Rotterdam, Manchester and a writing life
Born Mary Louisa Stewart in Rotterdam in 1839, she grew up in Manchester after her family moved to England. Memories of the Netherlands supplied material for The Cuckoo Clock. Her own childhood and later life as a mother furnished circumstances she could turn into fiction without asking readers to know where they had come from.
She was at work on a book in 1869 when scarlet fever struck her household and her eldest daughter died. Her early novels appeared under the name Ennis Graham. As Mrs. Molesworth she became particularly well known for children’s fiction, producing more than a hundred books and stories over a career that also included writing for adults.
An object with a missing history
Uncanny Tales gathered six stories in 1896. In The Shadow in the Moonlight, a family takes an old house without supposing it haunted. A tapestry seems an equally reasonable purchase: the shopkeeper can explain how it was repaired. The one fact he declines to give is the identity of the family from whom it came. The voice that remembers this transaction turns ordinary household negotiations into the first stages of a ghost story.
