The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850–1945 [1st ed.] 9783030407513, 9783030407520

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PALGRAVE GOTHIC

The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850–1945 Emma Liggins

Palgrave Gothic

Series Editor Clive Bloom Middlesex University London, UK

This series of Gothic books is the first to treat the genre in its many interrelated, global and ‘extended’ cultural aspects to show how the taste for the medieval and the sublime gave rise to a perverse taste for terror and horror and how that taste became not only international (with a huge fan base in places such as South Korea and Japan) but also the sensibility of the modern age, changing our attitudes to such diverse areas as the nature of the artist, the meaning of drug abuse and the concept of the self. The series is accessible but scholarly, with referencing kept to a minimum and theory contextualised where possible. All the books are readable by an intelligent student or a knowledgeable general reader interested in the subject. Editorial Advisory Board Dr Ian Conrich, University of South Australia Barry Forshaw, author/journalist, UK Professor Gregg Kucich, University of Notre Dame, USA Professor Gina Wisker, University of Brighton, UK Dr Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, UK Dr Alison Peirse, University of Yorkshire, UK Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Professor William Hughes, Bath Spa University, UK

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14698

Emma Liggins

The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850–1945

Emma Liggins Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester, UK

Palgrave Gothic ISBN 978-3-030-40751-3 ISBN 978-3-030-40752-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design by eStudioCalamar Cover image: Victorian engraving of an abandoned mansion (1876), Duncan1890, Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of Richard Jones (1972–2018) An inspiring friend who firmly believed that research should be fun

Acknowledgments

My fascination with ghost stories has been with me since childhood and, like the women writers discussed in this book, I have always loved visiting old houses. This fascination would never have developed into a book, however, without the inspiring and supportive community of scholars who make up the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Thanks to Xavi Aldana Reyes, Ellie Beal, Linnie Blake, Chloé Germaine Buckley, Matt Foley, Sarah Ilott, Peter Lindfield, Angelica Michelis, Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, Dale Townshend and Sue Zlosnik for all of their friendship, creativity and deep knowledge about the dark side of fiction, film and architecture. Research students Ian Murphy, Alicia Edwards and Teresa Fitzpatrick and those taking my classes on the Rise of the Gothic, Nineteenth-Century Writing to Modernism and FinDe-Siècle Literature and Culture in the last six years have all helped to develop my thinking on Victorian and modernist ghost stories, as well as directing me towards new texts and authors. I am grateful for a period of sabbatical leave and funded research trips to Italy granted by Manchester Metropolitan University to enable me to complete this project. For invaluable comments on the initial proposal and draft chapters, I am indebted to the careful and challenging reading of Xavi Aldana Reyes, Clive Bloom, Claire Drewery, Matt Foley, Adrienne Gavin, Vicky Margree, Liz Nolan, Carolyn Oulton, Luke Thurston, Dale Townshend and Minna Vuohelainen. For illuminating conversations, helpful references and searching questions about the uncanny, ruins, interior

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decoration and the short story, many thanks to Rachel Dickinson, David Miller, Joanne Shattock, Ruth Robbins, Julie-Marie Strange, Dara Downey, Catherine Maxwell, Deborah Wynne, Leslie de Bont, Katharine Fama, Becky Bowler, Clare Taylor, Ailsa Cox, Jerrold Hogle, Nickianne Moody, Jessica Gossling, Marie Mulvey Roberts, Victoria Mills and Bryony Randall. Three inspirational women writers, Margaret Beetham, Ann Heilmann and Rosie Garland, shared writing strategies and offered encouragement when finishing seemed a long way off. For her unwavering support, good humour and wide variety of snacks, special thanks to my office side-kick, Angelica Michelis (who also encouraged me to think again about the links between decadence and the Gothic). I benefited greatly from feedback and discussions at conferences I have attended, particularly Reading the Country House, Death and the Sacred (both at Manchester Metropolitan University), Modernism and the Home (University of Birmingham), Women Writers of the 1920s and 1930s (Canterbury Christ Church University) and the Short Story as Humble Fiction (Université Paul-Valery, Montpellier). I learnt a lot about spiritualism, the supernatural and Gothic tourism from papers given by Karl Bell and Christine Ferguson at the After Death symposium at John Rylands Library, Deansgate, in 2018 and by Tatiana Kontou and Rachael Ironside at the North-West Long Nineteenth-Century seminar later that year. The Vernon Lee conference in Florence in May 2019, organised by Patricia Pulham, Stefano Evangelista and Sally Blackburn-Daniels, was hugely important in helping me to refine my ideas on Lee and the genius loci. I am grateful to the staff at country houses and tourist sites in the North West, including the Brontë Parsonage, Capesthorne Hall, Gawthorpe Hall, Ordsall Hall, Speke Hall, Liverpool and the Elizabeth Gaskell House for letting me wander around and answering strange questions about space. Some of the material I draw on in Chapter 1 was inspired by working on an exhibition “Romance and Revival: The Gothic at Speke Hall,” which ran from March to July 2018. Papers given on ghost stories in the spooky settings of Ordsall Hall, Speke Hall and the Elizabeth Gaskell House all generated thought-provoking comments from audiences. Librarians in the Special Collections and archives at Manchester Metropolitan, Manchester Central Library, University of Manchester and the British Library have all been helpful and efficient. The team at Palgrave have been consistently professional and well organised; thanks

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to Lina Aboujieb and Emily Wood for their prompt responses, sternness about deadlines and belief in the project. Thanks to my Chorlton friends and neighbours, particularly Dawn Cole, Cathy Devine and Ruth Cross, for listening to my anxieties about never finishing the book and making me laugh whilst running, swimming and walking in the Lakes. A special mention to my Devon friends Sharon Gedye and Richard Jones, for some great holidays, lots of silliness and late-night cheese-boards. Sharon, thanks for sharing the eeriness of Berry Pomeroy and other fine castles, and Richard, I still miss your infectious laughter at the absurdities of academia. Last but not least, thanks to my amazing family Antony, Polly and Clara Rowland. They have rarely complained when being dragged round gloomy country houses and old Italian churches (except those deemed too scary to enter), or when waiting patiently (but rather hungrily) for me to emerge from the library. Some sections of Chapters 2 and 7 first appeared in the chapters “Victorian Sensations: Supernatural and Weird Tales,” and “Women’s Stories, 1940s to the Present,” in The British Short Story (co-authored with Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins) (Palgrave, 2010). An earlier version of Chapter 4 was published as “Gendering the Spectral Encounter at the Fin de Siècle: Unspeakability in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Stories,” Gothic Studies 15, no. 2 (2013): 37–52. Some material from Chapters 6 and 7 first appeared in “Beyond the Haunted House? Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories and the Troubling of Modernity,” in British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now eds. Emma Young and James Bailey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reproduce this material.

Contents

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Introduction: Women in the Haunted House Women Writers, the Ghost Story and Female Gothic Domestic Space and the Architectural Uncanny The Haunted House and Modernity Bibliography

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The Old Ancestral Mansion and Forbidden Spaces in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ghost stories The Reverence for Old Architecture and Victorian Haunted Space Open and Locked Doors: Servants and Forbidden Spaces in “The Old Nurse’s Story” and “The Grey Woman” The Ancestral House and Servant Space in “The Poor Clare” and “The Crooked Branch” Bibliography

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Left Out in the Cold: Exclusion and Communications with the Female Ancestor in the ghost stories of Margaret Oliphant Strangers in the Drawing-Room: The Horrors of Visiting The Haunted Garden: “Earthbound” and “The Lady’s Walk” Ghostly Communication and Female Inheritance: “Old Lady Mary”

1 7 16 21 35

41 43 51 64 76

81 84 88 96 xi

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Between the Drawing-Room and the Father’s Library: “The Portrait” and “The Library Window” Bibliography 4

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The Rapture of Old Houses: Dust, Decay and Sacred Space in Vernon Lee’s Italian ghost stories Spectres and “Definite Places”: Museums, Crypts and the Sacred Gothic Italy and the Allure of the Church Italy as a Haunted Museum: The Lumber-Room of the Past The Exquisite Creepiness of Old Houses: Where Devious Routes Lead in “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” and “The Doll” Bibliography “Ghosts Went Out When Electricity Came in”: Technology and Mistress-Servant Intimacy in the ghost stories of Edith Wharton Modernist Domestic Interiors, Privacy and The Decoration of Houses Between the Italian Garden and the Crypt: “The Duchess at Prayer” Letters, Electricity and Household Hierarchies in “Pomegranate Seed” and “Afterward” Ghostly Machinery: Telephones and Servants’ Bells Bibliography Finding Her Place: Claustrophobia, Mourning and Female Revenants in the ghost stories of May Sinclair Claustrophobia and the Haunted Brontë Parsonage Mourning and Maternal Space in “The Intercessor” and “If the Dead Knew” In the Haunted Library Haunted Bedrooms and the Horror of Sexual Intimacy Bibliography

101 113

117 119 124 129

136 150

155 157 163 170 178 190

195 199 204 212 218 230

CONTENTS

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Ideal Homes? Emptiness, Dereliction and the Ruins of Domesticity in the Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen Demolishing the Big House: Bowen’s Court and Lost Architecture In the Shadows of the New House: Bowen’s Stories of the 1920s The Ruins of the Wartime Home: Bowen’s Stories of the 1940s Bibliography

237 243 255 271

Conclusion Bibliography

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Bibliography

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Women in the Haunted House

Edith Nesbit’s “The Shadow” (1905), a short story about something which “wasn’t exactly a ghost” (173), typically locates the supernatural in relation to women’s responses to architectural façades and navigation of domestic interiors.1 Narrated to a group of young women by a usually silent, older housekeeper, Margaret Eastwich, a “model of decorum and decently done duties” (170), it is framed by the words of the niece staying in her aunt’s large country house. The housekeeper’s story of her friend Mabel’s death, which she tells to “pay” for the cocoa she is sharing as a “guest” in the girls’ bedroom after a Christmas dance, questions the invisibility of servants. It prompts the female narrator to admire this “new voice” of a woman whom she had previously dismissed and feared; the housekeeper’s silence “had taught us to treat her as a machine; and as other than a machine we never dreamed of treating her” (170). The malevolent shadow that kills Mabel, who is newly married to a man whom Margaret had loved herself, is glimpsed on the stairs, and in dark passages and corridors, and, more unnervingly, at any hour of the day and night. Visible in the in-between spaces occupied by domestic staff, this spectral entity in the story is that “something about the house” that one “could just not hear and not see” (176), like the “comforting” but liminal servants who silently bolster class privilege. The shadow is also produced by the unsettling newness of the nervous couple’s “gloomy” house in the London suburbs:

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_1

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there were streets and streets of new villa-houses growing up round old brick mansions standing in their own grounds … I imagined my cab going through a dark, winding shrubbery, and drawing up in front of one of these sedate, old, square houses. Instead, we drew up in front of a large, smart villa, with iron railings, gay encaustic tiles leading from the iron gate to the stained-glass-panelled door and for shrubbery only a few stunted cypresses and aucubas in the tiny front garden. (172–73)

When Margaret pronounces the house “homelike – only a little too new” (173), the unnamed husband replies, “We’re the first people who’ve ever lived in it. If it were an old house … I should think it was haunted” (173). The “too new” house without a past, lit by modern gas lights, becomes uncanny, as the glare of technology and its excessive newness render it disturbing. Even though “the gas was full on in the kitchen,” the husband agrees that “all the horror of the house” (175) comes out of the open cupboard used to store empty boxes at the end of a dark corridor. The dazzling light of modernity cannot blot out the darkness and emptiness that shadows it, for “the future … seemed then so much brighter than the past” (176). Published on the cusp between the Victorian and modernist periods, this haunted house narrative exhibits some of the key conventions that I address in this feminist history of the ghost story between the 1850s and the 1940s. It transforms domestic space into a place of terror that threatens marital relations and women’s lives and sanity. The supernatural seems to be activated by, or take the form of, a visitor, guest or intruder. It directly addresses the complex mistress-servant relationship and includes a female servant narrator, both key components of the stories written by women in this period. Moreover, the story is saturated with architectural description that renders both old and new architectures, the country house and the modern villa, uncanny. What makes the house haunted cannot be separated from women’s experience of the “homelike,” what is homely but also unhomely and therefore uncanny. If, according to Anthony Vidler in The Architectural Uncanny, architecture can demonstrate the “disquieting slippage between what seems homely and what is definitely unhomely,”2 then this slippage becomes apparent not only in supernatural manifestations in the home but also in the unsettling transformations in domestic space which span this period.

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Freudian notions of the uncanny and the familiar/unfamiliar distinction have become essential to our understandings of the nineteenthcentury ghost story and the haunted house.3 In his examination of the definitions of the German words heimlich and unheimlich and their correlates in other languages, Sigmund Freud notes that in English the uncanny is glossed as “uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly, (of a house): haunted, (of a person): a repulsive fellow.”4 The German definitions of the adjective heimlich begin with “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, dear and intimate, homely, etc.” before indicating that it shades into its opposite, also denoting “something secret,” “mysterious,” “concealed, kept hidden,” used in relation to the “ghostly,” the “gruesome” and the “eerie,” or to modify the word “horror.”5 One definition glosses the meaning of heimlich as “intimate” in the sense of “a place that is free of ghostly influences.”6 The uncanny can be an experience of disorientation, or the feeling of being lost in an unfamiliar environment. These contradictory meanings of the term cluster around notions of space and spectrality, as if, paradoxically, intimacy and homeliness both incorporate and exclude the ghostly. In his reflections on the relationship between dwelling and the uncanny, Julian Wolfreys has emphasised the necessary “undecidability” of inhabiting the border between homely and unhomely, suggesting that haunted locations invite a disturbing “interaction between person and place” which underwrites “the uncanniness of dwelling” itself.7 This uncanniness of dwelling underpins but does not fully explain conceptualisations of the haunted house. Theorised in terms of “the familiar turned strange,” the unlivability of the haunted house, according to Vidler, can be mobilised by the insecurity of the newly established middle classes, so that the uncanny operates as “the quintessential bourgeois fear,” the underside of material comfort.8 It is a place of dark and sometimes unfathomable secrets; as Nicholas Royle points out, the uncanny is not only about what is hidden and secret which comes to light, but also, “at the same time, about what is elusive, cryptic, still to come (back).”9 The notion of the haunted house, for Freud, is annexed to emotional responses to the dead: “to many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts.”10 The return of the dead may destroy the intimacy of the home by revealing its secrets, what is “kept from sight” in the ostensibly comfortable interior. This study is in dialogue with these Freudian framings of the haunted house in terms of death,

