The Canterville Ghost

I really appreciated Virginia's kindness. I love the wildness of the twins. The Minister and his wife were great with their matter of fact advice to the ghost. Sir Simone, It resonated with me for his longing for forgiveness.

Full of the wit and charm you would expect from Wilde, but I was expecting a novel with fully developed characters and The Canterville Ghost is a short story with only the barest of shells for characters.

The overall story is strangely twisting. At the beginning of the novel you assume you are being thrust into a creepy Poe story, but by the end you are peering at a sappy Disney movie plot.
I personally liked the story's quick and easy reading pace. It actually made me giggle a bit when I was expecting to get frightened. By the end, the reader is confronted with Gods undying love.
Best characters in my opinion have to be the minister for his logical reasoning in the midst of unreason, the twins for their pranks, the Duke of Cheshire for his obsession with the Otis daughter (and his small pony), and the Otis daughter for her pure heart.

I chose this book because I had seen the movie decades ago, bought it but wanted to read the book (see if its as good as the movie). Well, it is hilarious. Never a boring moment. Wanted to steal away to read it when I could but had to be careful because I knew I might laugh.
A definate 5 star 6 really!!

i loved this book i laughed out loud and that is something i usually don't do. this book is a must read my husband read it first then i read it when i saw he was laughing i really liked it for an old story

What a cute little story this was! Someone over at Booklikes recommended it to me, and I'm so glad I followed through.

The Canterville Ghost is not scary at all, but it IS funny and as the story goes on, rather pitiful. I found myself laughing at some portions and then all but shedding a tear towards the end.

This is a short story which is available for free, or at least this version is, at the store, and you can add the Audio for a nominal fee.

After having just read "The Picture of Dorian Grey" (also a great read by Oscar Wilde) I was ready for something light and amusing. It is a very quick read and rather humorous. I found myself chuckling to myself and I enjoyed the simplicity of the book. Highly recommended!

I remember seeing the movie a long time ago with Charles Laughton and Margaret O'Brien starring in it. There was quite a bit of difference between the movie plot and this original story. The book was well-written.

I have rated other Oscar Wilde, if you like his work than this is just fine for you, but it is just as uninteresting to me as his others simply because it is a very different writing style than I myself enjoy.

An overly confident and not easily scared American family moves into a haunted British castle. The British caretakers know to fear the ghost that has caused as much chaos in life as he does death. The American children do not fear the nasty spirit that is running out of scare tactics to frighten the family. The American’s daughter finds a connection to the ghost that may bring him peace.

I read this after I read The Picture Of Dorian Grey and I have never seen the movies based on this short story so my mind had no real thoughts on the story except that I knew it was supposed to be humorous. Again the author, Oscar Wilde, bring description like an artist brings paint to a canvas. The details are lovely and even in slow parts there is beauty in them

Something is missing in this compared to TPODG. I knew this was supposed to be funny and thought there would be some laugh out loud moments. For me there wasn’t I could not fully connect maybe because this story was a commentary on British nobility. I just felt more a disconnect reading TCG then I did TPODG.

There are very few classic authors I like. Even though I thought The Canterville Ghost was okay a not great I will still try to read more Oscar Wilde at this point. His writing is a treasure.

I read The Canterbury Ghost with two of Wilde's short stories: The Happy Prince and The Model Millionaire. The Happy Prince is from Oscar Wilde’s first collection of fairy tales published in 1888. The Canterville Ghost and The Model Millionaire are included in his second short story collection published in 1891, although both were written in 1887.

The Canterville Ghost was Wilde’s first published story. An American family buy a mansion in Canterville Chase in England. The previous owner, the Dowager Duchess of Boston, had been haunted by its ghost for the past 50 years, but this does not deter the Otis family – until their fifteen-year-old daughter Virginia is missing. This is delightfully funny, mostly due to the antics of the Otis twin boys, nicknamed Stars and Stripes.

The Happy Prince is a very short tale about an unhappy but beautifully gilded and bejewelled statue and its relationship with a bird – a swallow. In The Model Millionaire Hughie Erskine is in love with Laura Merton, but her father, a wealthy baron, forbids their marriage because Hughie, although charming, is poor.

