Patricia Clapp, Jane-Emily

Jane-Emily

Patricia Clapp

Harper, August 2007, $12.95, 285 pp.

ISBN: 9780061245015

"Jane Emily". In the summer of 1912 in Lynn, Massachusetts, Louisa Emory accompanies her niece Jane to visit her father's mother. Twenty years ago another young child died there; a girl who was willful, selfish, and determined to get her own way. Jane is obsessed with Emily, seeing her face in the reflections ball in the garden, reciting a poem that Emily wrote and seeing the reflections that light up on a moonless night in Jane's room. The one thing Emily wanted most was to grow up and marry Dr. Frost but now he is falling for Laura. That makes Emily very angry and she is determined to haunt Jess through someone he cares about.

"Witches' Children". It began in January of 1692 in Salem village when a group of girls, cooped up for the winter, begged the slave Tituba to read the cards and tell the future from reading palms. They know the slave goes into a trance and they teach themselves how to do it. As they emulate the slave, the villagers see them having fits and when they come out of it they accuse villagers of being witches. The more attention people pay to them, the more power they gain and the more people are named witches and wizards; arrests are made until one of the girls Mary Warren begins to believe they are suffering from group hysteria and begins to doubt what she has "seen" is real. All the people named witches are found guilty and some are executed until the tide of public opinion turns against them.

"Jane-Emily" was first published twenty years ago and it is a brooding gothic ghost story in the tradition of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Slowly readers come to believe that the essence of Emily is lingering even after she died, as malevolent after death as she was in life. "Witches' Children" is a tale of mass hysteria in which the power of the mind is mistaken for the power of witches living in the village. Both novellas are well written, with interesting characters and a dark foreboding atmosphere.

Harriet Klausner