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disquiet and estrangement, the terrors of dwelling. Missing from these readings, though, is any recognition of the particular terrors of home for women, an omission borne out by the male authors and theorists used as evidence for Vidler’s arguments. Re-examining the resonances of the architectural uncanny for women writers is important in order to extend our understandings of gendered space in a transitional period, when the modernisation of the home, the growth of tourism and the veneration for the past as figured through the “old house” all seemed to call up the ghosts. The gendering of space has not been fully explored in debates about haunting and the haunted house. If Gothic writing, with its emphasis on location and setting, is “a spatially articulate mode,” as Minna Vuohelainen has claimed, it is surprising that “critical attention to Gothic spatiality is only slowly gathering pace.”11 An examination of the spatialities of women, of the ways in which they inhabit and navigate space in the Gothic mode, opens up new understandings of gender and modernity. This project provides a taxonomy of the specific rooms or areas of the house and garden in which ghosts were sighted in Victorian and modernist ghost stories by women writers, and maps this against the movements of both live and dead women around the haunted house. As this book argues, such a mapping of spectral encounters enables an examination of women’s changing roles in the domestic economy as servants, mistresses, female householders, second wives and unmarried daughters in a transitional period that witnessed significant transformations in domestic space. The 1850s marks the beginnings of organised feminism and debate about the Woman Question in Britain and America, which gathered force in the fin de siècle and early twentieth century, with the suffrage campaign and women’s involvement in war work for the First World War. Despite political changes granting women more rights, women were still very much associated with the private, domestic sphere. The unease in domestic space highlighted in many ghost stories of this period can be read in terms of female fears about modernity and the ways in which this private realm was being transformed. As Royle reminds us, “there has to be a sense of home and homeliness within and beyond which to think the unhomely.”12 Women were often responsible for, as well as resistant to, new technologies, such as electric light, telephones and labour-saving devices, that transformed the domestic space. Set in both ancestral mansions and newly modernised households, haunted house narratives exposed women’s feelings of insecurity and dread at a time

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when Victorian gendered divisions within the home and mistress-servant hierarchies were being questioned. Preoccupied, as they are with space, spaciousness and the navigation of the home, women’s ghost stories in the Victorian and modernist period borrowed from the architectural language of discourses on domestic etiquette, tourism, servants, design and homemaking. Haunted spaces are usually described in meticulous architectural detail, as if the reader had picked up one of the new guidebooks rather than a collection of stories. Like key works of Gothic fiction from the 1790s and the early nineteenth century, the titles of ghost stories often contained the word “house,” the specific name of a dwelling or an architectural style or feature: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Wuthering Heights, “The Open Door,” “The Mystery of the Semi-Detached,” “Walnut-Tree House,” “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Working on the interface between spatial theory and Gothic Studies, Ilse Bussing has explored the dynamics of haunted space in Victorian Gothic, reading authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Riddell and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in relation to spatial segregation, secrecy and the illicit crossing of boundaries in the nineteenth-century household. She argues that “an excessive concern for privacy and concealment translate[s] easily into Gothic texts in the form of spatial anxiety and infiltration.”13 Illuminating the “spatial characteristics” of the home in Gothic texts by comparison with representations of space and privacy in Victorian architectural manuals, she argues that “Victorian households demanded spaces of seclusion,” often sealing occupants into such spaces by means of symbolic closed doors.14 Bussing’s impressive spatialisation of the Gothic has been influential on my own approach, which concentrates specifically on the ways in which forbidden or enclosed spaces and restrictions impacted on women’s navigation of the home and their encounters with ghosts. In his analysis of the concept of “home,” the philosopher Michael Allen Fox emphasises this construct as a “problematic notion … an almost undefinable thing, a je ne sais quoi. Home is somewhere definite; anywhere; I’m-not-sure-where; somewhere-yet-to-be; or an imaginary and distant somewhere.”15 Home may be a sacred place, a site of security and shelter, but also a prison-house, where women in particular are bound by the rules of domestic mythology or constrained by boundaries and limits. Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei identify the home as a challenging concept, which “implies a space, a feeling, an idea, not necessarily located in a fixed place,” as well as its adaptive ability to be “shelter and

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labyrinth, vessel of desire and of terror.”16 Arguing for the complexities of the “homeplace” for women, Iris Marion Young writes that “despite the real dangers of romanticizing home … there are also dangers in turning our backs on home.”17 The problematics of home, both as an imaginary realm and as a material reality, underpin the concept of the haunted house. As Vita Sackville-West argued in her nostalgic vision of The English Country House (1940), “the soul of a house, the atmosphere of a house, are as much part of the house as the architecture of that house or as the furnishings within it.”18 In the Victorian and modernist periods, haunted houses were incessantly talked about, visited, discussed in the press and in fiction, investigated and ridiculed as fake. To bring together notions of haunting and the house was to mesh together two extremely potent areas of the cultural imagination. Haunting in its broadest forms not only denotes the appearance of ghosts but a sensation of being troubled, discomforted and trapped in the past. As most of the haunted houses that appeared in women’s ghost stories were domestic spaces, concepts of home and domestic organisation are crucial to understanding the haunted house narrative, as if in this period what is most haunting is domesticity itself. In Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place, Shelley Hornstein considers the ways in which architecture captures memory and the importance of imagined sites, urging us to reconsider our perceptions of the domestic: “When we think of a house or the furniture elements that are requisite to it, we are hard-pressed to consider a house for its houseness. Rather, we are deadened by its convention in our everyday lives.”19 Briganti and Mezei suggest that we should pay attention not only to “how humans … inhabit domestic space, but also to how domestic space inhabits us.”20 Ghost stories remind us of the “houseness” of the haunted house, how it inhabits us and play on the diverse meanings of new and old houses in relation to cultural investments in the home, modernisation and the fascination with the past. My own contribution to debates about women’s ghost stories in this book centres on the distinctions and continuities between different and diverse representations of the haunted house between the 1850s and the 1940s. Comparing the hauntings in the Victorian ancestral country house with hauntings in the suburban villa or new town house powered by technology is revealing of cultural anxieties about tradition and modernity, the old and the new. By analysing the preoccupations of women writers of the ghost story with architectural design and old and new houses, it becomes possible to trace a genealogy of the haunted house narrative centred on

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explorations of the past as well as shifting attitudes to the domestic interior. How does a gendered approach transform our understandings of the architectural uncanny? What does a mapping of spectral encounters in haunted rooms reveal about women’s troubled occupation of the home? By examining the changing roles of mistresses of the house and female servants, and the possible impact that these changes had on the architectural dimensions of the ghost story, I offer a new genealogy of women’s developing vision of haunted space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the following sections, I locate women’s ghost stories in relation to debates about Female Gothic, spatial theory, the haunted house and modernity in order to frame my analysis of the gendering of the architectural uncanny.

Women Writers, the Ghost Story and Female Gothic Female Gothic has traditionally been associated with women’s terrors at confinement within the home, with heroines kept behind locked doors, in dark places where they are preyed on by unknown men or their movements circumscribed. Following Ellen Moers’s well-known identification of the 1790s heroine as “simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine,”21 feminist critics have framed Female Gothic as a subversive genre, “articulating women’s dissatisfactions with patriarchal structures and offering a coded expression of their fears of entrapment within the domestic and the female body.”22 Ann Radcliffe famously claimed the category of terror for her particular brand of Gothic in her posthumously published essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” of 1826, arguing that “the great difference between horror and terror [lies] in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the [latter], respecting the dreaded evil.”23 Uncertainty and obscurity are also both key characteristics of the Freudian uncanny, which operates in a climate of scepticism and ambivalence about the supernatural. Kate Ferguson Ellis, in her important study The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (1989), has traced the relationship between the idealisation of the home and the popularity of the Gothic novel, showing how the Gothic becomes “preoccupied with the home,” particularly “crumbling castles as sites of terror.”24 Her emphasis on the home as “a place of danger and imprisonment” rather than a haven of security is particularly relevant to the haunted castle of the early Gothic tradition, with its malevolent and

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violent patriarchal villain.25 The groundbreaking work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) also paid attention to architectural terrors, showing how the oppressive “male houses” in the fiction of Jane Austen and the Brontës operated as dark inversions of the domestic ideal, with “dramatizations of imprisonment and escape” becoming “all-pervasive” in nineteenth-century women’s writing.26 In focussing exclusively on women writers in this book, I reconsider this association of terror with the feminine, tracing the development of the haunted house narrative across the work of six female authors in order to explore the relationship between the home as site of terror and women’s perceptions of gendered space. Theories of the explained and the unexplained supernatural are an important aspect of discussions of the Female Gothic, which I explore in relation to a developing tradition of women’s writing. Women’s uncanny stories, Diana Wallace argues, “use the Female Gothic to push at the boundaries of the traditional ghost story, and vice versa … work[ing] on the ambiguous edge between the explained/unexplained supernatural.”27 According to Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, “Many women authors have used the Gothic mode to critique … the systems of power that effect the hierarchy whereby women are devalued,”28 challenging the patriarchal inheritance. If Gothic texts by women sometimes simultaneously “mimic the polarisation of women in Western society … [and] challenge damaging stereotypes and constricting practices,”29 the ghost story plays on contradictions and tensions about the constricted movement of women and the domestic rules that help to confine them. As the ghost story began to reflect new understandings of psychology, trauma and repression, women writers of the ghost story increasingly made use of the unexplained supernatural to address their fears about modernity. Whilst the avoidance of closure was one of the organising principles of the ghost story, an advancing modernity could only find expression in the unexplained supernatural. There were no easy answers to the irruption of ghostly disturbances into the ancestral or the modern home. Late eighteenth-century female-authored Gothic fiction often depicted the heroine as terrified of ghosts, believing ominous noises in the night or the mysterious openings of doors and windows to have supernatural origin. In Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793), Monimia, the persecuted servant of Rayland Hall, is locked into her turret bedroom at night by her cruel aunt and frequently expresses her terror at the strange noises she hears. She believes the stories that the chapel is haunted by the

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spirit of a previous Lady Rayland, whose ghost “sits every night in the chancel, and sometimes walks round the house, and particularly along the galleries, at midnight, groaning and lamenting her fate.”30 But these night terrors do not have a supernatural source, as Monimia’s tale of suffering reveals: “how weak I was to add imaginary horrors to the real calamities of my situation; rather than try to acquire strength of mind to bear the evils from which I could not escape!”31 More at risk from the men who try to access her room at night through a hidden door, and her aunt’s villainous plans, than unhappy ghosts, the heroine’s “imaginary horrors” pale into insignificance beside the “real calamities” and inescapable “evils” which threaten women in domestic space. Emily St. Aubert, the trembling heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), similarly expresses “a sudden terror of something supernatural,” as she wanders through her dead father’s library at night, though she only fancies that she sees his ghost.32 Once immured in the castle of Udolpho, in a bedchamber which cannot be locked against intruders, she proves susceptible to the superstitions and ghost stories of her maid Annette, “infected with her … terrors,” which she tries to dismiss as “ridiculous,” “silly tales.”33 The maid’s melodramatic recounting of the “strange stories” of the missing Lady Laurentini, who supposedly haunts the shutup rooms of the castle, coincides with her frequent claims to have sighted apparitions. Dale Townshend has argued that in Radcliffe’s influential novels the Gothic castle is “coterminous not with a splendid, mythical past but with gender-based violence and incarceration.”34 Haunted by the threat of violence, sceptical mistresses and superstitious servants share in the terrors of the supernatural, which condition the ways in which they navigate the patriarchal space of the labyrinthine castle. Both Emily and Annette become frightened of ghosts because of the “remote,” “lonely” bedchamber, in a vast, decaying edifice where “every room feels like a well.”35 Famously, the spirits of unhappy ancestors rarely materialised in 1790s fiction, which tended to explain away the supernatural. The strange noises that Monimia hears turn out to be a villainous smuggler hiding his contraband hoard. Neither does Udolpho harbour “real” apparitions. Nevertheless, terror of the supernatural functions as an important way for house-bound women to express their feelings of unease, disorientation and vulnerability in patriarchal space. The telling of lost stories about dead female ancestors becomes inseparable from the expression of fear about haunted space, a key aspect of Female Gothic to be developed in the nineteenth century.

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It is in the increasingly popular short story form, with its ellipses, absences and discontinuities, that these spatial fears and lost histories found a fitting mode of expression. The 1840s to the 1940s encompasses the rise and subsequent popularity of the British and American ghost story, and the ghost story collection. Noting the importance in modernist short fiction of “in-between spaces,” particularly “the liminal space between what is seen and what is unseen,” Claire Drewery has argued that the genre’s embracing of liminality meshes with its capacity to render the uncanny and the elusive self, both significant in the related rise of psychoanalysis.36 In The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917), Dorothy Scarborough recognised that the Victorian and modernist vogue for shorter narratives intensified the terrors of the supernatural: “Brevity has much to commend it as a vehicle for the uncanny.”37 Her belief that representations of the unearthly and “weird effects” were more difficult to sustain in novels was shared by many short story writers.38 In 1959, Elizabeth Bowen commented that the short story “is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis.” Moreover, not only is “the moment from which [a story] sprang” inseparable from “longings, attractions, apprehensions without knowable cause,” its unknowability is linked to moods, buildings, scenes, “places more often than faces have sparked off stories.”39 Unlike the multidimensional Gothic narratives of Radcliffe and her imitators, the short story, a genre steeped in the apprehensions of place, lends itself to the unexplained supernatural, which increasingly underpins representations of the haunted house and women’s perceptions of its unhomeliness. The connections between spatiality, geography and the unexplained in women’s ghost stories, as patriarchal rules and regulations shifted but never disappeared, have been addressed but not yet fully explored. In her genealogy of the ghostly, Scarborough contrasted the “mistaken” or “hoax” ghosts of Ann Radcliffe’s fiction with the freedoms of modern ghosts in a transformed haunted house narrative.40 In this early account of the fictional spectre and its behaviour, place is a key concern: The earlier ghosts seemed to be more reserved, to know their spectral place better, were not so ready to presume on unwelcome familiarities as those in later fiction, but spooks have doubtless followed the fashion of mortals in this easy, relaxed age and have become a shade too free in their manners … Modern ghosts, however, have not been taught to restrain

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their impulses and they venture on liberties that Radcliffian romance would have disapproved of … Likewise the domination of the Gothic castles, those “ghaist-alluring edifices,” has passed away and modern spooks are not confined to any one locality as in the past. … Yet here are ghosts that do haunt certain rooms as relentlessly as ever Gothic specter did.41

Whilst Gothic spectres contented themselves with curses and issued after dark from castles, family vaults and cemeteries, modern ghosts take the liberty of touching the living, operating in broad daylight and, most importantly, moving around within the modern household or more than one locality. Significantly, these new choices of surroundings reinforce the importance of space to the ghostly; despite changes in household organisation, the relentless haunting of “certain rooms” is still a vital feature of the ghost story. The broadening of the notion of “spectral place” is also important, as is the emphasis on the terrors occasioned by the increased invisibility of ghosts, all of which impact on women’s experiences of modernity and the gendering of both old and modern homes. Male authors of the period, including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James, explored the uncanny effects of haunted interiors and landscapes in their stories in similar ways to women writers. Crosscurrents are apparent between their work: Dickens’ editorial comments helped to shape the stories published in his journals by Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, as well as those by Wilkie Collins. Henry James admired Vernon Lee’s collection Hauntings (1890) for its “bold, aggressive, speculative fancy,”42 whilst M.R. James singled out H. D. Everett’s story “The Death Mask” as among his favourites.43 With its focus on the dead servants who appears as ghosts or hallucinations to the tormented governess at Bly, Henry James’ influential novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) was admired by Lee, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf.44 Yet male contributions to the haunted house story, and the ways in which they address empire, capitalism, science, spiritualism and history, have been routinely privileged within studies of the genre. Whilst it would be short-sighted to argue that male authors shied away from the domestic uncanny—haunted bedrooms and unquiet libraries were prominent features of stories such as Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” Sheridan le Fanu’s “Green Tea” and M. R. James’ “The Haunted Dolls’ House,” among many others—an exclusive focus on women writers’ conceptualisations of the unhomeliness of space is revealing of the hauntedness of

