The Ghost's Summons | Ada Buisson | A Bitesized Audiobook

A struggling and impecunious young surgeon, settling down on a cold and snowy night to treat himself to a chop and a glass of Christmas punch, receives a mysterious visitor requesting him to attend a death-bed... The story starts at 00:01:25

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:25 The Ghost's Summons
00:20:09 Credits, thanks and further listening

Ada Buisson (1839–1866) was an English author of French descent, who briefly flourished in the 1860s; sadly her literary output was curtailed by her early death at the age of just 27 and her work afterwards fell somewhat into obscurity. She was born in Battersea, then in Surrey but now south-west London, to French-born merchant Jean François Buisson (who anglicised his given names to John Francis) and his English wife Dorothy Jane Smither. Not a great deal appears to be known for certain about her early life, although her childhood must have been impacted by her father's bankruptcy in 1842, when Ada was just three years old. By the early 1850s the family had relocated to Brighton on the south coast of England, where her mother died at the age of about 35 in 1852.

Ada was the youngest of three sisters, all of whom studied at the women-only Bedford College in Bloomsbury, London (which after various amalgamations remains today as part of Royal Holloway, University of London), reading Moral Philosophy and Natural History. Incidentally, Ada's older sister Leontine Buisson also became a writer, and she was to become well known in Australia where she found work as a teacher and later union organiser after emigrating in 1871 with her husband Edward Cooper. As Leontine Cooper she became a leader of the Queensland campaign for women's suffrage in the 1890s. (Leontine died in 1903, two years before women in Queensland were granted the right to vote.)

It seems that Ada only published one novel during her lifetime, at least in her own name: 'Put to the Test' was published in 1865 by John Maxwell. A second novel, 'A Terrible Wrong' (1867) was published posthumously. John Maxwell's wife Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) – herself a celebrated Victorian author of ghost and gothic mystery stories – appears to have taken Ada under her wing, and Braddon published a number of Ada's short stories in 'Belgravia', the magazine she founded and edited from 1866 to 1876. Most if not all of Ada Buisson's short stories seem to have been published posthumously, following her early death in December 1866, in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France.

'The Ghost's Summons' was first printed in 'Belgravia' in January 1868, just over a year after Ada's death. Perhaps as a result of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's support for Ada, and the latter's untimely death, authorship of her ghost stories, including 'The Ghost's Summons', was misattributed to Braddon for some years, notably by Montague Summers, the early 20th century expert on gothic fiction.

Ada Buisson's complete ghost stories – just five stories in all – were recently collected together and published by Snuggly Books in 2022 as 'The Baron's Coffin and Other Disquieting Tales'.

This recording © Bitesized Audio 2023.