Man-Size in Marble and Other Grim Tales

Selected and introduced by Stephen Carver

The draped effigy just behind him worried him again. He had been trying, at the back of his mind, behind the other thoughts, to strangle the thought of it. But it was there—very close to him. Suppose it put out its hand, its wax hand, and touched him. But it was of wax: it could not move. No, of course not. But suppose it did?

Best known as the author of The Railway Children, beloved British children’s writer Edith Nesbit had a morbid fear of the dark. Childhood trauma had also left her haunted by the thought that dead things might return, and copies of the living become horribly animated. These deep-rooted fears are the foundation of her horror and supernatural fiction. Frequently overlooked by readers and biographers, Nesbit’s weird and uncanny stories belong to the ‘Golden Age of the Ghost Story’ – that period from Dickens to M.R. James – and the ‘Female Gothic’, which uses horror as a veiled way to explore anxieties over motherhood, domestic abuse, and female sexuality.

Nesbit’s tales are short, sharp shockers, her delivery vivid, eerie, and unsettling. She wrote about what scared her: ghosts, zombies, ‘things that walk’; madness, murder, and premature burial. This edition collects all her short horror and weird fiction, reproducing her own collection Grim Tales (1893) in its entirety, including ‘Man-size in Marble’, adapted by Mark Gatiss as Women of Stone for the BBC’s 2024 ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’.