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domesticity itself, particularly in terms of women’s specific experiences of the home in a transitional period. Female servant narrators like James’ unnamed governess were rare in male-authored ghost stories but were deployed in complex ways by female authors drawing on direct experience of managing domestic staff. The disintegration of ideologies of sacred domesticity, shifting attitudes to domestic service and gendered understandings of tourism are reworked by women writers of the uncanny in ways which insist on the centrality of gender to understandings of the architectural uncanny. A number of important histories of the genre have compared the writing of male and female authors. Following in the wake of Julia Briggs’s Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977), they explore supernatural narratives as expressions of cultural anxieties, colonialism, trauma, alienation and psycho-geography.45 In The Ghost Story, 1850–1940: A Cultural History (2010), Andrew Smith ponders the relationship between spectrality, liminality and economics, as well as colonial narratives of the ghostly. His arguments about women writers of the ghost story, focussing on representative stories by Vernon Lee, Charlotte Riddell and May Sinclair, centre on art, history and money.46 Whilst the concept of the haunted house in relation to tourism, art and inheritance is discussed in relation to the ghost stories of Henry James, Smith does not elaborate on the gendered implications of haunted space. In A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (2011), Simon Hay insists on “social and historical understandings of the trauma that the ghost story addresses,” contending that the struggle for class identity becomes a key concern of Victorian narratives organised around property and failed inheritance. His arguments are primarily concerned with the ghost story, class and Empire, as he maps the traumatic transition to capitalism against depictions of the structure of imperialism in both fiction and poetry.47 In Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (2014), Luke Thurston draws out the ghostliness experienced by and embodied in alienated modern protagonists who retreat from the reader’s understanding. Writing on the convergence of the living and the undead in the ghostly encounter, Thurston follows Jacques Derrida’s later work on hospitality in foregrounding the curious relation between host and guest, arguing that “it is hard indeed to find a ghost story that does not feature … the arrival of a guest or a strange act of hospitality.”48 Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston’s excellent Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (2018), with its comprehensive overview of national and regional settings and contexts

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for the ghost story, also includes an important section on “Haunting Sites,” which stresses the value of “considering the relationship between ghosts and geography” and analysing the eeriness of haunted topographies.49 The collection is indicative of the vibrancy of research on women writers of ghost stories, though of the ten chapters on individual Victorian and modernist authors, only three focus on women—Oliphant, Lee and Wharton—suggesting that there is more work to be done to reinsert women into the history of the ghost story. The choice of women writers for this book has been determined by their output of supernatural short fiction and their interest in architecture and property, as well as in the short story as a form. Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, May Sinclair and Elizabeth Bowen are key contributors to the genre of short fiction as well as canonical writers. With the exception of Gaskell, who was writing before short-story collections became popular, they all published collections of Gothic stories, including Lee’s Hauntings and Sinclair’s Uncanny Stories . All of these women fall broadly into the category of the middle class. Some owned their own properties or wrote about their experiences of moving house. Edith Wharton took an active role in designing her own home. All employed domestic staff, with the majority of them enjoying close bonds with their female servants, which impacted on their depictions of mistress-servant relations. Lee, Wharton and Bowen were key commentators on the importance of setting to the ghost story. Their publications of essays and journalism on travel, geography and the impact of war on perceptions of place informed their accounts of the ghostly. All of the six writers published non-fictional texts and articles on property, tourism, houses, gardens and/or interior design, or recorded in their diaries and letters their responses to old architecture and the effects of modernisation. Surprisingly, Edith Wharton is often missed out of histories of the ghost story, despite the significance of the story collections and commentaries on the form that she published. Her retrospective preface to her collected ghost stories, written in 1937, is an important framework for considering the transformation of the haunted house in the age of electricity. Like Bowen and Lee, she also reflected on the hauntedness of ruins. The 1860s to the1880s have been identified as the “golden age of spiritualism” when séances, mediumship and communication with the dead attracted public attention, though a resurgence of belief in ghostly communications in response to the losses of the First World War also

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affected the development of the ghost story.50 Luke Thurston suggests that this was partly to do with an “insistent demand” for “decisive hermeneutic closure on certain fundamental ontological questions [about the ghostly] that were becoming ever-more insistent in the course of an accelerating, disruptive modernity.”51 Jen Cadwallader concurs that conceptualisations of spirits and spirituality had changed by the end of the nineteenth century as theological frameworks for belief gave way to more scientific understandings of the unknown.52 Oliphant and Sinclair were particularly influenced by contemporary debates about spiritualism, the afterlife and the possibilities of communication with the dead. The spiritualist resonances of ghost stories will inform my analysis of the spatial dimensions of communication and the specific locations of visitors/guests when they receive ghostly messages. In The Victorian Supernatural, Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell argue that the Victorians both mocked and believed in the supernatural, which was “both feared and terrible and ardently desired … an important aspect of [their] intellectual, spiritual, emotional and imaginative worlds.”53 Freud too recognised the importance of scientific uncertainty to an experience of the uncanny in his discussion of the return of the dead. The fear of the uncanny can be activated by residual or repressed beliefs about the supernatural: “as soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to support the old, discarded beliefs, we get a feeling of the uncanny, as if we were acknowledging: ‘Then the dead do continue to live and manifest themselves on the scene of their former activities!’”54 To write about ghosts was to address both fears and desires about the ghostly and the dark possibilities of communication with the dead in an ostensibly sceptical age. Feminist approaches to the woman’s ghost story have identified the genre’s interest in the invisibility of the Victorian woman, in repression and secrecy, in women’s handling of money and in colonial identities, domestic interiors and women’s forgotten histories. Vanessa D. Dickerson’s pioneering account of Victorian women writers and the supernatural was one of the first studies to consider the invisibility or “inbetweenness” of the ghost as a paradigm for Victorian femininity in patriarchal culture. Echoing the belief in women as simultaneously powerful and peripheral, she argues that “the ghost corresponded … particularly to the Victorian woman’s visibility and invisibility, her power and powerlessness, the contradictions and extremes that shaped female culture.”55 Her point that women writers seized on supernatural stories as not only a lucrative but

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also a rewarding genre because it allowed them “more license” to experiment and challenge taboos echoes some of the sentiments of women writers themselves.56 But Dickerson’s argument that the Victorian woman was “robbed of place, of space, of substance” in a society organised around men needs to be revisited in the light of new understandings of space and place.57 The recent collection The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s (2019) is indicative of new ways of thinking about space, gender and the occult, putting “into conversation” writers across the Victorian/modernist divide. Nicholas Daly argues in the foreword that it is unsurprising that, in a period of gender inequality, women were “drawn to the fantastic as a mode of writing that seemed to offer an opportunity to imagine a world whose contours were less definite and whose ways of life were less reified.”58 Tracing correspondences across decades and genres, the collection’s methodology allows for comparison of elements of the ghost story such as “supernaturally loaded objects” and “transformative and uncanny spaces” in the work of different authors.59 By putting my chosen six women writers into conversation, I hope in this book to trace some of the correspondences between understandings of space and the supernatural in the different decades examined, rather than simply constructing an artificial opposition between the Victorians and the moderns. Despite being structured around the writing of individual authors, the chapters identify links between women writers of the supernatural by cross-referencing stories or essays written by each other. Some of the writers knew and commented on each other’s work: the influence of Lee’s vision of Italy on Wharton’s Italian ghost story “The Duchess at Prayer” is clearly apparent, whilst Oliphant’s representations of the haunted garden anticipate the travel writing of Lee. The shared characteristics of the Victorian stories produced by Gaskell and Oliphant, and the modernist stories of Wharton and Bowen, has meant that the readings of Oliphant’s “The Open Door” and Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” have been placed in chapters focussed on the work of their fellow authors. Recent studies have tended to situate women’s ghost stories in relation to the maternal, mourning, material culture and formal innovation, exploring Female Gothic as a protean form and a slippery generic category. Arguing for the distinctiveness of women’s writing in the Gothic, Diana Wallace notes the ways in which the ghost story as a form, from Gaskell to Bowen, has offered women writers “special kinds of freedom to critique male power,” often in potentially radical ways.60 She argues

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that “women writers have developed the language and imagery of Gothic – spectrality, live burial, the haunted house, the womb-tomb recess, the murdered mother – to symbolise the fact that they … have been denied a matrilineal genealogy.”61 Her emphasis on buried female histories is particularly apposite to readings of the haunted house in terms of its lost female inheritance. Paying attention to the material culture of the spectral encounter in American women’s ghost stories, Dara Downey argues that such stories “dramatize both the intimate bond and the vicious struggle between the overwhelming plethora of commodities that crowded the nineteenth-century home, and the woman enjoined by social structures to keep them in check.”62 Supernatural tropes, in her compelling readings, can be employed “to literalize the contemporary association of women with things, so that domestic objects act as substitutes for female spectres,” haunting their owners. The everyday then becomes problematic, dangerous, as materiality, display and privacy play central roles in the ghost narrative.63 In her important examination of women’s short supernatural fiction, Victoria Margree argues that the woman’s ghost story between 1860 and 1930 “presents a case study of how twentiethcentury writers could innovate within existing narrative forms, taking the conventions of a popular Victorian genre and adapting and revitalising them to interrogate the modern present.”64 By the 1920s, according to Margree, “we encounter women’s ghost stories that question just how much the Victorian past has really been left behind,”65 as the new freedoms women had begun to enjoy still left them haunted by the dark shadow of an outdated Victorianism. Both Downey and Margree offer readings of neglected woman writers such as Madeleine Yale Wynne, Alice Perrin and Eleanor Scott. In order to create new genealogies of the woman’s ghost story, we need to continue to explore the links between women writers in ostensibly different periods and across national borders.

Domestic Space and the Architectural Uncanny The relevance of spatial theory to nineteenth-century and modernist Gothic has been evidenced in a number of recent studies. Yet the gendered dimensions of haunted space, specifically in relation to property ownership and transformations of the architectural uncanny by Victorian and modernist women writers, have not been fully explored. The work of spatial theorists such as Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1958) and Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) can be

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productively read alongside contemporary commentaries on space and architecture such as Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses (1898) and Vernon Lee’s “In Praise of Old Houses” (1897). Such non-fictional texts and essays are indicative of women writers’ cultural investment in the aesthetics of the country house and garden as well as in modern interior design. They offer another perspective on what Bachelard calls “the intimate values of inside space,” described in his nostalgic vision as “eulogized space.”66 Throughout this period, both women and servants were encouraged to occupy particular rooms or spaces, or to cross thresholds, at particular times of the day and night. Their movements were circumscribed in ways that were rendered uncanny in women’s non-fictional writing. Developments in architecture, the property market, technology and interior decoration all impacted on women’s accounts of the domestic economy, often less eulogised than seen as a site of claustrophobia and the invasion of privacy. Spatial theorists have drawn attention to the cartographic organisation of the domestic space and the house as a site of memory. Bachelard’s highly influential account frames my readings of women’s ghost stories, particularly his conceptions of memory and loss in terms of the spectral. Houses of the present exist in relation to other “lost” houses or the house of the past: “We consider the past, and a sort of remorse at not having lived profoundly enough in the old house fills our hearts, comes up from the past, overwhelms us” (77).67 Oriented towards “felicitous space … the space we love,” Bachelard’s celebration of the ways in which intimacy has been imagined stresses the importance of secrets, dreams and the hidden to our appreciation of domesticity.68 He asks, “how can secret rooms, rooms that have disappeared, become abodes for an unforgettable past?”69 For Bachelard, a house often functions as a “house of memories,” so that for each of us there exists “an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past.”70 Yet what is lost in the shadows may be a repressed nightmare, intimately connected to the specific rooms and corners which have disappeared. It is not only the childhood home that becomes a lost house, “this house that is gone,”71 but phantom versions of the marital or family home, inhabited by other ancestors and other families. The “extraordinary discrepancy” for feminist critics between Bachelard’s topophilic notions of “felicitous space” and “the negative space” apparent in nineteenthcentury women’s writing has been noted by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.72 They read women’s representations of space as always already

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confining, tomb-like, “anxiety-inducing,”73 making the connections to spatial phobias which Bachelard leaves unsaid. “Hostile space” is “hardly mentioned” in his account.74 Yet the unlocking of the treasure boxes of the past by women, servants and visitors/tourists suggests that the home does indeed become a “negative space,” with women’s sensitivity to shifting spatial configurations shedding light on forgotten and menacing secrets. Prohibition, denial, repression and fear constitute key elements of the dynamics of space, all of which feature prominently in women’s ghost stories in relation to female inhabitants. In his influential The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre makes the important distinction between spatial practice, representations of space and what he calls “representational spaces,” which “embody[] complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life.”75 Representational space, further glossed as “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’,”76 is clearly of direct relevance to conceptualisations of the haunted house, which can be understood in terms of the gendering of its inhabitants and their “living through” of its complex symbols and codes. Prohibited spaces and the bourgeois desire for privacy in the nineteenth century are key components of Lefebvre’s analysis of the livability of space. Conceptualisations of the livability (or not) of the haunted house need to acknowledge the gendering of the inhabitants which spatial theory has often ignored. In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Martin Heidegger reflects that “in dwelling [mortals] persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations. And only because mortals pervade, persist through, spaces by their very nature are they able to go through spaces.”77 This notion of pervading and persisting through space is significant in terms of movement around the house, as the movement from one room to another is only possible by a knowledge of both spaces: “we always go through spaces in such a way that we already experience them by staying constantly with near and remote locations and things.”78 To recognise that forbidden spaces and spaces of desire might operate in tension with, or collapse into, each other within the domestic interior, that women might “pervade” space in different ways to men, or that women might (re)appropriate spaces which have previously been patriarchal, allows for a rethinking of the positioning of women within the “spatial world”79 of the ghost story.

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Feminist geographers and philosophers have intervened in these debates by reinforcing issues of power and authority inherent in the gendering of space and place. Following Michel Foucault, Doreen Massey argues that “the spatial is socially constituted … full of power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and co-operation.”80 In her desired separation of understandings of place from nostalgia and statis, and from being fixed and unproblematic, Massey recognises that “the identities of place are always unfixed, contested and multiple.”81 Gillian Rose has discussed the importance of “the spatiality of everyday life” in terms of breaking down the public/private dichotomy and rethinking gender divisions within space. She argues that: Social space can no longer be imagined simply in terms of a territory of gender. The geography of the master subject … has been ruptured by the spatialities of different women … the subject of feminism depends on a paradoxical geography.82

This acknowledges the need to pay attention to the plurality of women’s diverse and divergent experiences of domestic space, a plurality I examine in my exploration of the gendering of space in women’s writing. Women’s spatialities can be paradoxical, ostensibly constrained by patriarchal rules yet also challenging hierarchies within the domestic economy, a realm where female power becomes a possibility. The philosophical work of Elizabeth Grosz is also important in its interrogation of the missing femininity at stake in “the domain of the dwelling,” and its radical considerations of ways in which women can “reoccupy” or reappropriate patriarchal space.83 By the turn of the century, feminist re-imaginings of the house of the future—maybe a kitchenless house, a servantless house, an allfemale house—broke the rules of domesticity and advanced the notion that houses ostensibly defined by lack and absence could also enable newly adjusted gender roles and new territories of gender. Grosz warns that “the containment of women and space always has its costs,” and reminds us of the need to “open other possibilities for rethinking space, time, dwelling, the built environment, and the operative distinctions with which such concepts function.”84 This rethinking of space and dwelling is crucial to this study.