The Canterville Ghost is my favourite of Wilde's short stories, although The Happy Prince is exceptionally well-known and has been interpreted in many movie and stage productions for more than 100 years (and as recently as 2014).

The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890, was Oscar Wilde's first novel. I think it’s interesting to read his early works – his short stories – mainly written for magazine readers. Even The Picture of Dorian Gray was initially serialised in the Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine before it appeared in book form in 1891. Reading the short stories, especially The Canterbury Ghost, gives readers an excellent introduction to serial or episodic novels in which each chapter is tightly written with an attention-grabbing introduction and a powerful 'leave-the-readers-wanting-more' ending.

This is a fun ghost story by an iconic author. Oscar Wilde can be very witty. This is a fine example of his humor. I read this story in one day. I read it while listening to an audiobook. It was a little bit over one hour of listening. I reread a few passages.

Oscar Wilde pokes fun at Americans and British alike. It is not offensive, just fun. I have often heard the line that America and Great Britain are two great countries separated by a common language. I don't know who first said that, it does appear within this story. I have read a good deal of Oscar Wilde, but I never read this story and I am glad I was able to do so. Thank You...

This story is sort of strange, for me, because the beginning feels like we're getting a total comedy, but the ending is so typical of the saccharine stories of faith. The humor all comes from the American family that moves into a haunted English home, proceeding to put the ghost at his wit's end by undoing all his little stains and inconveniences with modern American products, or by being utterly unimpressed with his appearances. But then the second half comes, and the girl of the house convinces the ghost to join her in prayer, setting his soul to rest.

I mean, overall, I enjoyed this story, but in particular the beginning. I've seen enough of the overly-religious ending that it knocked the story down a star. If it was purely Americans screwing with a ghost, I'd have given this five stars. But the ending is so different in tone that I can't fully endorse it.

This story is in the public domain. I listened to the free audio production from Librivox.

The ghost of Canterville is an admirable exercise of superb erudition and distinguished employment of the main codes of the genre. Filled of sharp irony, relentless reminiscence of by gone days, when the ghosts disturbed the quietness of the village as well as the origin of many legends of horror which still nestle and persist in the collective unconscious (Loch Ness, for instance).

These underground stories shaped and forged the inspiration of Lovecraft, Shelley, Stevenson, Kafka and overseas Poe and Quiroga who knew to dig and explore those sinister labyrinths of the human soul.

But the coup of grace of this brief novel is the cynical treatment given by Poe around the presence of the ancestral figure when Hiram Otis decides to buy the castle.

The underneath message deals with an ancestral archetype. The miscommunication of this missed anima, who needs to rest in peace after so many centuries contrasts with the impossibility to reach the goal to scare and frighten his new victims, who come from the North American universe absolutely divergent with these ancestral customs.

Wilde displays a compete arsenal of brilliant observations, with is well known verbal elegance and good manners, distilling acidic irony which impress the novel of genial from start to finish.

One of the most emblematic literary works of this unforgettable genius.

I'm not sure what went wrong, but when I read this book on my Kindle, I found the following problems:
1. The book only contains chapters 1-4 of the story, and is MISSING chapters 5 and 6.
2. The book is missing one section in which there is a picture of text -- writing on a sign that is kind of important to the situation.

Ever since the Tudor era, Sir Simon has haunted Canterville Chase. He plumes himself on his track record driving its inhabitant to apoplexy and madness through his many disguises.

But then, horrors! the house gets sold - to a bunch of Americans. Rather than recoiling in fear from the irremovable bloodstain on the carpet, they keep erasing it with Pinkerton’s Patent Stain Remover - and rather than give up when the stain keeps coming back, the horrid family takes bets about how the shade of the bloodstain is going to differ day by day! How is a ghost supposed to deal with unresponsive materialists like that?

This summary covers only the beginning of this hilarious ghost story. If you want thrills and chills, this is not the story for you, but if you want something laugh out loud funny, then it's perfect.

I try to read classic in between more modern mysteries and thrillers . I love the beauty of well written English, English with depth and descriptions that paint pictures.
Wilde combines this with wit.
What aa enjoyable ghost story. No-one should ignore Oscar Wilde.