At a Winter's Fire.

Bookseller Notes

The first collection of short stories from Bernard Capes, journalist, editor of 'The Theatre', a highly regarded periodical, and prolific author, who published over 40 books and numerous articles for magazines such as Pall Mall, Pearson's and Blackwood's. Many of the quintessential themes and landscapes of the hugely popular late nineteenth-century Gothic revival are represented in the 11 tales gathered here: precipitous snow-encrusted mountains, graveyards crumbling into the sea, a traumatic encounter with the surface of the moon, and numerous shadowy creatures of the night - 'the face was hidjus beyond words, and the shadder of it, with the light behind, stretch out and reached to the gal, and made her hidjus, too' ('The Vanishing House'). The dedicatee may be the highly regarded Scottish landscape painter and member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, who was in London during this period and would have moved in similar circles.