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The domestic interior, the politics of “inside space,” privacy and the middle-class family, has become a renewed focus of attention for architectural historians and cultural critics. Well-known Victorian texts such as Robert Kerr’s The Gentleman’s House: Or, How to Plan English Residences, from the Parsonage to the Palace (1864) and Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (1874) set out advice about the spatial organisation, furnishing and decoration of middle-class homes, which were influential into the twentieth century. Drawing on the work of Kerr, Jane Hamlett’s fascinating exploration of “the distinctive set of intimacies and distances that characterised nineteenth-century middle-class family relationships” suggests that the creation of spatial boundaries was not primarily driven by the desire for privacy.85 The limits of privacy are apparent in the close bonds between maids and mistresses working side by side in smaller homes, or the occupation of supposedly female spaces by the whole family. Non-fictional texts about the home by women, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses (1897) and Flora Klickmann’s The Mistress in the Little House (1915), also proliferated in this period, offering a more gendered perspective on mistress-servant relations and women’s positioning within domestic space. Hamlett notes the difficulties of gendered segregation in “homes with little space to spare” which contributed to “the decline of the formal spatial segregation of the home” in the twentieth century.86 The attentiveness to the behaviour and positioning of servants was a hallmark of women’s writing about the home. Judy Giles has noted that authority over servants was “one of the few ways that middle-class women might assert a powerful identity at a specific historical moment when the characteristics of this servant population were changing rapidly.”87 Servants could be threatening and contaminating, with the potential to increase what Gilman called “complexity and difficulty, with elements of discomfort and potential disease” to the supposedly “sacred” domestic traditions.88 In this study, I have drawn primarily on what women writers had to say about the home, considering how they reconfigured the views of Kerr, Eastlake and others in order to highlight women’s experiences of the interior and the desire for privacy.

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The Haunted House and Modernity The haunted house as a key Gothic convention and locale has generated renewed critical interest in the last ten years, as the spatial turn encouraged a renewed focus on space, place and locality. Fred Botting has noted that in nineteenth-century Gothic writing, “the castle gradually gave way to the old house; as both building and family line, it became the site where fears and anxieties returned in the present.”89 The old house as site of anxiety became a central feature of Victorian Gothic, what Alexandra Warwick has characterised as “the domestic uncanny.”90 For Edmundson Makala, the “uninhabitable” haunted house in Victorian women’s ghost stories operates as an “uncomfortable” house, a realm of displacement and disinheritance for women, which can nevertheless enable its living dwellers to profit both financially and emotionally from connections with its ghosts.91 If women writers “replace the ‘angel in the house’ with the ‘ghost in the house,’ a far less stable and comforting presence which haunts rather than reassures the inner workings of the Victorian household,”92 then this haunting should be read in relation to spatial as well as financial anxieties. A variation on the haunted house popular with modernist writers was the “haunting house,” defined by Nick Freeman as “one which impresses itself upon the mind and memory with ever more … deleterious effects.”93 The obliquity and emptiness of this dwelling highlights the relationship between uninhabitability and the alienation of modernity. It is important to consider the implications of analysing haunting in terms of modernity, a concept identified as problematic by historians. Historical accounts of hauntings have addressed both superstition and scepticism in the attempt to reconcile belief in the supernatural with an advancing modernity. As Sasha Handley has argued in relation to the eighteenth-century “obsession” with the unseen, ghost stories were “legitimate and effective social narratives” inextricably tied to place and space, as well as to anxieties and expectations about death, which should be “recast … as essential complements to processes of so-called modernization.”94 If “the present … is always ‘modern’ compared to the past,” argues Karl Bell, “each age obviously defines its sense of modernity by comparison with what has preceded it.”95 My discussions of responses to haunted locations take into account the complexities and contradictions of discourses of modernity. If haunted house narratives can be seen as “fictions of historical collapse, in which distinctions between past

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and present are questioned, violated or erased,” as Freeman contends,96 then oppositions between tradition and modernity, past and present, are constantly open for interrogation, and an embracing of the new always already shadowed by the lure of the old. The relationship between spectrality and modernity can be mapped in terms of women’s responses to (Gothic) architecture, the growth of the suburbs and new forms of housing from the turn of the century. In her important study, Ideal Homes, 1918–39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (2018), Deborah Sugg Ryan has examined homeowners’ engagement with and responses to modernisation “through the choices they made in the decoration and furnishing of their homes” at a time when home ownership became established as an ideal.97 Modernisation and decoration were key to ways of conceptualising the home between the 1850s and the 1940s. The non-fictional writing of the six authors I focus on here displays the same preoccupation with housing and the domestic economy evident in women’s ghost stories. Lee’s 1897 essay, “In Praise of Old Houses” explained the “rapture” of the ancient dwelling in terms of both its deceits and its imaginative possibilities, “the past is the unreal and the yet visible.”98 Exploring new suburban villas, soulless town houses and fashionable servantless domains, women writers embraced the new whilst clinging on to the half-visible memories of the past, reverencing the old houses, churches and palaces which they visited on their travels. Servants in the Gothic have often remained on the sidelines, despite their crucial roles as agents of surveillance, (unreliable) narrators and figures of class ambiguity. Kathleen Hudson has argued that, “it is perhaps not surprising that a mode so preoccupied with the making and unmaking of domestic spaces should refer frequently to a social subgroup essentially defined through their relationship with the home.” In her excellent revisionary study, she reinserts servants into Gothic narratives, showing how their performances, superstitions and storytelling “reflect[] a complex understanding of liminal groups.”99 Uncertainty about “the real or imagined status of ghosts,” according to Handley, became essential to the telling of ghost stories, which often lent authority to the female and servant voice.100 The revaluing of stories told by women and servants allowed for alternative accounts of place and spectrality to emerge. Elizabeth Steere has reclassified the Victorian female servant in sensation fiction as “a key figure at the nexus of gender and class studies,” whose relative absence from critical attention seems surprising.101 Understudied

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female servants can reveal the “malleability” of the dichotomies of masterservant relations, according to Steere, who notes that the cook, the lady’s maid and the maid-of-all-work, despite their crucial cultural roles, have been relatively ignored.102 Servants’ functions as potential spies, or agents of surveillance, noted in relation to sensation fiction, clearly have relevance to the ghost story. Eve Lynch’s work on Braddon’s under-rated ghost story, “The Shadow in the Corner” (1879), which focusses on the traumatic responses of the maid-of-all-work Maria to sleeping in a haunted and lonely bedroom, has highlighted the ways in which female servants, often treated as automatons, operated as the shadows in the corner of the Victorian household.103 In the time span of this study, domestic space was transformed by new technologies, anxieties about the “servant question” and shifts in gender and class identities. The gradual decline in domestic service and the replacement of servants by machines prior to the Second World War have not been fully explored in relation to haunted space. The desired invisibility of servants, which aligned them with the spectral, is manifest in non-fictional accounts of this period. Domestic staff were characterised in terms of silence, servility and the unseen: they should always move with “noiseless footsteps”104 and “manifest a MEEK and QUIET spirit.”105 The “servant question” or “the servant problem” was often conceptualised in terms of domestic disorder and trouble, with the strained relations between mistress and servant identified as particularly disturbing of household hierarchies. In The Servant Problem (1899), an “experienced mistress” gathered together bitter testimonies from mistresses, including such grand claims as, “servants have spoiled my life,” and “They have broken my spirit, and ruined my health.” The author attributed the new scarcity of servants at a time of “straining to keep up appearances” to the servants’ worrying abilities to do just as they pleased: “they have, in fact, under present conditions, mistresses quite in their power.”106 As increasingly unruly servant behaviour meant that “our peace [was] disturbed and our homes degraded” by terrible “scenes,” according to one writer on the servant problem, the home becomes the site for unrest, disorder and even evil, “there is something terribly wrong in the relations between mistresses and servants.”107 In R. Randal Phillips’ forward-looking account, The Servantless House (1920), new models of domestic organisation were structured around the decline of domestic service: “War conditions have left a permanent mark, and we shall never expect to go back to the old conditions.”108

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According to Lucy Delap, domestic service was “more integrated into the imagining of twentieth-century modernities than previous histories have allowed,” not least because of the crucial position of servants in a “reworked domestic realm.”109 As Delap continues, “it became increasingly possible to see ‘modernity’ as embodied in the middle-class labour-saving house and its linoleum floors” or in new appliances shared by mistresses and servants.110 Between 1850 and 1945, servants were key figures in Gothic narratives; after the war, servantless houses changed domestic space forever. Drawing on advice manuals and guides on household management as well as the work of cultural historians in the growing fields of country house studies and material culture,111 this study reconsiders the “wrongness” of mistress-servant relations as a key element of a troubled modernity, evidenced in the uncanny doubling of mistresses and maids. Recent work on Gothic architecture has tended to focus either on castles, ruins and abbeys in the work of Romantic writers such as Ann Radcliffe and William Wordsworth, or on Gothic tourist attractions like dungeons, prisons and Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.112 Townshend has meticulously mapped the influence of Radcliffe’s architectural imagination on conceptualisations of old or Gothic buildings up to the 1840s, arguing that she “spearheaded the movement into the topographical Gothic.”113 The Gothic potential of mid to late-Victorian and modernist architecture, including the haunted house, has received considerably less attention. If, as John Urry claims, “acting as a tourist is one of the defining characteristics of being ‘modern’,”114 then the ways in which tourist sites are encountered can tell us something about Victorian and modernist conceptualisations of place. As James Buzard concurs, “tourism quickly became embroiled in the issue of how modernity itself might be characterised and confronted.” Interestingly, he lists nineteenth-century adjectival combinations emphasising overcrowding, such as “tourist-crammed” and “tourist-mobbed,” alongside “touristhaunted,” as if the tourist becomes the ghostly figure at the historic site.115 Writing about buildings and localities from the point of view of a tourist became a newly fashionable endeavour. What Urry identifies as “the tourist gaze” permeates the nineteenth-century fascination with death and burial sites, inscriptions on tombstones and Gothic churches. Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1857 Life of Charlotte Brontë, as Nicola J. Watson has noted, drew on the language of the mid-Victorian guidebook to describe Haworth, the wild moors and the old church.116 The tourist

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gaze infuses Victorian and modernist descriptions of the haunted house, as if the haunting is conjured up by an over-investment in the oldness of old places. The nineteenth century was an age of museums, collecting and spectatorship. Barbara J. Black has argued that museums “enchanted Victorian culture,” promising “so much to the observing eye.”117 It was an era of “compilation, organization and display,” of a fascination with objects and buildings.118 Accounts of visits to churches, cathedrals, old houses and galleries align them with the museum, displaying past civilisations, relics, the worn-away stories of the dead. The first editions of the new magazine Country Life, appearing in the 1890s, promoted an ethos of reverence for the past as embodied in the country house, an ethos annexed to a growing anti-urbanism.119 Protecting the ancient had also become an agenda of “we moderns,” a phrase that Vernon Lee often archly used to emphasise her own generation’s forward-looking stance and a modernity inseparable from a veneration for the past and all it signified. Gaskell, Wharton and Lee were all influenced by the work of the cultural commentator and art critic John Ruskin, who wrote and lectured on the aesthetic appeal of Gothic architecture and its museum-like qualities. In her essay on “Ruskin as a Reformer,” Lee praised his work for what it had opened up for his contemporaries in terms of aesthetic enjoyment, including his views on Gothic, medieval painting, and perhaps most significantly, “Imaginative Topography.”120 She also argues for a re-evaluation of “the modern-ness which he anathematized” in his looking towards the past,121 perhaps capturing some of the paradoxical impulses at work in both her own writing and that of others in relation to the conflicts between tradition and modernity. I explore some of the ways in which appreciation of a Ruskinian vision of sacred spaces may have helped to shape a particular Gothic vision of the haunted house. Ruin studies, a relatively new area of architectural enquiry, has also been a useful framework for examining a number of ghost stories by women that focus on the hauntedness of what is missing from a former site of domesticity, the discomforting emptiness of empty space. Established in 1895, the National Trust signified mounting concern about the preservation of ruins and old buildings. William Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB, 1878) was set up partly in response to the famous artist’s horror at the desecration and demolition of medieval churches.122 In her monumental work, The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), the modernist novelist Rose Macaulay wrote of the

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“ruin-pleasure” experienced in the contemplation of broken and decaying architecture, from the picturesqueness of Roman ruins to the disturbing, blackened shells of London houses bombed in the Blitz. In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg argues that the ruin offers a dark rendition of what we understand by space and place: “outside of the domestic house, the flight into the elsewhere … is catalyzed by the coming of the ruin, disordering the conventions of space as it conceives a radically disruptive mode of place.”123 Such reflections on the desolation and disorder at the heart of the modern as figured through ruination are illuminating in relation to women’s visions of the supernatural, where, “in the modern ruin, the sense of unfamiliarity, uncanniness, and bewilderment converges … it twists our attachment to spatial regulation.”124 Lee, Wharton and Bowen all depict ruined houses, subject to decay and deterioration, as unnerving, ghostly spaces, which re-enact past histories of suffering women via their incompleteness, spatial irregularity and dismantling of the family home. This sense of the ruin-pleasures of the past, of the decaying ruin as an “altered place”125 unnerving to women (over-)invested in the domestic, is an under-explored aspect of the architectural uncanny. Chapter 2 explores women’s restricted movements in the ancestral rural home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ghost stories in the light of mid-Victorian concerns about the family, property and illegitimacy. Analysing Catherine’s Crowe’s chapter on “Haunted Houses” in her popular account of the supernatural, The Night Side of Nature (1848), and Gaskell’s essay “Clopton House,” it relates the mid-Victorian fascination with haunting to conflicting views about property, women’s positions within the family and the rise of tourism. It considers the Radcliffean ancestral mansion and servant space in relation to domestic confinement, Victorian spatial divisions and mistress-servant intimacies. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s reflections on forbidden space, it argues that women’s fearful navigation of the house brings to light the secrets of the past. It considers the location of women and ghosts outside windows and behind locked doors in “The Old Nurse’s Story,” “The Poor Clare” and “The Grey Woman.” The uncanny opening of doors in “The Crooked Branch” is explored in relation to Gaston Bachelard’s conceptualisations of inside/outside, with links made to Margaret Oliphant’s later story “The Open Door.” Chapter 3 analyses Oliphant’s ghost stories of the 1880s and 1890s, collected in Tales of the Seen and Unseen, in relation to women’s exclusion, visiting practices and patriarchal traditions in ancestral homes and

