SOURCE: "Fireside Frissons," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3983, August 4, 1978, p. 881.

In the following review of Mrs. Gaskell's Tales of Mystery and Horror, Tomalin suggests that the twentieth-century impulse to classify Gaskell as a "mystery" or "horror" writer is misleading.

Elizabeth Gaskell's friends spoke of her as a teller of ghost stories at the fireside; and she once lightly claimed to have seen a ghost. Her biographer, Winifred Gérin, reminded us of her Celtic origins but had little more to say about her interest in the supernatural: hardly surprising, since the great mass of her work, including the majority of the stories in this slim collection, was firmly built on earthly premises.

Of the seven tales here, only one is a ghost story proper—"The Old Nurse's Story." Written in 1852 at the invitation of Dickens for the Christmas number of Household Words, it is a stock tale of...