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Lois the Witch
  • Published: 27 October 2008
  • ISBN: 9780141928616
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Lois the Witch



Part of our Gothic Classics series - ten terrifying tales of the supernatural - eerie visitations, revenge from beyond the grave, vampire love and many other macabre manifestations from masters of the genre

Fear of Satan becomes murder in the name of God.

Newly orphaned, the God-fearing and heart-broken Lois is sent across the Atlantic to live with her uncle’s family in Salem, but on her arrival she finds herself the object of cruel hostility, potent jealousy and mad desire.

When the local Pastor’s daughters are contorted and convulsed by apparently satanic powers, the whole town is whipped into a hysterical witch hunt. And when Lois’s cousins start to resent her presence in their household, life becomes precarious and an old woman’s curse returns to haunt her.

  • Published: 27 October 2008
  • ISBN: 9780141928616
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

About the author

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in London in 1810, but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Manchester's Cross Street. As well as leading a busy domestic life as minister's wife and mother of four daughters, she worked among the poor, traveled frequently and wrote. Mary Barton (1848) was her first success.

Two years later she began writing for Dickens's magazine, Household Words, to which she contributed fiction for the next thirteen years, notably a further industrial novel, North and South (1855). In 1850 she met and secured the friendship of Charlotte Brontë. After Charlotte's death in March 1855, Patrick Brontë chose his daughter's friend and fellow-novelist to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a probing and sympathetic account, that has attained classic stature.

Elizabeth Gaskell's position as a clergyman's wife and as a successful writer introduced her to a wide circle of friends, both from the professional world of Manchester and from the larger literary world. Her output was substantial and completely professional. Dickens discovered her resilient strength of character when trying to impose his views on her as editor of Household Words. She proved that she was not to be bullied, even by such a strong-willed man.

Her later works, Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1864) and Wives and Daughters (1866) reveal that she was continuing to develop her writing in new literary directions. Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865.

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