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Scottish town houses. It explores women’s ghostly occupation of the haunted garden in “Earthbound” and “The Lady’s Walk” in relation to the difficulties of communicating with female ancestors. The contradictions of green spaces, both domestic and non-domestic, are investigated in relation to essays on gardens by Vernon Lee and Gertrude Jekyll. For Oliphant, male visitors operate as conduits for the forgotten stories of female ancestors, who haunt the walled gardens and forbidden paths of the estate. In “The Portrait” and “The Library Window,” the haunted spaces of the male library and the feminised drawing-room, a potential chamber of horrors, are examined in terms of the lost mother and stifling Victorian spatial divisions. The chapter uses Bachelard’s discussions of the inside/outside dialectic and Oliphant’s reflections on space and spiritualism in her autobiography to frame arguments about failed communications between the living and dead in “Old Lady Mary.” Both ghosts and women are often locked outside the country house or remain “unseen” to the next generation. Chapter 4 analyses Vernon Lee’s Italian settings for the supernatural, drawing on arguments about Gothic Italy, as both tourist destination and “museum of antiquities,” in order to assess the implications of the Italian city as haunted space. It develops readings of “the old” in relation to the architectural by reconsidering Lee’s essay “In Praise of Old Houses” (1897), alongside her travel writing and her diary notes on Italian churches and cathedrals, outlining her arguments about the “rapture” of the past. In “A Wicked Voice” and “Winthrop’s Adventure” sacred space, with its decaying, crypt-like, gloomy interiors, is rendered uncanny. Lee’s intervention in modernist debates about ruin and dust is traced in relation to philosophical debates about the aesthetics of decay by Rose Macaulay and Dylan Trigg. The chapter draws on Michel de Certeau’s discussions of walking to illuminate women’s navigation of urban space and museum-like interiors in “The Legend of Madame Krasinka” and “The Doll.” In her 1937 Preface to her collected ghost stories, Edith Wharton ponders Osbert Sitwell’s statement that “Ghosts went out when electricity came in,” showing her ambivalence about modernity and the transformation of domestic space by technology. Chapter 5 considers the differences between Victorian ancestral homes and the modernist haunted house with its telephones, electricity and radios. It explores the sinister American town houses and haunted mansions in Wharton’s ghost stories “Pomegranate Seed” and “Afterward” in relation to her

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manifesto for domestic privacy The Decoration of Houses (1897), which considers the “material livableness” of rooms in relation to the positioning of doors, windows and furniture. Bachelard’s vision of rooms as triggers for memory and a desire for a lost past and Lefebvre’s paradigms of the appropriation of space are relevant to the gendering of the supernatural in these vanishing husband stories. The chapter also traces the links between spectrality, mistress-servant intimacies and the decline of domestic service in “The Duchess at Prayer,” “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” and “All Souls’,” as well as addressing the influences of Lee’s work on Italian gardens to the setting of “The Duchess at Prayer.” Chapter 6 reconsiders May Sinclair’s interrogations of patriarchal space in ghost stories of the 1910s and 1920s set in modern European villas, tawdry hotels and remote Yorkshire farmhouses. It examines Sinclair’s perceptions of the Brontë Parsonage as a haunted memory-site, a gloomy and uncanny space of mourning and fatality. Psychoanalytical discussions of mourning are also relevant to the fatal rooms with their repressed memories of the dead. Drawing on philosophical imaginings of women’s reoccupation of space by Luce Irigaray and Elizabeth Grosz, it considers bedrooms and drawing-rooms as sexual and maternal spaces in “The Intercessor” and “If the Dead Knew” Questioning Victoria Rosner’s account of modernist domestic interiors, the chapter examines women’s claiming of space in the patriarchal library in “The Token” and “The Nature of the Evidence.” It demonstrates that claustrophobia and the stifling smallness of domestic space, crowded with outdated Victorian furniture, are key features of Sinclair’s haunted houses and the haunted hotel room in “Where their Fire is not Quenched.” The final chapter develops readings of the modernist haunted house in terms of the clash between old and new architectural styles and shows how Elizabeth Bowen’s ghost stories of the 1920s and 1940s locate spectrality in Irish Big Houses, unearthly suburban villas and bomb-damaged London terraces. It argues that Bowen’s stories consistently spectralise newness and suburban values, showing how the new house is haunted by missing pieces of furniture, absent servants and out-of-date Victorian traditions. Debates about the ideal home and the servantless house are used in readings of “The New House” and “The Shadowy Third,” in which spectral predecessors mock new homeowners from the shadows. The chapter draws on the theoretical frameworks of War Gothic and ruin studies in its explorations of emptiness, loss and the spectral connections between bomb-damaged London town houses and the lost ancestral

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home. Bowen’s biography of her Irish home Bowen’s Court and the wartime stories “Oh Madam …” and “The Happy Autumn Fields” reveal the continuities and differences between women’s troubled occupation of domestic space in the different eras. Her stories are emblematic of the changes in the function and setting of the haunted house by the 1940s, as the disappearance of servants from the household hierarchy in the war-damaged urban dwelling heralds new conceptualisations of haunted space.

Notes 1. All quotations are taken from E. Nesbit, The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror ed. David Stuart Davies (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006). 2. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), ix–x. 3. See Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Donna Heiland has also discussed the uncanniness of home, arguing that “the Brontës take us further than [earlier Gothic novelists] in exploring the ways in which familiar domestic spaces are ‘haunted’ by uncanny presences,” as they consider “the often eerily double-edged nature of life at home.” See Gothic and Gender: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 114, 115. 4. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” (1919) in The Uncanny trans. David McClintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 125. 5. Ibid., 126, 130–31. 6. Ibid., 133. 7. Julian Wolfreys, Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture, 1800—Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 25, 36. 8. Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 4, 28–29. 9. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 51. 10. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 148. 11. Minna Vuohelainen, Richard Marsh (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), 16. 12. Royle, The Uncanny, 25. 13. Ilse M. Bussing, “Sequestered Spaces and Defective Doors in Tales by Collins and Riddell,” Ilha do Desterro/Florianopolis 62 (2012): 100. 14. Ibid., 115. 15. Michael Allen Fox, Home: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 14.

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16. Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, “Introduction,” in The Domestic Space Reader eds. Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 5, 6. 17. Iris Marion Young, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” (1997) in The Domestic Space Reader, 193. 18. Vita Sackville-West, English Country Houses (1940; London: Unicorn Press, 2014), 91. 19. Shelley Hornstein, Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 91. This reading of the “houseness” of a house is inspired by Rachel Whiteread’s artworks House (1993–4) and Ghost (1990), and Whiteread’s interest in “relocating a room, relocating a space.” See Hornstein, 84–87. 20. Briganti and Mezei, “Introduction,” 12. 21. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (1976; London: The Women’s Press, 1978), 91. 22. Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith “Introduction: Defining the Female Gothic,” in The Female Gothic: New Directions (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 2. 23. Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” New Monthly Magazine 16 (1826): 149. 24. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), ix. 25. Ibid., x. 26. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 85. 27. Diana Wallace, “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic,” Gothic Studies 6, no. 1 (2004): 58. 28. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, “Introduction,” in Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 11. 29. Ibid., 2. 30. Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House ed. Jacqueline Labbe (1793; Broadview: Ontario, 2002), 72. 31. Ibid., 470. 32. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho ed. Bonamy Dobrée (1794; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 95. 33. Ibid., 231, 239. 34. Dale Townshend, Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 141. 35. Ibid., 234.

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36. Claire Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 3, 13, 67–68. 37. Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (London: Knickerbocker Press, 1917), 284. 38. Ibid. 39. Elizabeth Bowen, “Preface to Stories by Elizabeth Bowen,” (1959) in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 1986), 128, 129. 40. Scarborough, The Supernatural, 82, 83. 41. Ibid., 101–2, 113–14. 42. Quoted in Angela Leighton, “Ghosts, Aestheticism and Vernon Lee,” Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2000): 2. 43. M. R. James, “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories,” Bookman 71 (1929): 171. 44. May Sinclair singled it out as one of her favourite ghost stories in “Dreams, Ghosts and Fairies,” Bookman 65 (1923): 144. See also Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction, 68. 45. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber and Faber, 1977). See also Eugenia C. Delamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 46. Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story, 1850–1940: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 78–82. 47. Simon Hay, A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 5, 7, 15. Hay’s book also includes a final chapter on “The Ghost Story and Magic Realism,” extending the analysis to texts from the 1950s and 1990s by authors from Mexico, Nigeria and New Zealand to show how the ghost becomes a key figure in global subaltern literatures. 48. Luke Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 3. 49. See Lucie Armitt, “Haunted Landscapes,” in The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story eds. Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston (London: Routledge, 2018), 299. 50. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3. See also Christine Ferguson, Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualism, 1848–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 51. Luke Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 7.

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52. Jen Cadwallader, Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 11–12, 19. 53. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell, “Introduction,” in The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1, 2. 54. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 154 55. Vanessa D. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 5. She is drawing here on the work of Diana Basham. See The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1992). 56. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts, 113. 57. Ibid., 4. 58. Nicholas Daly, “Foreword,” in The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s eds. Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares (London: Routledge, 2019), xiii. 59. Harris McCormick et al., “Introduction,” in Female Fantastic, xxxi. 60. Diana Wallace, “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic,” Gothic Studies 6, no. 1 (2004): 57. 61. Diana Wallace, Female Gothic Histories (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 195. 62. Dara Downey, American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 4. 63. Ibid., 9, 11. 64. Victoria Margree, British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860– 1930: Our own Ghostliness (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019), 8. 65. Ibid., 10. 66. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas (1958; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2014), 25, 19. 67. Ibid., 77. 68. Ibid., 19. 69. Ibid., 20. 70. Ibid., 36, 37. 71. Ibid., 38. 72. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 87–88. 73. Ibid., 89–90. 74. Ibid., 19–20. 75. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 33. 76. Ibid., 39. 77. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” (1951) in Poetry, Language, Thought trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971), 5. For more on dwelling and disturbance, see Wolfreys, Haunted Selves, 30–31.

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78. Heidegger, “Building,” 7. 79. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 226. 80. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 265. 81. Ibid., 5. 82. Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 151. 83. Elizabeth Grosz, “Women, Chora, Dwelling,” in Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 118, 121. 84. Ibid., 123. 85. Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 209–10. 86. Ibid., 212, 215. 87. Judy Giles, “Authority, Dependence and Power in Accounts of Twentieth-Century Domestic Service,” in The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain Since 1800 eds. Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin, and Abigail Wills (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 205. 88. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903; Poland: Freeriver Community Project, n.d.), 33. 89. Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 3. 90. Alexandra Warwick, “Victorian Gothic,” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2004), 29. See also Heiland, Gender and the Gothic, 37–38. 91. Melissa Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 93. See also Margree, British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 28–29, for her discussion of late-Victorian women’s ghost stories as “financial writing,” in which spectral appearances in the house can be read as “uncanny reminders of the origins of middle-class wealth.” 92. Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature, 131. 93. Nick Freeman, “Haunted Houses,” in Brewster and Thurston, Routledge Companion, 333, 334. 94. Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghosts Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 4, 15. 95. Karl Bell, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20. He goes on to argue that discourses of modernity do not have to be defined “in terms of crisis, conflict and dualism” (21). See also Deborah

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96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

112.

113. 114.

L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 16–18. Freeman, “Haunted Houses,” 328. Deborah Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 17, 21. Vernon Lee, “In Praise of Old Houses,” in Limbo and Other Essays (London: Grant Richards, 1897). Kathleen Hudson, Servants and the Gothic, 1764–1831: A Half -Told Tale (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019), 5, 17. Ibid., 19, 18. Elizabeth Steere, The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: Kitchen Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 3. See also Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts, 78–80. Steere, Female Servant, 6, 7. See Eve Lynch, “Spectral Politics: The Victorian Ghost Story and the Domestic Servant,” in Bown et al., The Victorian Supernatural, 67–68. Amara Veritas, The Servant Problem: An Attempt at Its Solution by an Experienced Mistress (London: Simpkin and Co, 1899), 169. Samuel and Sarah Adams, The Complete Servant: A Practical Guide to the Peculiar Duties and Business of all Descriptions of Servants (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825), 39. Veritas, Servant Problem, 4, 7. Servants were perceived as causing “unrest” whilst leaving houses “filthy.” Ibid., 8, 13–14. R. Randal Phillips, The Servantless House (London: Offices of Country Life, 1920), 9. Lucy Delap, Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 237, 238. Ibid., 238. See, for example, Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, Consumption and the Country House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), Pamela Horn Ladies of the Manor (Stroud: Amberley, 2012). See Townshend, Gothic Antiquity, which covers the period 1760– 1840, Emma McEvoy, Gothic Tourism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016) and Peter N. Lindfield and Dale Townshend, eds., Writing Britain’s Ruins (London: British Library, 2017). McEvoy focuses on Strawberry Hill and haunted castles, including Berry Pomeroy, Warwick Castle and Alnwick Castle. Lindfield and Townshend’s collection encompasses writing about ruins from 1700 to 1850. Townshend, Gothic Antiquity, 173. John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (1990; London: Sage, 2011), 14.

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115. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 2, 19. 116. Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 115. 117. Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and their Museums (University Press of Virginia, 2000), 3. 118. Ibid., 5. 119. Adrian Tinniswood, The Polite Tourist: A History of Country House Visiting (1989; London: National Trust, 1998), 170–72. He argues that writing about country houses in the new magazine and similar publications about old properties in the early twentieth century contrasted solidly-built “old mansions” with contemporary “suburban abominations,” giving “an attractively vague, sanitised picture of the past as evoked by, and embodied in, the English country house” (170). 120. Vernon Lee, “Ruskin as a Reformer,” in Gospels of Anarchy (London: T.F. Unwin, 1908), 302. 121. Ibid., 304. 122. Tinniswood, Polite Tourist, 177. 123. Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 127. 124. Ibid., 130. 125. Ibid.

Bibliography Adams, Sarah and Samuel. The Complete Servant: A Practical Guide to the Peculiar Duties and Business of all Descriptions of Servants. London: Knight and Lacey, 1825. Armitt, Lucie. “Haunted Landscapes.” In The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story edited by Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston, 291–300. London: Routledge, 2018. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas. 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014. Basham, Diana. The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. Bell, Karl. The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Black, Barbara J. On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

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Bowen, Elizabeth. “Preface to Stories by Elizabeth Bowen.” (1959) In The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen edited by Hermione Lee. London: Vintage, 1986. Bown, Nicola, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell, eds. The Victorian Supernatural. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Brewster, Scott and Luke Thurston, eds. The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story. London: Routledge, 2018. Briganti, Chiara and Kathy Mezei, eds. The Domestic Space Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber and Faber, 1977. Bussing, Ilse M. “Sequestered Spaces and Defective Doors in Tales by Collins and Riddell.” Ilha do Desterro/Florianopolis 62 (2012): 99–125. Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Cadwallader, Jen. Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. Certeau, Michel de. “Walking in the City.” In The Practices of Everyday Life in The Certeau Reader edited by Graham Ward. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Davies, Owen. The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Delamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of NineteenthCentury Gothic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Delap, Lucy. Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Dickerson, Vanessa D. Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Downey, Dara. American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014. Drewery, Claire. Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011. Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Foley, Matt. Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Melancholy and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017. Fox, Michael Allen. Home: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Freeman, Nick. “Haunted Houses.” In The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story edited by Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston, 328–37. London: Routledge, 2018.

