The Door Ajar and Other Stories

Synopsis

"The Door Ajar, a collection of seven short stories of the weird and uncanny by Virginia Milward, was first published by William Rider & Son, Limited, in the spring of 1912. Two of the tales are premonitory, and three of them involve haunted objects—a book from the time of plague, a silver box that witnessed the French Revolution, and a painting from fifteenth-century Florence—that reveal the tragic ends of those who once possessed them. The atmosphere in all of the stories is oppressive; the women in them are haunted, desperate, tortured, abandoned or exhausted, and the cause for their sad state is usually a man, for 'where men go pain follows—pain and misery of mind.' These are tales in which 'woman suffers and the man sins, and the man shares all the sin, but not the suffering.'" (Nezu Press)