Couching at the Door

By D.K. Broster

2001

First Published

3.54

Average Rating

192

Number of Pages

5H51M

Audio Length

Dorothy Kathleen Broster (1877-1950) is best known for her historical novels. But there is a darker side to her writing, glimpsed in her early poems - The Second of September 1792 is a fine example - and finding full expression in the stories she wrote after she had become a highly successful novelist. Sometimes - as in The Window or The Pestering, or All Soul's Day - these are what we might call 'explainable' ghost apparitions or hauntings whose origin is to be found in some violent or unjust action in the past. Other stories, Couching at the Door and From the Abyss, have little or no explanation, even in supernatural terms. Add to these an elegant reworking of the Persephone myth, The Taste of Pomegranates, the downright bloodthirsty Clairvoyance, and the psychological studies, The Promised Land and The Pavement which so well merit the heading 'Madness and Obsession', and you have a collection to disturb and unsettle the strongest nerves.

Avg Rating

3.54

Number of Ratings

116

5 STARS

12%

4 STARS

41%

3 STARS

38%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

D.K. Broster

Author · 10 books

Dorothy Kathleen Broster (1877 - 1950) produced 15 popular historical novels between 1911 and 1947. The Yellow Poppy (1920) about the adventures of an aristocratic couple during the French Revolution, was later adapted by Broster and W. Edward Stirling for the London stage in 1922. She produced her bestseller Scottish historical novel, The Flight of the Heron, in 1925. Broster stated she had consulted eighty reference books before beginning the novel. She followed it up with two successful sequels, The Gleam in the North and The Dark Mile. She wrote several other historical novels, successful and much reprinted in their day, although this Jacobite trilogy (inspired by a five-week visit to friends in Scotland), featuring the dashing hero Ewen Cameron, remains the best known. The Flight of the Heron was adapted for BBC Radio twice, in 1944, starring Gordon Jackson as Ewen Cameron, and again in 1959, starring Bryden Murdoch as Cameron. Murdoch also starred in radio adaptations of the book's sequels, The Gleam in the North and The Dark Mile.