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Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” (1919) In The Uncanny trans. David McClintock, 121–62. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Giles, Judy. “Authority, Dependence and Power in Accounts of TwentiethCentury Domestic Service.” In The Politics of Domestic Authority edited by Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin, and Abigail Willis, 204–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Home: Its Work and Influence. 1903; Poland: Freeriver Community Project, n.d. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Women, Chora, Dwelling.” In Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Hamlett, Jane. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Handley, Sasha. Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007. Harris McCormick, Lizzie, Jennifer Mitchell and Rebecca Soares, eds. The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s. London: Routledge, 2019. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Hay, Simon. A History of the Modern British Ghost Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” (1951) In Poetry, Language, Thought trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon, 1971. Heiland, Donna. Gothic and Gender: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik eds. Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Hornstein, Shelley. Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Hudson, Kathleen. Servants and the Gothic, 1764–1831: A Half-Told Tale. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019. James, M. R.“Some Remarks on Ghost Stories.” Bookman 71 (1929): 169–75. Kerr, Robert. The Gentleman’s House. 1864; London: John Murray, 1871. Lee, Hermione, ed. The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. London: Virago, 1986. Lee, Vernon. Gospels of Anarchy. London: T.F. Unwin, 1908. Lee, Vernon. Limbo and Other Essays. London: Grant Richards, 1897. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. 1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

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Leighton, Angela. “Ghosts, Aestheticism and Vernon Lee.” Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2000): 1–14. Lindfield, Peter N. and Dale Townshend, eds. Writing Britain’s Ruins. London: British Library, 2017. Lynch, Eve. “Spectral Politics: M.E. Braddon and the Spirit of Reform.” In Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context edited by Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie, 238–55. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Macaulay, Rose. The Pleasure of Ruins. New York: Walker and Company, 1953. Makala, Melissa Edmundson. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010. Mandler, Peter. The Rise and Fall of the Stately Home. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. Margree, Victoria. British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. McCorristine, Shane. Spectres of the Self: Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. McEvoy, Emma. Gothic Tourism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. 1976; London: The Women’s Press, 1978. Nesbit, E. The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror ed. David Stuart Davies. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006. Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho ed. Bonamy Dobree. 1794; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly Magazine 16 (1826): 145–52. Randal Phillips, R. The Servantless House. London: Offices of Country Life, 1920. Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Rosner, Victoria. Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Sackville-West, Vita. The English Country House. 1940; London: Unicorn Press, 2014. Scarborough, Dorothy. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York and London: Knickerbocker Press, 1917. Sinclair, May. “Dreams, Ghosts and Fairies.” Bookman 65 (1923): 142–49.

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Smith, Andrew. The Ghost Story, 1850–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Smith, Charlotte. The Old Manor House ed. Jacqueline Labbe. 1793; Ontario: Broadview, 2002. Steere, Elizabeth. The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: Kitchen Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Sugg Ryan, Deborah. Ideal Homes: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism, 1918–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Thurston, Luke. Literary Ghosts, from the Victorians to Modernism: the Haunting Interval. London: Routledge, 2014. Tinniswood, Adrian. The Polite Tourist: A History of Country House Visiting. 1989; London: National Trust, 1998. Townshend, Dale. Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Urry, John and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. 1990; London: Sage, 2011. Veritas, Amara. The Servant Problem: An Attempt at Its Solution by an Experienced Mistress. London: Simpkin and Co, 1899. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992. Vuohelainen, Minna. Richard Marsh. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015. Wallace, Diana. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales, 2013. Wallace, Diana. “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic.” Gothic Studies 6, no. 1 (2004): 57–68. Wallace, Diana and Andrew Smith eds. The Female Gothic: New Directions. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Warwick, Alex. “Victorian Gothic.” In The Routledge Companion to Gothic edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, 29–37. London: Routledge, 2007. Watson, Nicola. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. Wolfreys, Julian. Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture, 1800—Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018. Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Young, Iris Marion. “House and Home.” In The Domestic Space Reader edited by Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, 190–93. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

CHAPTER 2

The Old Ancestral Mansion and Forbidden Spaces in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ghost stories

Ghost stories of the 1850s typically focus on the haunted ancestral mansion in order to address concerns about property, inheritance and the secrets of the past, drawing on the traditions of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Gothic. “The nostalgic appropriation of the past,” as Isabella van Elferen has argued, has long been identified as a key Gothic trope, with “the transgressive force of nostalgia” in the text often “deliberately perverting the orderly texture of the yearnedfor past.”1 Elizabeth Gaskell’s yearning for a lost aristocratic heritage finds a place in her fashioning of the haunted house as a dilapidated ancestral home, partially uninhabited and uninhabitable because of its unquiet ghosts. Gaskell rewrites the Gothic convention of the terrified middle-class heroine trapped in the aristocratic castle or mansion by using the female servant and the female heir as the haunted figures. Servants, mistresses and male lawyers narrate her ghost stories, which often also contain embedded narratives written or spoken by haunted women. Supernatural interference becomes a way in which to expose and challenge the Victorian reification of the home, at a time when women’s occupation of domestic space was seen as fundamental to upholding the separate spheres ideology. According to Kate Krueger, “The domestic ideal, consolidated through architectural features, becomes dangerously unfamiliar to those who aspire to it as well as to those who occupy it. Haunting has spatial and social consequences.”2 The spatial dynamics

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of haunting were revealing of women’s uneasiness about the operations of the domestic ideal. If one of the defining strands of Victorian Gothic is a focus on the domestic uncanny, as Alexandra Warwick has argued,3 then the working through of anxieties about rooms, household objects, furniture and spatial boundaries is particularly prominent in narratives of spectralisation. The supernatural presence of a dead child or a returning son or daughter seems a common denominator in mid-Victorian haunted house narratives, typically positioned outside the domestic space whilst entreating to be let in through doors or windows which are locked or barred. Like the cries of Cathy’s traumatised ghost on the moors in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1848), these entreaties symbolise the displacement of those shut out from the family home, calling attention to the complex relationships between servants and mistresses, or mothers and lost children. This chapter explores the representation of haunted space in Gaskell’s ghost stories of the 1850s in relation to women’s experiences of restriction and containment within a rigidly gendered domestic economy. For Gaskell, looking backwards to Gothic novels by women such as Ann Radcliffe, whose castles and convents are constructed in terms of recesses, locked doors and forbidden zones, there are always domestic spaces which are inaccessible to both characters and the reader. Spaces which are out of bounds, as well as out of sight, reinforce spatial restriction, which is challenged by women’s curiosity. I begin by placing Gaskell in relation to mid-Victorian appreciations of Gothic architecture, arguing that representations of ancestral houses in her ghost stories are indebted to cultural appreciations and appropriations of the Gothic revival. Her early essay “Clopton House” (1840) and descriptions of old buildings and country houses in her letters reveal her veneration of old architectural styles and the connections to be made between Gothic architecture, the supernatural and the spatial restriction of women. Drawing on the work of Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre, I argue that Victorian households are governed by “the laws of space,” with doors, thresholds and windows acting as permeable barriers which can admit the supernatural. In “The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852), apparitional appearances on domestic thresholds act as a trigger for the forgotten histories of “disgraced” women, as children and servants access forbidden spaces. Female servants play key roles in keeping secrets and discovering these lost histories in “The Poor Clare” (1856) and “The Ghost in the Garden Room” or “The Crooked Branch” (1859) in which the servant cottage, and its connections to the

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ancestral mansion, acquires uncanny characteristics. “The Grey Woman” (1860) draws on a Radcliffean model of the explained supernatural to explore women’s haunted experiences of old architecture and the spatial restrictions affecting both mistress and maid.

The Reverence for Old Architecture and Victorian Haunted Space Historians have sometimes characterised the mid-Victorian period as the era of the “proper” Gothic revival in Britain. Although many of the country houses and churches designed or refurbished in the Gothic style had been completed before Victoria came to the throne, the fashion for Gothic architecture and furniture continued to influence the design of the Victorian home. In his essay “The Nature of Gothic” from his meditation on art and architecture, The Stones of Venice (1853), the critic John Ruskin reflected on the indeterminate “Gothicness” of particular buildings and argued that we should appreciate the artistry and beauty of architecture which breaks the rules. His insistence on the importance of “reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante” certainly chimes with the increased textual emphasis on poetic descriptions of buildings in the haunted house narrative.4 In Hints on Household Taste (1867), the architect Charles L. Eastlake celebrated the Gothic revival for its artistry, whilst noting the mixture of ancient and modern in fashionable homes: “I recommend the re-adoption of no specific type of ancient furniture which is unsuited … to the habits of modern life.” He concluded his first chapter by underlining his belief that “the prevailing taste [for Gothic] … may be adapted to the social habits and requirements of the present age.”5 In his full-length study A History of the Gothic Revival (1872), Eastlake linked “the Renewal, in this country, of a taste for Medieval architecture” to an enduring “veneration for the past.”6 This renewed taste for the medieval and the grotesque transformed ways of looking at, and writing about, buildings in the 1840s and 1850s. According to Dale Townshend, Victorian medievalism “penetrated the darkness upon which the Gothic fictional aesthetic often (though not uniformly) depended, shaking … the Gothic architectural imagination to its foundations.”7 Medieval architecture was believed “to convey ideas of exclusivity and social station,”8 argues Peter Lindfield, writing about the transformation of stately homes in the early nineteenth century. The addition of medieval decorative features, such as turrets, frennells,

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pinnacles, pointed arches, vaulted roofs and the “grotesque sculptures” singled out by Ruskin was not only a way of displaying social status but paradoxically a signifying of both modernity and antiquity.9 Lindfield has highlighted the ways in which the ancestral home articulated family history through visible signs such as coats-of-arms and family portraits, but also through its cultivation of antiquity: the creation of “new-old buildings” is fabricated in a mimicry of medievalism.10 In the hugely popular Great Exhibition of 1851, which Gaskell visited with her daughter, Gothic ecclesiastical furniture, designed by the renowned architect Augustus W. N. Pugin, was exhibited in the form of a Medieval Court crammed with chandeliers and carved staircases.11 Gaskell’s letters also show that she met the Ruskins in 1851 and was reading Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture the same year.12 Her ghost stories can be seen to “medievalise” domestic space in order to locate the haunting within family history and the declining aristocracy and to interrogate the opposition between modernity and antiquity. Catherine Crowe’s best-selling account of the supernatural and the superstitious, The Night Side of Nature (1848), which included chapters on döppelgangers, poltergeists and apparitions, also helped to establish the criteria for haunted space in the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing examples from the rural and the urban, from rented lodgings and inherited properties, Crowe’s account presented spiritual appearances not only as both extraordinary and possible but also as inseparable from understandings of place. According to Sasha Handley, from the eighteenth century onwards “even if individuals were unwilling to admit belief in the physical reality of ghosts, … ghost stories performed as legitimate and effective social narratives by focussing on … places, spaces and circumstances.”13 Equating emptiness with the traces of a sinful past, Crowe wrote of the haunted house as a “shut up uninhabited” house, where no one wants to live because of its “evil reputation.”14 The presence of the spectral does not always, however, accord with the conventional haunted façade: I never heard of a ghost being seen or heard in Haddon Hall, the most ghostly of houses; … nor in many other antique, mysterious-looking buildings, where one might expect them, while sometimes a house of a very prosaic aspect remains uninhabited, and is ultimately allowed to fall to ruin.15

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The uninhabitability of the haunted house invites ruin and emptiness, which become key aspects of its topography. Yet these definitions also presuppose a ghostliness about the antique building which might generate supernatural manifestations. Haddon Hall, a medieval manor-house in Derbyshire, complete with turrets, towers and courtyards, was open to visitors in the mid-nineteenth century. Henry James’ twilight observation of the Hall in 1872 prompted a reflection on its “sad desuetude and picturesque decay,” perhaps inspiring his dark vision of Bly, the haunted house, in his 1898 ghost story The Turn of the Screw.16 The word “prosaic,” meaning everyday, mundane or undistinguished, is often used in relation to settings and buildings, both in opposition to the supernatural and as its very essence, across the Victorian and modernist period. This invites comparison with Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the collapsing dichotomy between heimlich and unheimlich, whereby the meanings for homely and unhomely, or familiar and unfamiliar, are shown to be “not mutually contradictory.”17 As Anthony Vidler argues, in the nineteenth century “the house provided an especially favoured site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits.”18 Ghostly houses and prosaic houses become two sides of the same coin, as in some instances the very prosaic qualities of a house, its “apparent domesticity,” allowed it to become uninhabited except by supernatural presences. Supernatural encounters are framed in terms of “disturbance,” “trouble” or unwanted guests, in Crowe’s account, sometimes unlocking the secrets of the past but in other instances eluding explanation. Servants’ reactions to the ghosts, ranging from terror and superstition to indifference, are often recorded, as well as their task of protecting their mistresses from a supernatural threat. One example describes a family being “terribly troubled by an unseen inmate.” The Victorian haunted house echoes with the eerie crying of ghostly children, “sad and disappointed spirits,” whose uncanny playing can be heard from empty disused nurseries in the top of the house.19 One servant from North Shields hears her name repeated by a ghostly voice and concludes, “This is a troubled house you’ve got into, ma’am.”20 The inhabitants are kept awake by the noise of a child’s rattle, “a child crying, and a woman sobbing,” Once, the appearance of a child seemed to fall from the ceiling, close to her, and then disappear; and another time she saw a child run into a closet

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in a room at the top of the house; and it was most remarkable that a small door in that room, which was used for going out on to the roof, always stood open. However often they shut it, it was opened again immediately by an unseen hand, even before they got out of the room.21

Years later the skeleton of a child is discovered by the new owner beneath the floor of the upper room, unlocking a memory of a previous “dissolute” tenant, “supposed to have been on very intimate terms with a young woman-servant who lived with him.”22 This dreadful proximity of lost children, “close to her,” then disappearing, exemplifies the troubling links between female ghost-seers, child spirits and tormented mothers; other phantoms include weeping women separated from illegitimate offspring and a murderous countess buried alive in a vault for poisoning her sons.23 Ghostly children and servants, haunted nurseries and unplanned pregnancy are recurring features of Crowe’s haunted house narratives, all typically Victorian Gothic tropes. Gaskell’s first published account of a haunted house, which appeared in William Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places (1840), played to the public fascination with old dwellings and their hidden stories. The practice of sightseeing, a word first coined in the 1820s, opened up new ways of encountering place and recording travel experiences. John Urry dates the beginnings of the “tourist gaze” in the west to the 1840s, a moment encapsulating the invention of the camera, Thomas Cook’s first package tour and the first national railway timetable.24 Tourism, a growing phenomenon in the Victorian period, offered a new language for thinking about the architectural, encouraging visitors to heighten their enjoyment of a building’s display of the past and period features by simultaneously admiring its modernity. The new guidebooks of the early nineteenth century, according to Emma McEvoy, catered to the appreciation of the new and the novel, as well as the tourists’ “interest in the picturesque and ancient.”25 Whilst Howitt’s places were generally remarkable for their tranquillity, his first volume included an article on the haunted “Clopton House” written by the young Gaskell about a visit in the 1820s. Over-weighted with Gothic tropes and legends, this investigation into the “decaying” family of the old house dwells on its architectural features.26 Complete with a Gothic portrait gallery and a recessed parlour, the house boasts an oak staircase, “its massy balustrade all crumbling and worm-eaten,” an old well in an overgrown hollow and a haunted bedroom.27 The adjectives “old-fashioned” and “old” recur throughout

