Woman of Stone, the latest A Ghost Story for Christmas, brings E. Nesbit’s chilling tale, Man-Size in Marble, to the small screen, writes CHRIS NEWTON and TARA BRIGID
“Although every word of this story is true, I do not expect people to believe it.” So begins E Nesbit’s chilling tale, Man-Size in Marble, originally published in 1887.
Rather fittingly, Woman of Stone, the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas 2024 begins similarly, with Edith Nesbit herself (portrayed by Celia Imrie) directly addressing her audience. In this case, Dr Zubin (Mawaan Rizwan), the physician attending the aged author on her deathbed as she lies in bed smoking and ‘making phantoms in the air.’
Written and directed by League of Gentlemen alumni, Mark Gatiss (his seventh Ghost Story for Christmas since 2013’s The Tractate Middoth), ‘Woman of Stone’ is an adaptation of Man-Size in Marble… or is it?
Imrie is presumably playing an historically-accurate Nesbit. She alludes to The Railway Children, arguably her most famous work, as well as her ‘grimmer tales’. Yet Nesbit was 29 when she penned Man-Size in Marble, and here she is regaling the doctor with a scary story in what is presumably 1924. (Nesbit died at the age of 65.) We take it, then, that her ghost story about stone effigies that walk ‘in their marble’, already exists.
One of the key differences in this version of the tale is the doctor himself, who, in the original short story, is ‘a pleasant young Irishman’.
“I might even put you in the story, Doctor!’”Nesbit beams mischievously as she beckons Dr Zubin to sit on the counterpane as ‘every ghost story should have a rational medical man to offset the nonsense.’ So begins the story of Jack (Éanna Hardwicke) and Laura Lorimer (Phoebe Horn), and their new home in the country, in which their only neighbour is Zubin himself and not the Irish doctor of the published tale.
With this framing narrative of the dying author recontextualising an old story for a contemporary audience, one cannot help but feel that Gatiss is winking at his audience. In the original story Jack and Laura are – we are assured by the narrator – “as happy as the summer was glorious”. (Although the narrator is Jack himself, so this could be taken with a pinch of salt), whereas in Gatiss’ version, the young couple are “not long since married, but there’s already trouble in the union”.
“This story, is any aspect of it true?” the doctor asks Edith once she has concluded her tale, making a reference to the author’s own troubled marriage. She asks him if he would ‘perhaps indulge a dying woman her little fantasy,’ and therein lies the crux of this re-imagining of ‘Man-Size in Marble’.
Gatiss is on record as saying that this tale is “the very first ghost story I ever read,” and it feels as though Woman of Stone is as much a tribute to Edith Nesbit as it is an adaptation of the story itself. (Surely it is Nesbit herself, rather than Laura or Mrs Dorman, who is the titular Woman of Stone?)
In the 2024 Christmas Radio Times, Gatiss even penned a short story of his own, Edith’s Ghosts, which serves as both a love-letter to Nesbit and a prelude to Woman of Stone in its own right, in which the young Edith is haunted by “hundreds of skeletons, propped upright; still clothed in flesh, or the dry, leathery, vile remnants of it. Many were still actually clothed; like some ghastly parade of past fashions.” (You can read the full story here.)
Man-Size in Marble is recreated faithfully onscreen. The young couple from the city fail to heed the superstitious warnings of their ‘peasant’ housekeeper, Mrs Dorman (wonderfully realised by Monica Dolan exactly as written) when she tells them of “things that walked”, specifically the marble knights lying on low slabs in the local church, who sit up every 31 October (changed to Christmas Eve for the film – naturally) as the church clock strikes eleven and walk “over the graves, and along the bier-balk, and if it’s a wet night there’s the marks of their feet in the morning”.
Mrs Dorman refuses to be in the house on the night they walk, and that is the last she is seen in the story. Jack is terrified when he sees the low slabs lying empty in the church, and hurries home to Laura, only to find that he is too late. She is dead and, clasped in her hand is a grey marble finger.
Woman of Stone, however, adds an extra layer. In the story we are told by the wonderful Mrs Dorman that the ‘knights’ were “fierce and wicked men, marauders by land and sea, who had been the scourge of their time, and had been guilty of deeds so foul that the house they had lived in (where Jack and Laura now reside) had been stricken by lightning and the vengeance of Heaven”.
When Laura asks why these wicked men return, Mrs Dorman replies, rather chillingly, “they comes to punish,” explaining that when the knights came home from fighting their wars, they were told (incorrectly) that their wives had not been faithful, “and so they throttled the life out of their poor women, despite everything they had themselves got up to while they was away.”
Mrs Dorman has observed the trouble between the Lorimers and noticed the bruise on Laura’s wrist.
Laura blames the “life of an artist” for her husband’s frustrations yet confesses that the true reason for them relocating was due to Jack’s jealousy over his wife conversing with the local grocer’s boy. (In the story, the reason given for the move is simply that they can’t afford to live in London.) “They’re all alike, all of them,” says Mrs Dorman, “whether hewn from flesh or stone they are all as one”.
At its heart, Woman of Stone is less of a ghost story than it is a social commentary on the generational curse of patriarchal violence, from the wicked knights who throttled their wives, to Jack Lorimer’s jealous temper, to Edith’s own husband ‘despoiling’ her friend and fathering an illegitimate child.
It is interesting, then, that this adaptation ends not with Jack finding the marble finger clutched in Laura’s hand, but Mrs Dorman who, unlike in the story, returns to the Lorimer’s house. Sadly, not in time to save Laura from the wroth of the knights, but in time to hide any evidence of the supernatural so that all fingers (marble or otherwise) point to Jack as the murderer, who had already admitted to Dr Zubin that he was a ‘jealous husband’.
Throughout the story, Jack – who feels emasculated due to his wife being the breadwinner in their relationship – constantly belittles her writing career as a silly hobby which brings in the “jingling guineas”. We are assured that Jack is a great artist, though we never see anything that he paints, and he is yet to earn a penny from it.
He is also incredibly patronising towards the housekeeper when he regales them with the local myths, and so there is a certain delicious irony about the fact that, when Jack is screaming his assertation that “They walk! They walk!,” Mrs Dorman replies, somewhat condescendingly, “That’s just a story, sir. A silly story”.
Silly story or no, there are some aspects of it that are true, as Zubin observes. It’s hard not to read the ending as Mrs Dorman, the older woman who has walked away from a scene of domestic abuse, returning to point the finger at Jack – who hangs for the murder of his wife – and seeking to break that cycle of male violence, whether human or stone.
To hear more about ‘Man-Size in Marble’, and other spooky screen adaptations, you can check out Chris and Tara’s horror podcast, From Page to Scream.
What did you think of Woman of Stone? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below!
