As Edith Wharton grew older, she, like many of us, began to think more and more about those who had passed through her life, entwined their lives with hers, and then moved on to a spiritual realm.

When Wharton wrote her memoir in 1934, just three years before she died, she dedicated her remembrances to the friends who every

year on all souls night come and sit with me by the fire. Indeed, Wharton's tradition was to spend

all souls night just a few days following Halloween, recalling the souls that had mattered most to her in her life,

and now were in one form or another, ghosts in memory and remembrance.

Her dear friend, Henry James, had died years before. Perhaps her true, deep love and soulmate,

Walter Berry, had died more recently, and her closest female

friend and confidant, her sister-in-law, Minnie Jones, passed away the very year her autobiography

was published. Wharton's final years were indeed tinged with loss and reflection.

Ghosts, the supernatural, the life beyond one could call it,

had all fascinated Edith Wharton throughout her writing life. She experimented with the form of the

ghost story widely popular in the 19th century throughout her entire career. In fact, her very

last completed work finished in the weeks before she

died, was a ghost story entitled All Souls, and it was published in a posthumous collection

of ghost stories Edith had carefully chosen herself. In her ghost stories, Wharton explored much more

than the tales of the spooky and the unexplained.

She delved deeply into the human psyche, striking a match to illuminate even for a moment

the corners of all too human fear, longing, and even passion, only to blow it out and leave us once again in the dark.

To explore such deeply personal and conflicting emotions in standard fiction may have proven

challenging for her readers or even for Edith herself, but through the gauze of a ghostly tale

where what is real and what is not is often never quite clear, then nearly

anything can be considered.

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