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the article, describing both the material objects and the family. This fits with Urry’s conceptualisation of the tourist gaze as triggered by aspects of a place distinguishable from “what is conventionally encountered in everyday life.”28 Gaskell is evidently fascinated by the “fearful legend” of Charlotte Clopton, buried alive in the “ancestral vault,” having bitten out a piece of her shoulder in her “agonies of despair and hunger.”29 The well is also associated with a suicidal “maiden of the house” who has drowned herself. In the darkened chapel, Gaskell performs the actions of the Gothic heroine by lifting the lid of a curious carved old chest to find “BONES!,” connecting these to “the remains of the lost bride.”30 This evokes the old story sometimes titled “The Mistletoe Bough” of a fatal game of hide and seek, which left a young bride trapped in a locked, soundproof chest, and, argues Diana Wallace, can be traced back to Gothic tropes of live burial and the uncanny recess.31 If these bones signal “the historical reality of women’s ‘burial’ within history,”32 they are also suggestive of other lost brides and their lost children; drowning was often associated with seduction and unplanned pregnancies in the mid-Victorian period. The deserted nursery is singled out in the text, “the most deserted, and the saddest” of all the deserted rooms, haunted by its “once inhabitants.”33 Defined in terms of lack, registering the absence of noise and movement, “a nursery without children, without singing voices, without merry chiming footsteps!” becomes a significant uncanny space.34 This early account identifies many of the features of the architectural uncanny which would resurface in Gaskell’s ghost stories: the haunted bedroom, the deserted nursery, the reverence for the old-fashioned furniture, the wildness of the surrounding gardens. Like Crowe’s North Shields haunting, in which the disembodied voices and “all the noises seemed to suggest the idea of childhood, and of a woman in trouble,”35 the mid-Victorian ghost story often both concealed and revealed the stories of dead and despairing women and their lost children. Gaskell’s letters are also revealing of her uses of the tourist register, particularly the ways in which the architectural layout of houses and mansions and their spatial divisions impacted on female members of the family. Her reverence for the old is evidenced in her admiring descriptions of the ancestral houses of friends. In a letter of 1841 about a recent trip to Germany and Belgium she admires the “noble” castle, “splendid scenery” and picturesque town of “haunted” Heidelberg and “the sublime beauty of the cathedrals in grand old cities in Flanders,” praising the unknown architects for their “practical poetry.” Her detailing

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of the German folding doors which allow sitting-rooms to open into each other and the “looking glasses in every hole and corner” is indicative of her spatial awareness, her attention to the borders of the room. She goes on to contrast the living arrangements of her wealthy German friends, who winter in “grand old mansions” in Frankfurt and in the summer live near Heidelberg. One lives “in a new country-house, full of new elegances, with the most beautiful new paintings up and down,” whilst the other, a strict Catholic, lives in a converted convent, “an old conventual house and grounds” 450 years old, with a “picture-gallery filled with the oldest productions of art Van Eycks, Albert Durers, &c.”36 The new/old oppositions in these architectural descriptions offer a typically touristic perspective, borne out in their tour of the old convent, “the house with noble old oak furniture polished floors, a library with 40,000 vols – room within room & recess beyond recess, with the fine painted glass arch windows throwing a ‘dim religious’ light over all.” In a letter of 1849, she wrote in awe about her future visit to Caroline Davenport’s Capesthorne, “a place and person for an artist to be in – old hall, galleries, old paintings, &c. and such a dame of a lady to grace them.”37 In the 1850s Gaskell’s regular visits to Capesthorne, near Congleton in Cheshire, and later to Teddesley Hall, Staffordshire, after the widowed Mrs. Davenport remarried, are likely to have inspired her reverent descriptions of old halls in her ghost stories. A red-brick Georgian mansion, remodelled in the 1830s by the architect Edward Blore, Capesthorne, with its expanded wings, turrets, imposing facade and grand entrance hall, was an example both of a building combining new and old features and a Gothic place to get lost in. In his analysis of spatial practice, the philosopher Henri Lefebvre has designated as “representational space” that form of space which is “directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’ … [which] overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.”38 The images and symbols of the haunted house become over-determined, as its users invest in what it represents. Viewing the old house as a visitor, cataloguing its period features, offered a typically mid-Victorian perspective on the lost past. Another example of this tourist reverence can be seen in a contemporary account by a fellow woman writer of her responses to an old stately home. Recording her visit to Speke Hall, near Liverpool, in 1853, the American anti-slavery novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe dwelt on the

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delights of its Gothic architecture. She admired its tapestried chambers concealing hidden staircases, “that led delightfully off to nobody knows where” and the “long, narrow, black oak corridor, whose slippery boards had the authentic ghostly squeak to them.”39 The housekeeperguide who conducted the tour described the haunted chamber “not to be opened, where a white lady appeared and walked at all approved hours.”40 Relishing the “old-fashioned” fixtures and the “dark,” “sepulchral,” “goblin-like” yew tree in its central courtyard, Stowe approves their harmonising with “old, dusky buildings,” yet is also impressed with the way in which the “modern” furniture of the sitting room “seemed the more unique from its contrast with the old architecture.”41 The grounds are also admired for “the same picturesque mixture of the past and present.”42 The reality of Speke Hall is seen to supersede the seventeenthcentury haunted ancestral mansion recreated in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Gothic novel, The House of the Seven Gables (1851): If our Hawthorne could conjure up such a thing as the Seven Gables in one of our prosaic country towns, what would he have done if he lived here? Now he is obliged to get his ghostly images by looking through smoked glass at our square, cold realities; but one such old place as this is a standing romance.43

Written from the perspective of enraptured tourist, Stowe’s account includes many of the desired elements of the mid-Victorian haunted house narrative: the uncanny contrast between past and present, old and new, and the hidden door ways and mysterious staircases, forbidden spaces and ghostly sounds. The coveted authenticity of the haunted house is linked to its “picturesque mixture” of past and present, its clashing of the modern with the medieval. McEvoy has written of the ways in which representations of the much-visited ghostly castle at Berry Pomeroy make it “more than castle, more than stage set … becom[ing] an exquisite figure of the loveliness of the past.”44 The tourist vision authorises the relishing of the “sepulchral,” “old” and “uncanny” features of haunted architecture. The Victorian home as stultifying space, inhabited by the dead, is also apparent in Gaskell’s visions of Haworth Parsonage, the “bleak” Yorkshire home of fellow woman writer, Charlotte Brontë. After visiting for the first time in 1851, Gaskell constructed the Parsonage as an unearthly haunted space in her letters and 1855 biography of her friend. Lucasta Miller has

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noted Gaskell’s influential construction of the “remote” Parsonage on the edge of the windswept moor next to the graveyard as a significant element of the Brontë myth, highlighting her “exaggerated conception of the wildness and bleakness of [Charlotte’s] life in Haworth.”45 Although some critics have noticed the Brontësque qualities of Gaskell’s stories of the 1850s,46 the relevance of this conception to Gaskell’s Gothic writing has not been fully explored. Often associating the Parsonage with wildness, Gaskell was clearly captivated by its uncanniness: “The wind goes piping and wailing and sobbing round the square unsheltered house in a very strange unearthly way” (243). Not only was she intrigued by where the servants slept and the spatial divisions within Haworth Parsonage— “Her father and [Charlotte] each dine and sit alone” (128)—but also by the haunting presence of the dead sisters. The strange ritual of the three sisters walking around the table in the parlour for an hour after evening prayers is seen as uncanny, even before this walking is spectralised by the deaths of Emily and Anne. Gaskell muses, “I found that after Miss Brontë had seen me to my room she did come down every night, and begin that slow monotonous incessant walk in which I am sure I should fancy I heard the steps of the dead following me” (247). This ritual suggests both the confinement of the sisters within the home and their inventive use of the female space of the parlour to harness their creativity. Yet the parlour, or drawing-room, space is given a Gothic twist by the coupling of the ghostly footsteps with the isolation of the last surviving daughter, its rituals and dullness hiding darker secrets and the mourning for the dead. The rise of the ghost story in the mid-Victorian period has been explored in relation to the flourishing of spiritualism, investment in mourning practices and the lingering of superstition, despite a growing scepticism about the supernatural. In a letter of May 1849, including several references to “mesmeric clairvoyance,” Gaskell records the sharing of “capital” ghost stories among friends and her sighting of a ghost on a drive to an “over-grown” place “where I believed the Sleeping Beauty lived,” “I SAW a ghost! Yes I did, though in such a matter of fact place as Charlotte St I should not wonder if you are sceptical.”47 Jen Cadwallader has highlighted the significance of “framing the ghost story” in the nineteenth century: There is a discernible and noteworthy shift in the focus of the apologetic frame over the length of the period… early nineteenth-century writers often framed their tales in response to religious doctrine on ghosts, while later writers were more likely to be responding to scientific discourse.48

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Gaskell’s variation on the conventions of the haunted house narrative certainly owes something to religious doctrine, as she was writing before the heyday of spiritualism in the 1860s and 1870s. She has also been contextualised in terms of a paradoxical middle-class interest in “recording and preserving the customs of a disappearing past,” including superstitions and “irrational belief,” in an age of an increasing scientific orientation.49 The superstitions of the past continued to resonate in the Female Gothic narrative, though some historians have placed more emphasis on the linking of the spectral to place and space or psychology. Theories about spectral illusions and hallucinations were common in the nineteenth century, according to Shane McCorristine, who has linked the “anti-superstition agenda” to the entrenchment of “the place of the ghost within a psychologically haunted world.”50 Already evident was the “uneasy worry that ghost-seeing could be a symptom of incipient insanity.”51 In their preservation of the past, Sasha Handley claims, “ghost stories … extend[ed] the ritual process of mourning … By haunting familiar places and people [ghosts] reinforced structures of social memory and provided an important source of cultural continuity.”52 This chapter focusses on the haunting of familiar spaces within the home in order to intervene in debates about spectrality, buried memories and place, showing how spectral disturbances exposed instabilities within the domestic economy which directly affected Victorian women. Henri Lefebvre’s leading question, “What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?”53 is directly relevant to women’s experiences of domestic ideology and the “rules of space” it encodes and reinforces, rules which were broken by the appearance of unquiet ghosts.

Open and Locked Doors: Servants and Forbidden Spaces in “The Old Nurse’s Story” and “The Grey Woman” In Gaskell’s ghost stories, visions of the dead are significantly rooted in the architectural, bound up with the woman writer’s explorations of secrecy, the spaces visited by the dead and the crossing of thresholds in the ancestral home. Krueger has examined the fluidity and complexity of gendered spaces in the woman’s short story between 1850 and 1930,

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arguing that this form “provides women writers a way to challenge the cultural codes of society by depicting normative spaces as sites of crisis.”54 In his influential architectural manual The Gentleman’s House (1864), Robert Kerr organised his vision of the ideal Victorian home in terms of privacy, comfort, convenience and spaciousness, reinforcing the balance between “quiet comfort for [the master’s] family and guests” and “thorough convenience for his domestics.”55 The historian Jane Hamlett writes of “the sharpening of the divide between male and female space in the middle-class home” in the nineteenth century, with libraries, smokingrooms and dens catering for men and drawing-rooms, boudoirs and morning-rooms typically feminine, though her view is that “spatial division was not necessarily linked to female subjugation.”56 She points out that such idealised representations of “imagined gendered hierarchies” did not always match common behaviour, particularly in smaller homes.57 The haunted house narrative is certainly alert to hierarchical precedence and spatial divisions, constantly commenting on the spaces occupied by particular ranks of servants and their employers, as well as the ways in which they moved around the house. In Mrs. Beeton’s influential Book of Household Management (1861) the mistress-servant relationship is key to domestic organisation: As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path.58

Gothic writing suggested that management of the Victorian house and the mistress-servant relationship was not always so simple or so smooth. Gaskell’s letters of the 1840s and 1850s are peppered with worries about old servants leaving and new servants settling in, as well as comments on her long-serving housekeeper Hearn and the uses she makes of her time off.59 Left without a teacher for her children, Gaskell dismisses the idea of a live-in governess, “we dislike having a governess in the house to break our privacy as a family.”60 Often the mistress’s “spirit” is at odds with the domestic economy, spatial divisions are violated or an absent/dead mistress or servant may operate as the cause of disruption. As a double of her mistress, sharing her intimate knowledge of the household, the female servant was a potentially powerful and sometimes a threatening figure, an invader of privacy.

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Spatial theorists have been particularly concerned with doors, locks, barriers and thresholds, though these have not always been considered in gendered terms. Gaston Bachelard’s discussion of doors and the “dialectics of outside and inside” seem particularly pertinent to the Victorian ghost story and its architecture of the forbidden. He proclaims, “the door is an entire cosmos of the Half-open,” part of a scheme which encompasses what is also “closed, bolted, padlocked.” It is not only a threshold into the unknown, but an object which can yield “images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect.”61 The crossing of thresholds is often associated with the loss of security connected to the embracing of the forbidden. The symbolic resonance of doors is a familiar motif in Gaskell’s fiction, according to Carolyn Lambert, who argues that doors operate as “barriers which can be used to comment on gendered space and restrictions placed on women.”62 Yet these barriers are not always restrictive. “Visible boundaries” including walls and doors, argues Henri Lefebvre, give rise for their part to an appearance of separation between spaces where in fact what exists is an ambiguous continuity. The space of a room, bedroom, house or garden may be cut off in a sense from social space by barriers and walls, by all the signs of private property, yet still remain fundamentally part of that space.63

This potential continuity works against the spatial divisions apparently in place in the Victorian home, as the doors or barriers between spaces become permeable. The ritual of crossing over a threshold draws attention to the navigation of space and women’s ambiguously restricted movements, their association with insides and interiors rather than what lies beyond. Mysteriously (half-)open doors, less welcoming than exposing, became a key trope of mid- to late-Victorian ghost stories by women. In The Night Side of Nature, Catherine Crowe’s stories suggest that a key aspect of the haunted house was that “windows and doors were opened in spite of locks and keys.”64 In Margaret Oliphant’s later story, “The Open Door” in Tales of the Seen and Unseen (1882), the door is a servants’ entrance in the ruins of the ancestral home, from which emanates the suffering ghostly voice of the dead housekeeper’s son. The open door of Brentwood, a “temporary accommodation” rather than a “permanent home” for the family (171), appears welcoming but is actually an

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entrance into impermanency, haunted by what lies beyond. Although the new family feel pride in the “picturesque” ruins in the grounds of Brentwood, they are not prepared for what will emanate from “what had been a large room,” “the common doorway” to the offices no longer remaining, where “pantry and kitchen had all been swept out of being” (173). The ghost’s repeated cry of “mother, let me in,” which seems only to be audible to other servants and to the men in the story (not the women of the new house), has made the young heir ill. The master’s “unaccountable reluctance to pass these ruins on my way home” (190) is symbolic of a wider reluctance to acknowledge servant histories which threaten the middle-class family. Yet the heir’s hysterical illness makes his father Colonel Mortimer into the ghost-hunter who hesitates on the threshold of the “vacant doorway,” “a door that led to nothing” (191). Mortimer ponders its mystery, a strange suggestion in the open door – so futile, a kind of emblem of vanity – all free around, so that you could go where you pleased, and yet that semblance of an enclosure – that way of entrance, unnecessary, leading to nothing. And why any creature should pray and weep to get in – to nothing: or be kept out – by nothing! (201)

As a portal into the unseen realm, the entrance exposes the lost history of the unnamed servant mother and her son Willie, a history which must be passed on by the priest in order for the troubled spirit to be exorcised from the ruined place. The priest’s exhortation to the ghost to sob at “heaven’s gate” rather than “your poor mother’s ruined door” (205) suggests not only the Victorian framing of the ghost as a lost soul but also the sacredness of the maternal door, a door of disgrace. The haunted space is conceived of as “the bit of wall … associated with so many emotions” (208), a threshold into the hidden trauma of the dissolute servant, locked out of the old house. In this story dependence on the mother is evident across the classes; the ghost demanding entry is, like the sickly heir, lamenting his separation from the mother. According to Lefebvre, “no space disappears completely, or is utterly abolished in the course of the process of social development – not even the natural place where that process began. ‘Something’ always survives or endures.”65 The story of the dead housekeeper whose name echoes around the estate and the emotional realm of the phantom kitchen have to be acknowledged, even as new families arrive in the ancestral mansion.

