just think, an extra opportunity just a few months after Halloween...
I am adding a link to my favorite Christmas-themed Victorian tale,
courtesy of the Victorian Women Writers' Project.
This is "Amour Dure: Passages from the Diary of Spiridion Trepka,"
taken from Vernon Lee's out-of-print
(and very expensive on used book sites)
Hauntings.
Fortunately, the text is all online.
In the story, a hot-blooded Polish scholar who "had longed,
these years and years...
to come face to face with the Past," (p. 3)
falls in love through the centuries with a Lucrezia
Borgia-like historical figure.
It all comes to a very eerie and violent climax,
appropriately enough, on
Christmas Eve.
The story proper begins a little scroll down the page, but
I also recommend reading Lee's "Preface" to Hauntings
to help put you in the mood.