The Crown Derby Plate starts off cozily, with three elderly women sitting before the fire in the drawing room of the country house where they are spending Christmas. The conversation turns, as is its wont, to ghosts.
This story is unusual in that it is women who are telling stories; traditionally it’s the men, lingering over port, who bring out the old school tales or the curious thing that happened to Wigglesworth out in Rhodesia. When women tell ghost stories (in ghost stories), it is more typically in the form of written correspondence.
(As an aside, I deeply appreciated the word “ungetatable” on page 36.)
The atmosphere is very well done in this story; Bowen knows how to set a haunting, desolate scene, and contrast it sharply with a cozy hearth. The setting (but not the plot) is very reminiscent of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black.
In The Crown Derby Plate, an antique collector visiting friends hears about an old woman in the neighborhood who lives in a large, run-down, rumored haunted house who has a large collection of china. Hoping to complete her set of Crown Derby, the collector pays a visit to the house.
A few pages into this story, I realized that I had read it before, anthologized somewhere–and no wonder. It is solidly and absolutely a ghost story, and a very good one at that. After The Fair Hair of Ambrosine, I was afraid that the rest of Bowen’s stories would be vaguely supernatural thrillers, but this is an unsettling story of ghostly horror in the tradition of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu.
Spoilers after the jump
The little details really made this one work. The apparition’s grotesque obesity, the dress dirty with earth, as if she/he’d been mucking about in the garden, the socks, the SMELL. It was very clever of Bowen to throw us off the track with gender confusion; even though the grave in the garden was mentioned several times, I never suspected the creepy old woman of actually being the male antiquary who had been buried in the garden even though Bowen gave a steady supply of hints.
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