'I grew up in Wolverhampton now I'm starring in a one-woman play inspired by Edith Nesbit's ghost stories'
Edith Nesbit is famous for children’s classics such as The Railway Children and Five Children and It but there was also a darker side to her imagination.
The writer and poet, who was born in London in 1858, also penned 60 ghost stories for adults and three of her best gothic tales have been brought to the stage by Wolverhampton-born actress, Claire Louise Amias.
"Edith was well-known for children’s stories but not so much for her ghost stories,” explains Claire, who will perform at Stafford Gatehouse on November 13.
In her one-woman play, Haunted Shadows: The Gothic Tales of Edith Nesbit, Claire appears as Edith who regales audience members with the dark stories while also telling them about her childhood terrors.
Claire, who grew up in Tettenhall and attended the Central Youth Theatre in the Wolverhampton Arts Centre building in the 1990s, has a long-held interest in spine-chilling tales.
"My family have a love of ghost stories. We always used to read ghost stories out to each other even when me and my brother were in our 20s,” she explains.
After reading Eleanor Fitzsimons’ biography of Edith, which recounts her terrifying experience visiting the ‘natural mummies’ in the Saint-Michel tower in Bordeaux, she knew she had found an interesting subject for a new one-woman show.
Edith, who wrote poetry and short stories for magazines to earn a living to support her family, was the co-founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation which influenced the Labour Party.
“I was intrigued by her really fascinating life story,” says Claire, who now lives in Kent.
The show, which is directed by well-known horror expert Jonathan Rigby, is an adaption of the novelist’s stories and also uses extracts of articles written by Edith in the 1890s.
In The Shadow, a repressed housekeeper encounters an abominable entity, while in The Pavilion the shade of a long-dead necromancer envelops a social gathering.
Finally, a deranged young woman harbours a deadly secret in a rediscovered story called A Strange Experience.
Claire, who trained at Bretton Hall and RADA and is the co-artistic director of A Monkey With Cymbals theatre company with Pradeep Jey from Stoke, says using Edith’s own words helped her to get into character.
"I was putting myself in her footsteps and actually speaking her words even in these autobiographical sections because they are from her articles in various magazines that were out at the time,” explains Claire, who has previously portrayed writer and spy Aphra Behn.
"There is nothing like speaking in the words of the person that you are portraying to find their voice and to find their characterisation.
"And the other thing that really adds to characterisation is having the perfect costume and I had mine designed especially by Anna Sørensen Sargent.”
Inspiration came from clothes worn by Edith that she had made herself to be able to move more freely, in constrast to the corsets that were popular at the time.
“It’s between that and a Mrs Danvers’ housekeeping outfit because Edith is telling the tales and putting on simple items of clothing but I wanted it to be able to slip between Edith and also these other characters that she embodies telling these stories because each of the three stories are first person tales,” says Claire.
"So I’m not telling them as a third person narrator as Edith, she is telling the story about her life, and then she takes on a piece of costume and is talking to her guests and she becomes a housekeeper, she becomes the companion, and she becomes this ostracised socialite,” she explains.
Describing the show, she says: “It’s wonderfully creepy. Her tales are fantastic, they tap into that kind of fear that we have in the middle of the night in the dark.
"Having a show in that time between Halloween and Christmas connects to our Halloween story-telling but also A Ghost Story for Christmas that has recently come back on TV with the Mark Gatiss’ adaptations. It’s wonderful fun as well, delicious to be scared while you sit in your seats safely.”
Claire, who has worked extensively on screen and stage, including feature films as well as touring, West End and regional theatre, says what she enjoys most about being on stage is “the connection with the audience”.
"That can be quite intense with a one-person show because you are really using the audience as another character, you’re reacting to them, you’re talking to them and imparting a story,” she says. “I don’t think there is anything quite like it for the adrenalin rush.”
For more information about the show, which comes to Wolverhampton Arts Centre on April 28, 2026, visit amonkeywithcymbals.co.uk
