Episode 28 The Corner Shop by Cynthia Asquith

Lady Cynthia Asquith Lady Cynthia Asquith, born Charteris in 1887 in Wiltshire, England was an English aristocrat, best now known for her diaries and ghost stories. Her father was Hugo Richard Chatteris the 11th Earl of Wemyss which is a place in Fife in Scotland. Lady Cynthia Asquith married Herbert Asquith who was the son of the British prime minister. Lady Cynthia was also  well-connected in British literary circles: — a friend of DH Lawrence’s, she was also the secretary to JM Barrie who is most famously the author of Peter Pan. She worked with Barrie until he died in 1937 and he left her the bulk of his estate.  Lady Cynthia was also a friend of another female writer of ghost stories LP Hartley. In terms of the ghost stories, as well as her own she became famous for being the editor of a whole series of anthologies put out by the Publisher’s Pan as The Ghost Book. The story which I have just read The Corner Shop is included in Roald Dahl’s anthology of ghost stories. In the introduction to that book, Roald Dahl says that he read hundreds of ghost stories and most of them were rubbish. He only included the ones he thinks are good in his anthology and I would agree with his choice.  I like this ghost story by Cynthia Asquith. I like the evocation of the cold London winter’s night in the fog, with the hero stumbling into a candlelit curio shop. She paints the picture very well. In fact, I think that this story has many of the classic elements of a good ghost story. I'm writing a little article for the website on what I think makes a good ghost story as I'm reading so many of them at the moment. Certainly one of the key elements in a ghost story is the environment and we see  that in the cold foggy winter night, which is both hostile and cuts off the hero from the normal world.  There is also an essential requirement in that the protagonist must end up somewhere quite otherworldly. In earlier fiction this was the Gothic Castle, but in the Corner Shop, the antique shop itself serve