Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897. Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Grey Woman was published in 1861. It reminded me most of The Grey Woman because it is set in the border area of France and Germany at about the same period and there are brigands in the woods in both.

It’s a definite nod to the Gothic but also a right rollicking adventure story and so reminds of The Grey Woman but also the Scottish set A Journey of Little Profit by John Buchan from 1896, because it is also a tale of wanderings on foot and George Borrow’s Wild Wales was published in 1862, which deals with supposedly true wanderings in the Wild.

Mary Braddon’s The Cold Embrace and Hoffman’s The Sandman also have people tramping all over Germany and venturing into France and the Netherlands. It must have been busy on the roads.

Wordsworth had an edition of the Prelude out in 1850. This thrilling love for mountainous wild places titillated the middle class urban readers on a trivial level while Wordsworth was aiming for the spiritual, but each to their own indeed.

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