“The Apparition of Mrs. Veal” is the most famous example of a well-established genre at the time, that of the “apparition narrative,” which flourished in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and which developed in response to a crisis in religious belief that had been provoked by the works of Thomas Hobbes and the emergence of modern materialist philosophies.

Tonight, we join William Faulkner on a trip back to the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi.

This evening’s author, Frederick George Loring, was an English naval officer and writer, and an early expert in wireless telegraphy.

Our old friend Henry James, as well as being a chronicler of the Gilded Age, is no stranger to the Gothic, or the ghostly tale.

It’s always a little disconcerting when inanimate objects become, of themselves, animate.

The characters in Kate Chopin’s stories are usually residents of Louisiana, and many are Creoles of various ethnic or racial backgrounds. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north-central Louisiana, a region where she lived.

A young man goes off to seek his fortune and falls in love with a woman who restores him to life three times after he is killed. When he is unable to meet with her as they had planned, his real quest begins.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson, lived from July 3, 1860 to August 17, 1935, and witnessed everything from the American Civil War to the Roaring Twenties to the Great Depression.