“The Amber Gods” was written by Harriet Prescott Spofford and first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly 15 (Jan-Feb, 1860). Spofford (1835-1921) was, for some decades, one of the most respected writers in America, although today she is remembered only by obscurists and scholars. “The Amber Gods” is her best-known work.

“The Amber Gods” is about Giorgione “Yone” Willoughby, the daughter of a sea-faring family. She was named after the work of the Italian artist. She a gorgeous blonde and is well aware of how beautiful she is, and she plays up her own bewitching, alluring side for all it is worth. She thinks of herself as a “great creature without a soul,”¹ as having a “splendid selfishness,”² and she does not care about others and does not care that she does not care. One day her father shows Yone and her sister Lu a string of amber beads, which Yone selfishly insists best belong to her rather than Lu. The beads are part of a family legend. Once upon a time Yone’s great-grandfather, Captain Willoughby, brought home “a little islander, an Asian imp, six years old, and wilder than the wind.”³ The girl, whose only possession was “a string of amber gods that she had brought with her and always wore,”⁴ was savage: “she turned the house topsy-turvy, cut the noses out of the old portraits, and chewed the jewels out of the settings,”⁵ and Willoughby’s wife couldn’t stand her. So Captain Willoughby took the girl away. The girl had learned only two words in her time with the Willoughbies: “Willoughby” and the name of the town in which she lived. The girl was shipwrecked and led a wandering life, and she ended up as a servant to a family in Fiesole, in Italy. Yone’s father was first exposed to the work of Giorgione in a church in Fiesole, and at that church Yone’s father saw a girl, saying prayers on an amber rosary, and Captain Willoughby’s Asian child, now an old woman of ninety but still serving the same Italian family. Yone’s father returns home, but he can’t get the Italian girl out of his mind, so he returns to Italy and marries the girl. The Asian woman is set against the marriage but can’t prevent it.

Her only revenge was to take away the amber beads, which had long before been blessed by the Pope for her young mistress, refusing herself to accompany my mother, and declaring that neither should her charms ever cross the water, - that all their blessing would be changed to banning and that ban would burn the bearer, should the salt-sea spray again dash round them.⁶

But the beads eventually went to Yone’s aunt, who then sent them to Yone’s father, and when he shows them to Yone and Lu, Yone affectionately bullies Lu into letting Yone have the amber beads.

That same day Yone’s cousin Vaughan Rose arrives from Europe. Vaughan and Lu and Yone had all grown up together. Vaughan and Lu are the same age, and they have been corresponding in the years they were apart. Vaughan and Lu have not seen each other for two years, and Lu is in love with Vaughan, but when he sees Yone he is enchanted by her. Lu sees this, but Yone, supremely self-concerned, does not, and she treats Vaughan with the same blithe insouciance that she treats all others. Weeks pass, and Vaughan only treats Lu as a sister and seems altered in his manner from what Lu expected. He goes away for a fortnight and then returns, still acting as if in a dream. And then one night Yone sees him standing on a balcony and realizes that she loves him. When Yone’s father tells her that her Aunt is ill, Yone refuses to go see her Aunt or care for her, so Lu, ever willing to sacrifice herself for Yone, goes in Yone’s place. Lu returns a month later, pale and thin and distracted. One night Vaughan reads poetry to Yone, and they kiss, and Yone realizes that Vaughan loves her and has since he saw her. Watching Vaughan and Yone in a mirror from the next room is Lu, who is crushed by what she sees. Yone does not care, and is happily triumphant when Lu asks her if she loves Vaughan. Months pass, and Yone and Vaughan are to be married. One night Vaughan tells Lu how miserable and forlorn he is, and “You loved me once; you love me now, Louise, if I were free.”⁷ But the wedding continues, and soon after he gets Yone Vaughan slights her, and she soon dies, seemingly of neglect.

“The Amber Gods” is a striking story which readers are not likely to soon forget. The language of the story is lush and almost decadent, with a heavy emphasis on color, sight, smell, and sound. While the plot is opaque, Spofford’s concentration on sensual input, on the infuriating, alluring Yone–a forerunner to the overtly supernatural Fatal Women of later in the century–and on the feverish, hallucinatory ending make “The Amber Gods” a memorable reading experience.

Yone is monstrously self-absorbed, self-concerned, and hugely, innocently selfish. She is a version of the femme sans âme, the “woman without a soul,” akin to Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Elsie Venner (see: Elsie Venner), and it is hard to see her as being morally conscious of the damage her decisions cause.

“The Amber Gods” is a work of Romantic horror. One critic writes that Spofford’s best work, which by all critical estimations includes “The Amber Gods,” “represents not only the last flowering of the romantic impulse in nineteenth-century New England, but also the most significant female counterpart to the essentially male tradition of American romantic fiction.”⁸ “The Amber Gods” was part of Spofford’s entrée into American letters—one of the most attention-getting entrances in the history of American literature—and helped establish Spofford as an important writer. That she did not fulfill her promise, by publishing too much work of too uneven a quality too quickly, is an unfortunate fact. But during her lifetime she became influential on her fellow female writers:

It is important to note that, increasingly during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Spofford¼was part of and exercised influence over a community of Boston-based female writers, including Elizabeth Phelps Ward, Rose Terry Cooke¼and Alice Brown.⁹

Spofford essentially became the mother of the “East Coast” school of American horror during the nineteenth century:

Arguably the mother (or perhaps the aunt) of the East Coast school was Harriett Prescott Spofford, who began writing her horror writing before Nathaniel Hawthorne died and was still writing it after Ambrose Bierce disappeared. Spofford deserves primacy in consideration of the East Coast because of her early fame—her “Amber Gods” garnered her significant attention and controversy—and because of her influence on other East Coast authors, including Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. Although the group of women writers in Boston were formed and led by Annie Fields¼it was Spofford who was the group’s favorite and who wielded the most influence. Spofford’s horror literature, both short story and poems, is significant in the history of Great Age horror fiction. They introduce the feminine and the feminist into the horror story—there were no female horror writers of significance before Spofford, and certainly none who achieved her level of fame—and present a significant female point of view into what had been the essentially male field of horror fiction.¹⁰

“The Amber Gods” is historically significant because its role in making Spofford an important part of the history of American horror fiction. But besides that, it is an excellent, memorable piece of storytelling.

Print: Harriet Prescott Spofford, “The Amber Gods” and Other Stories. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

¹ Harriett Prescott Spofford, The Amber Gods, and Other Stories (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 29.

² Spofford, The Amber Gods, 7.

³ Spofford, The Amber Gods, 12.

⁴ Spofford, The Amber Gods, 12.

⁵ Spofford, The Amber Gods, 12.

⁶ Spofford, The Amber Gods, 14-15.

⁷ Spofford, The Amber Gods, 63.

⁸ Alfred Bendixen, “Introduction,” The Amber Gods and Other Stories (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), xi.

⁹ Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 29.

¹⁰ Nevins, Horror Fiction in the 20^th Century, 38-39.