Here and Beyond

Edith Wharton's Miss Mary Pask opens with a weary, half-reluctant narrator drawn into an uncanny errand in Brittany, where a simple promise to Grace Bridgeworth leads him toward her reclusive sister's house through gathering fog and sea-darkness. What begins as a dutiful visit becomes a nightmare of memory and perception: a dead woman seems to answer the door, a candlelit room feels preserved outside time, and Mary Pask herself appears as a lonely, ghostlike presence pleading not to be abandoned. The narrator flees shaken, then returns in fevered doubt, only to discover that Mary was not dead after all but trapped in a cataleptic trance, leaving him stranded between superstition, grief, and disbelief. The selection also moves into The Young Gentlemen, where an old New England village's antique charm and entrenched family pride shape the social world around the Cranch household. In a separate, brooding African episode, missionary Willard Bent and Mr. Blandhorn confront spiritual exhaustion, cultural distance, and the failure of their work in Eloued. Under a moonless sky, with distant music, animal cries, and the muezzin's call echoing across the city, Blandhorn's fervent challenge to Islam signals a dangerous crisis already underway. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.