Episode 64 – Featherston’s Story by Mrs Henry Wood

A Podcast to the Curious - The M.R. James Podcast

Have you ever had a hankering for upping sticks and moving overseas, where one’s limited means might stretch a little further and the wine flow more freely? This week Will and Mike head for the north coast of France in Featherston’s Story, where Mrs Henry Wood shows us that expat life is not always baguettes, brie and “la bonne vie”…

Show notes:

• MR James wrote in ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories” that “I own to reading not infrequently ‘Featherston’s Story’ in the fifth series of Johnny Ludlow, to delighting in its domestic flavour and finding its ghost very convincing. (Johnny Ludlow, some young persons may not know, is by Mrs Henry Wood)”.
• Mrs Henry Wood (or Ellen) began to published her Johnny Ludlow supernatural tales in 1868. She did so anonymously (or rather under the name ‘Johnny Ludlow’) in ‘The Argosy’, a magazine that she had taken over editorship of the year before. The website mrshenrywood.co.uk is a fantastic resource if you would like to find out more about her prolific writing career.
• Ellen Wood admitted the stories were written by herself in the introduction to the first Johnny Ludlow anthology, published in 1880. She claimed that she wrote them under a pseudonym because using her own name would have destroyed the illusion that they were true accounts of things that happened to the male protagonist.
• The Ludlow stories are quite well known today for their supernatural content, but the paranormal only featured in a small number of the Ludlow stories. These were more commonly crime, adventure or romance stories (of the 80 individually named Ludlow stories, only 17 feature the supernatural). They were packed full of characters, perhaps over a thousand in total.
• Featherston’s Story was published after Ellen Wood’s death and is one of the last of the Johnny Ludlow tales. There’s a full list of Ludlow stories online, with a very brief summary of themes for each.