ABSTRACT
In the year of her death, 1937, Edith Wharton collected eleven ghost stories that she had written throughout her career into one volume, entitled Ghosts. Some of the stories are set in the past and follow the traditional gothic plots of mystery and entrapment; others exhibit a more modern psychological realism, locating the source of their terror in the vagaries of the mind. Although Ghosts as a whole is uneven, several stories—“All Souls’,” “The Eyes,” “Mr. Jones,” “Kerfol,” and “Pomegranate Seed,” in particular—show Wharton’s superb mastery of the elements of fear and her skill in penetrating the inner workings of the psyche. One of the most provocative short stories in the collection, however, and one of the finest of all of Wharton’s short stories is a relatively little discussed narrative set in North Africa, “A Bottle of Perrier.” Published first in 1926 in The Saturday Evening Post under the title “A Bottle of Evian” and again in Wharton’s 1930 collection Certain People, “A Bottle of Perrier” is an intricately crafted ghostly thriller about murder and deception. To say this much about the story is both to describe and vastly underrate it, however—and to name only the most obvious of many levels on which the story operates. 1
