Wharton wrote in 1901 one of her first ghost stories: “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”. In this story, Wharton unfolds with mastery different narrative techniques, extracted from her readings that allow her to “send a shiver down the readers' spine” (Zaugg 3). This story has clear influences from authors like Henry James or Edgar Allan Poe in the elements used to create an uncanny atmosphere in which the most obscure and hidden secrets of a married couple are the key for terror. It is not a supernatural story, despite the apparent presence of a ghost, it is a story about the difficulties and problems of an abusive marriage and “the vulnerability of the feminine self (…) through the trope of the literary double” (Murillo 770).
Wharton's story is notable