A Horror of the Gentle Kind

by

Lauren Roberts

Horror is not a genre I read even on those rather rare occasions when I pick up book of fiction. My ignorance of Stephen King’s work is total, and of other horror writers I know even less—like their names. Yet I found myself including in a recent order to Persephone Books what the San Francisco Chronicle called “a jewel of horror,” The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski.

For months I have held in check my lust for Persephone Books, an extraordinary small publisher based in London, England. The name Persephone has a deeply personal meaning to me so I checked it out when it was first mentioned on Readerville. And I fell in love. They specialize in reprints of “forgotten classics by twentieth-century (mostly women) writers.” Their 72 books to date include novels, collections of short stories or essays, diaries, cookery books and garden books. But they go one step further. To satisfy the biblio-fetishist as well as the reader in all of us, they issue their books in gorgeous dove-gray jackets, each one with a unique, specially chosen end paper and matching bookmark (that relate to the contents). 

Alas, the dollar-to-pound ratio means they tend to be expensive for us Yanks especially when shipping is added in. But because I have been craving them for so long I decided to splurge, a bit at a time, and ordered these to start: Few Eggs and No Oranges, Good Evening Mrs. Craven, and The Victorian Chaise-Longue.

They arrived last week, each one in its own package. As I excitedly opened the envelopes, I did each book justice: I fondled it from front to back, admired the dust jacket, ran  my fingers over its smoothness, opened it up to admire the end papers and to read the first page. None of it was a disappointment.

It wasn’t until three days after their arrival that I was able to sit down with one. That one was The Victorian Chaise-Longue, the choice about which I had been most dubious. Surprisingly—to me—it turned out to be a fascinating, engaging, attention-holding literary horror story of novella length.

It is 1953. Melanie Langdon is a spoilt young married woman. She has the twittering, simpering personality that moves easily to become whatever anyone or any situation needs her to be. And yet, not entirely. A hint that she’s neither a fool nor emotionally weak comes through in the opening lines where, in talking with her doctor, she demands to know if she is going to die of  the tuberculosis that has kept her bedridden for months. He assures her she is not if she continues to follow his orders.

Though she successfully completed a pregnancy and delivered a son, Melanie has been forbidden anything that would excite her by her doctor, but as the doctor acknowledges to himself, “excitement and intensity, he had always known, were Melanie’s response to life.” So when he asked her if she wanted a change of view, she immediately responds with enthusiasm.

It was during her pregnancy and just before the tuberculosis was confirmed that Melanie found, while browsing an antique shop a unique chaise-longue, “ugly and clumsy and extraordinary, nearly seven feet long and proportionately wide. The head and foot end of the seat curled round as little as though to meet each other, raising, above the elaborately carved legs and frame, a superstructure of wine-red crimson felt.” She bought it out of a “profound want,” but shortly thereafter her confinement began and it went unused. Until the offer of a change.

With her husband, Guy, her sister, doctor and nanny hovering over her, she is brought down and placed upon the chaise-longue in the drawing room to watch the sky and flowers, to hear the noises of the city and children playing, and to savor “the first embrace for so very long that held the certain promise of continued happiness” with Guy before falling peacefully asleep.

When she awakes, however, it is to a world and place entirely different—a faint foul smell, rough bedclothes, a strange voice “that binds the limbs in dreadful paralysis while the danger creeps and creeps and at last will leap.” At first in denial about her wakefulness, she refuses to believe that she is awake. Sleep, sleep, she pleads with herself, wanting desperately to awaken back in her home with her husband and baby.

But the new place remains. The woman whose voice she woke to is, she learns, named Adelaide. She is dressed in an old-fashioned high-necked dress that falls to the floor and black mittens with hair that “hung down over her cheeks in loops like the curtains and then back to a low wide bun.” Weariness and impatience are in her voice as she responds to Melanie’s few questions as if for the hundredth time.

But there is more than mere impatience in Adelaide’s voice. There is a dangerous story that makes no sense to Melanie—called Milly Baines. Why can’t she wake up? Why is the room so different? Who, really, is Adelaide and what does she mean when she demands, “Is that his name?”

Milly/Melanie is further troubled by a sense of knowing and not knowing. Objects in the room that are out of place are known, but when she asks the date she is stunned to learn that it is 1864—ninety years in the past.

I am awake but I cannot be awake, she said to herself, and between each statement she made, there was a pause, long, and then shorter, of horrible convulsive trembling. I know Adelaide, I know this room — but queerly, like half-remembering last night dream just before going to sleep . . . Who is Milly Baines? Came the gradual inquiry, and at last she looked, as she had not dared to before, at what was immediately around her, examined, tested, interpreted the feeling of this body of Milly Baines in which was imprisoned the brain of Melanie Langdon.

When the local reverend, Mr. Endworthy, visits Milly/Melanie pleads with him to help her, but he cannot understand her real meaning. Nor can Mr. Charters—a second visitor that stirs Milly/Melanie “with a shiver, a strange, desirous shiver” and leaves her wondering why if she has never met him before he should have so powerful an impact or why Adelaide seems more intense at their attentions.

A strange and horrifying time-travel story, The Victorian Chaise-Longue provides an atmosphere of relentless tension in a riveting literary style. Though the character of kittenish, playful Melanie is initially annoying, it is that very trait, turned so adroitly on its head, that she uses to find the answers she desperately seeks.

No blood, no guts here. Just a fine story that I highly recommend.    


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it