The Power of Darkness

The Power of Darkness is a collection of twenty short stories by the English writer Edith Nesbit, issued in this Wordsworth Editions printing of 256 pages, ISBN 9781840225310, dated 2006.

Nesbit is better known for the children's novels she wrote in the same period, and these stories belong to the other half of her work. They are ghost stories and tales of the supernatural, and love is often what they are about: one concerns a man whose devotion to his dead wife is bound up with a misunderstanding that keeps him from seeing clearly, and another follows a superstition held in the countryside which turns out to be accurate. The collection is described in its headings as English ghost stories and English horror tales.

The stories are set in respectable English houses and in the open country, and the volume gathers them into a single book. Its contents come from her supernatural short fiction rather than from the children's books she is usually remembered for.