3 good reasons to read The Canterville Ghost
1- Oscar Wilde, quite simply!
Novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer, Oscan Wilde is the best-known Irish writer in the world. His novels and plays, universal, timeless, have not aged a bit.
2- A story that is both funny and (a little) scary
Mr. Otis, a former American minister, buys Canterville Castle in England to settle there with his family. Before concluding the sale, Lord Canterville told the new buyer that the castle was haunted. Oscar Wilde revisits English Gothic by shaking up the ghosts and making the assassinations comical. He makes fun of the superstitions and beliefs of his contemporaries.
3- Accessible two-way writing
Published in 1887 in a short collection with other short stories, The Canterville Ghost remains a model of humor. It has been the subject of numerous adaptations for cinema, television, radio, and even comic strips. Behind the irony and the comic situation, there is a criticism of English and American societies, one attached to its ancestral values, the other modern and materialist.
