Böcker av Catherine Crowe

Shipwrecked as a young girl, middle-class Lilly Dawson is kidnapped by smugglers and forced to work as their servant. Terrified by the prospect of a forced marriage, this Victorian Cinderella flees captivity and has to navigate an outside world she finds both oppressive and dangerous. The Story of Lilly Dawson is a romping tale of pirates, outlaws, murder, mistaken identity, lust and betrayal.Best known for The Night Side of Nature, Crowe was one of the most successful women novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. Through her memorable heroine, Crowe insists that woman can "play a noble part in the world's history, if man would . . . not treat her like a full-grown baby to be flattered and spoilt on the one hand, and coerced and restricted on the other, vibrating between royal rule and slavish serfdom".As Ruth Heholt argues in her introduction, The Story of Lilly Dawson places Crowe in the vanguard of the emerging sensation genre and shows her to be a visionary and radical thinker and writer.

Catherine Crowe (1790-1872) was a successful author of fiction, non-fiction and plays, who moved in literary circles and corresponded with the prominent authors of her day, including W. M. Thackeray and Harriet Martineau. Her interest in the supernatural and the spiritual dimension, and her frustration with the narrow-mindedness of her generation, are evident in this work, first published in 1859. A strong believer in the possibilities of spiritual planes and of forces beyond contemporary human knowledge, she suggests that much is still unknown to the human race, and that the advance of scientific materialism may hinder the search for spiritual insight. Unusually for her time, Crowe also questions the literal truth of the Bible, suggesting metaphorical interpretations of scripture, and asks how modern miracles or prophets might be recognised, in a society so closed to the possibility of the physically impossible.

Crowe's collection of ghostly and psychic tales was a nineteenth-century best-seller. Volume 1 includes stories on presentiments, traces, wraiths, doppelgangers, apparitions and the after-life. It is a wonderful example of early Victorian spiritualist writing and marks the apogee of the nineteenth century's fascination with the supernatural.