Louisa Baldwin (nee MacDonald) was one of four sisters who became famous for their marriages and families. Her sister Alice would become the mother of Rudyard Kipling, and after Louisa married the industrialist Alfred Baldwin she gave birth to a son, Stanley, who would go on to become the U.K. Prime Minister. Unfortunately, much of Louisa’s life seemed to be unhappy, which is likely why she turned to writing.
We really liked the haunted bed idea at the center of “The Weird of the Walfords”, but the story does rely on purple prose, and in the end we felt it wasn’t quite up to the standards of some of our other ghost stories. Still, it’s an entertaining read, and is charged with a subtext of eroticism not often found in ghost stories of the period.
Baldwin