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Anne Hereford, like most of Mrs. Henry Wood's novels, was first published in monthly instalments. It appeared throughout 1868 in Argosy, the magazine owned and edited by Mrs. Henry Wood and her son Charles.
It's unusual among Mrs Wood's novels as it is written throughout in the first person. Its features include a young orphan, a gloomy mansion, deaths--violent and natural, and a missing will, mistaken identities and family loyalties.
Mrs. Henry Wood's works were incredibly popular in their time. A contemporary survey of the reading habits of the "lower and servant classes" showed that a majority of those surveyed who read any novels at all read hers exclusively; certainly, if they were looking for sensationalism and melodrama, she was the author to provide it.
A sample chapter of Anne Hereford is available on this website.
The full text can also be read online or downloaded free of charge. It is in XHTML format, like this page. Please note the file size is 926kb and it may take some time to open-up if you choose to read it online. Downloading for reading later may be the preferred option and this can be typically achieved by calling up an option box. If you have a mouse and it is configured for left click to select, right clicking the link may give you this option. Link to the full text of Anne Hereford.
It has never been your fate, as I feel sure, my gentle reader, to be at one end of a gallery in a haunted house at night and see a ghost gliding towards you from the other...
Thus Anne, the heroine of this archetypical Mrs. Henry Wood novel.
To get full enjoyment from a Mrs. Henry Wood story, one really has to go with the flow and switch off the critical faculties honed by years of watching Morse or reading Ruth Rendell. Inconsistencies abound: dilemmas, which could have been solved by asking a simple question, drag on for years: familiar faces are rendered completely unrecognizable by the growth of a beard or change of hair colour: logic and rationality are subservient to producing a story that will grip the reader.
Occasionally the author acknowledges the multiple loose ends flapping in the breeze, and blithely deals with them:
..how it was that Hill had not seen it [a cloak] on her arm when talking with her in the portico was a mystery.
Just as often she ignores them. The labyrinthine twists and turns of the plot are clarified by having them laboriously explained--usually to the heroine, who seems (like most of Mrs. Henry Wood's heroines) rather slow on the uptake.
What my sensations were I can neither describe nor you conceive: I cannot bear to think of them even now. That I beheld the ghost, said to haunt Chandos, my fainting heart as fully believed, in that moment, as it believed in Heaven, Presence of mind forsook me; all that the wildest imagination can picture of superstitious terror assailed me: and I almost think--yes, I do think--that I might have lost my senses or died, but for the arrival of succour.
Page created 15 November 2002 and last
updated 17 December 2002
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