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Inaccessibility becomes a significant aspect of nineteenth-century Gothic architecture. Henri Lefebvre divides social space into “accessible space for normal use … governed … by established rules and practical procedures,” boundaries and “forbidden territories.” Between accessible and inaccessible spaces, there are “junction points … places of passage and encounter”; to which “access … is [often] forbidden except on certain occasions of ritual import.”66 If space is organised around the accessible/forbidden opposition, this has particular resonances for women and servants, those whose movements are more circumscribed in terms of rules and boundaries. Influenced by Romantic women writers such as Ann Radcliffe, whose narratives often revolved around women imprisoned in castles and convents or forbidden to access certain rooms and zones of a labyrinthine building, Gaskell’s stories usually include areas of the house (or garden) where women and/or servants are not permitted. Ilse M. Bussing has linked the obsession with spatial divisions in Victorian Gothic to an emphasis on “sequestered space,” with its resonances of secrecy and the invasion of privacy.67 The uncovering of secrets in the Gothic narrative is often achieved by entering forbidden space, as in Bluebeard’s castle the curious heroine goes where she is told not to go. In “The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852), Furnivall Manor House, at the foot of the Cumberland Fells, is a place of secrets and locked doors, where the movements of women are restricted and restrained.68 The narrative opens with the arrival of Hester, the narrator and lady’s maid, who becomes the “old nurse” of the title, and her young charge Rosamond, privileging the servant’s point of view of the old aristocratic residence with its mysterious topography. It was published in Household Words alongside Edmund Saul Dixon’s “The Charwoman’s Story,” told from the perspective of a cook who shares her fears with another servant about hearing the ghostly footsteps of their dead master going up the stairs. In Gaskell’s story the Furnivall sisters had lived “almost entirely apart, having separate rooms, the one on the west side, Miss Maude on the east – those very rooms which were now shut up” (27). Spatial divisions here operate between the sisters, rather than between male and female, with the “bad” sister’s disgraced child, beaten and locked out of the house to die by the cruel patriarch, becoming the unspoken secret of the house. Forbidden space in Furnivall Manor, created by the harsh, unforgiving father, takes the form of a locked shrine to the disgraced daughter. The mysterious east wing is the forbidden zone, “never opened,” associated with the dead sister Maude. The remaining sister, the ageing and frail Miss Grace, is sequestered in

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a few ground-floor rooms with her maid and companion, Mrs Stark. Housekeepers and stewards are depicted as sinister keepers of the keys and of guilty secrets, playing to Victorian fears that the home’s privacy was “under siege” and “under surveillance” from its snooping staff.69 The old lord, now dead, had told the servants that his daughter “had disgraced herself, and that he had turned her out of doors” (28) and that they were not to help her; the absent lord’s steward had the keys to the east wing. Described by David Galef as a “nasty fairy tale” of sibling rivalry, repression and denial, the narrative uses the supernatural to reveal the “etiology of the family pathology.”70 In this female-headed household the patriarch, Lord Furnivall, is missing, only appearing in spectral form in the closing scene. The organ, whose ghostly music heralds the reappearance of the supernatural, is significantly built into the wall on the western side, with the music an ominous reminder of the patriarchal influence of the dead father. In the ancestral home with its many rooms and old furniture, women are lost and disorientated, as well as captivated by the female ancestors hidden from view. The “complex internal layout” of Furnivall Manor and its many mysterious doors have been noted by Carolyn Lambert,71 but there is more to say about its disorientating uncanny effects on the servant and child. Hester is in awe of the grandly furnished hall, with its chandelier, fire-place, organ and heavy “old-fashioned sofas,” claiming, “I thought we should be lost – it was so large, and vast, and grand” (14). Her young charge Rosamond clings tightly to her “as if she was scared and lost in that great place” (14). Set in a “large wild park,” the Manor also harbours wildness within: Hester fears being “lost in that wilderness of a house” (15). Dorothy, another servant, is fearful of playing hide-andseek in the house, “for that there were some ugly places about the house, where she should like ill for the child to go” (17). Just visible in the “green gloom” of the ivy-covered windows are curiosities, such as “old China jars and carved ivory boxes, and great heavy books, and, above all, the old pictures!” (16), recalling Gaskell’s enraptured responses to her visit to Capesthorne. Drawing on the Gothic tradition of the ancestral portrait gallery, Gaskell contrasts the portraits of the two scornful daughters, though, also in keeping with Gothic tradition, the portrait of the disgraced family member has been turned towards the wall. When Dorothy and Hester turn round the picture, the organ music is heard for the first time, as if the servants’ talk and actions have unlocked the secret72 ; it is also significant that Rosamond has to be shielded from the

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sight of her “wicked” female ancestor. Another noticeable feature of the wild park is an “old fashioned flower garden” which had been scooped out of the wood for “some old Lady Furnivall” (14), another relic of the female ancestor and her demarcated space. Although the child makes “expeditions” all over the house, the “roaming” of women is controlled by the repressed memories of this ancestor, whose story has to be communicated via supernatural means and the breaking of architectural barriers. The servants are shown to respect the rules of the house and be fearful of the child’s “roaming.” Deviating from set routes, breaking Lefebvre’s laws of space, is a generator of supernatural disturbance. The west drawing-room, where the old ladies sit and knit, is a typically contradictory space, seemingly a place of warmth and quiet but also deadening, “dull” and sepulchral. Hester and Rosamond feel more “at home” in the nursery due to the hospitality of the other servants and out of place in the west drawing-room, a place of the “unknown” with the sinister older women. The breakdown of mistress-servant intimacies in their uncanny closeness threatens the family. In the past, Mrs Stark, Grace’s “stony” companion, was “for ever spying about the east rooms” (28), violating spatial restrictions in order to protect her mistress. The two older women had lived together so long that Mrs Stark “seemed more like a friend than a servant; she looked so cold, and grey, and stony, as if she had never loved or cared for anyone; and I don’t suppose she did care for anyone, except her mistress” (15). The child’s preference for the cheerful kitchen over the tomb-like west drawing-room is also telling of the restrictions of female space. In The Decoration of Houses (1897), Edith Wharton writes of the “exquisite discomfort” of the “dreary drawingroom” with its dark shadows, heavy furniture and limited space.73 It is assumed that Rosamond’s “hiding-place” is not the “always locked” east wing, already a place of the hidden, but “some warm, hidden corner” (20–21) of the drawing-room. Yet rather than going to the kitchen “when she was tired of behaving pretty in the drawing-room” (20), the child had crossed the great hall, near the east wing, and been lured out of the door by the spectral child who took her “round the east corner” (22) to the dark side of the house. Escaping the deadly drawing-room is here a route to the supernatural, to the vision of the ghostly sister in the snow, “a lady weeping and crying … [who] took me on her knee” (23). In a later scene, Hester, summoned by the west drawing-room bell, takes the sleeping child with her, fearing that the night-nursery no longer offers security from malevolent ghosts. The middle- and upper-class woman’s

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confinement to the deadly drawing-room, often figured as a sepulchral, overcrowded and stultifying environment, where women must “behave pretty,” became a recurring image in the ghost story, to be explored in more detail in later chapters. In the Victorian ghost story, the trope of the opening door seems particularly appealing to the woman writer, linked to women’s anguished confinement by the rules and rituals of gendered space. Doors open into moments of trauma from the past or operate as portals into another realm. If “a defining characteristic of (private) property … is a closed frontier,” as Lefebvre asserts, the barrier between inside and out is not impenetrable, but “always relative and … always permeable.”74 Despite Victorian ideals of privacy, the permeability of boundaries allowed the phantoms to get through doors or across thresholds. This opening of what should be closed suggests divisions within the domestic economy, or gradations of privacy, according to Krueger, in line with advances in architectural design. The irruption of the supernatural into the domestic space is signalled in “The Old Nurse’s Story” by the releasing of the secrets of the east wing, Pandora’s box, “The east door gave way with a thundering crash, as if torn open in a violent passion” (30). A door which opens by itself undermines spatial divisions which keep the family intact, letting out “the proud defiance of a fierce woman” (28), which can no longer be contained. The terrifying moment of the opening door is accompanied by a Brontësque howling, “terrible screams” and “my father’s voice” echoing through the female-headed household. In the final sequence, the women are drawn “towards the great hall-door, where the winds howled and ravened for their prey” (31). Forbidden space is organised around rejection and denial: “Any determinate and hence demarcated space necessarily embraces some things and excludes others; what it rejects may be relegated to nostalgia or it may be simply forbidden. Such a space asserts, negates and denies.”75 What is excluded and denied in Furnivall Manor is the threat of illegitimacy and female passion. The ghost child, the spectre of Miss Maude’s daughter, becomes visible through the windows of the great hall, where Hester and Rosamond are playing billiards (a man’s game). The desired removal of the child from the male space of the billiard-room to the nursery at the dangerous time of “dusk” might have prevented the spectral communication; instead, this violation of spatial divisions invites the supernatural. In her discussion of the Gothic child, Margarita Georgieva has argued that “the child adopts any gothic edifice, no matter how confined, for

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its home.”76 Lucie Armitt emphasises the “power of the [ghost-girl’s] magnetism,” her “seductive allure.”77 The spectral powers of the dead child, her desire to get in, stem from her homelessness, making her a powerful symbol of mid-nineteenth-century attitudes to illegitimacy and tainted blood. The ghost-girl who calls for Rosamond is both outside and within, challenging the confinement of the Victorian lady: How I watched her, and guarded her! We bolted the doors, and shut the window-shutters fast… but my little lady still heard the weird child crying and mourning; and not all we could do or say, could keep her from wanting to go to her, and let her in from the cruel wind and the snow”. (28–29)

Bachelard’s discussion of the relevance of the “dialectics of outside and inside,” “this side” as opposed to “beyond,” is inseparable from notions of home and homelessness,78 encapsulated in this recurrent trope of Victorian ghosts wanting to be let in. Letting in the supernatural, like allowing the vampire across the threshold, will unleash the secrets of the past as well as rendering the home uncanny, threatening the limited guardianship of the servants. In the final spectral encounter, servants watch and witness the cruelty of the ghost family, who appear in the great hall, in between the east wing and the west wing. Doomed to repeat the violent blow against his dead daughter’s child, the phantom patriarch can only be defied by his living daughter, Grace. She has to confront the ghost of her former self, which has been trapped in the east wing and emerges into the hall to look on “stony, and deadly serene” (31) at the violence. Hester fears that there is “a power stronger than mine” which will wrest away Rosamond, but is able to keep her from being drawn out through the great hall-door. Earlier in the story, Dorothy reminds Hester that, despite her fears, she cannot leave the house with the child because “she was my lord’s ward, and I had no right over her” (25). This reinforces the limited power of servants in the Gothic narrative and within the domestic realm, what Kathleen Hudson calls their “functioning within spaces … themselves defined by radical instability.”79 Gaskell records a significant glance of recognition between the servants of different generations: “Mrs Stark looked at me, and I at her, but we dared not speak” (30). Dickens famously advised Gaskell to rewrite the ending of “The Old Nurse’s Story” so that the revenants are only visible to the nurse and

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child rather than the whole family. Gaskell’s refusal to follow his rules may stem from her focus on these acts of servant witnessing. In Female Gothic narratives, Diana Wallace contends, women writers “push at the boundaries of the traditional ghost story […] by working on the interstices between the explained/unexplained supernatural.”80 Before the more psychological stories of the fin de siècle, the apparition’s materiality was affirmed, so that the revelation of the secret triggers punishments, retribution or salvation.81 Victoria Margree has noted the formula adhered to in many of Charlotte Riddell’s Victorian ghost stories, whereby the ghost’s desired exposure of the crime renders the haunted house “habitable” again.82 “The Old Nurse’s Story” ends with an old woman’s guilt, her “death-stricken” (31) figure atoning for the “deadly” serenity of her youth. Yet the restoration of habitability to Furnivall Manor is crucially dependent on servant narration, returning the reader to the beginning where Hester passes on her old nurse’s story to Rosamond’s children. What comes out of forbidden space or peers through the windows of the ancestral home comments more broadly on the servants’ roles in ensuring communication between female ancestors, in telling the stories of the past. “The Grey Woman,” published in All the Year Round (1861), is another narrative of uncanny confinement which borrows from Radcliffean Gothic in its castle setting and gruesome murder in a forbidden room. The newly married Anna de la Tourelle is kept under surveillance in her husband’s dreary French chateau, les Rochers, where she is mocked by the servants and only permitted outside in the flower garden. The chateau’s uncanniness is compounded by its unsettling and “incongruous” blend of old and new, combining “a raw new building” surrounded by weeds, lichen and rubbish, and the picturesque old castle, “whose building dated many centuries back” (300). More importantly, the “smart, half-finished apartment in the new edifice” is joined to the old domain, “by means of intricate passages and unexpected doors, the exact position of which I never fully understood” (300). Disturbed by the gossip about a stabbing among the servants, Anna, like Radcliffe’s Emily St Aubert, is also haunted by the fear of her missing father’s death, so that “There was no end to the thoughts and fancies that haunted me” (307). Despite the public perception that Anna “lives in a chateau with many servants, bound ostensibly to obey me as a mistress” (302), her authority is minimal, “in my husband’s absence, my wishes were but seldom attended to, and I never dared to give orders” (306). In this “terrible household,” servants assume unusual authority:

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I had always the feeling that all the domestics, except Amante, were spies upon me, and that I was trammelled in a web of observation and unspoken limitation extending over all my actions. (309)

The transgressive figure of Amante, the Parisian lady’s maid, uses her power to rescue her mistress from the husband’s tyranny and her servants’ surveillance. Lady’s maids, like governesses, were high up in the servant hierarchy, “on terms of privileged intimacy with their employer,”83 an intimacy which again both generates and atones for the unhomeliness of the haunted house. Split between “his apartments” and her “suite of rooms,” the gendered spatial divisions of the castle reinforce female confinement. The master has free access to all rooms, whereas the mistress never steps outside her “domain.” The repeated references to unexpected doors, and the portieres, or curtains, which cover them and muffle sounds, highlight both the labyrinthine layout of the chateau and the master’s greater knowledge of its geography. Despite trying to take ownership of her apartments by occupying the bedroom rather than the salon or boudoir, which she prefers to keep locked, the young wife is lured back into the soundproof salon, where “the servants could not hear any movement or cry of mine unless expressly summoned” (301). If “nineteenth-century employers sought to control every aspect of their servant’s identity and appearance,”84 this hierarchy is overturned in the text. As several critics have noted, the story is significant for the erotic relations between mistress and servant, which Wallace reads in relation to the “‘ghosting’ of women within patriarchy.”85 Elizabeth Steere has highlighted the complexities of the “close proximity” between mistresses and lady’s maids in midVictorian narratives, where the maid’s devotion could tip over into an “unhealthy obsession.86 Yet there is more to say about the spatialisation of mistress-servant relations in the text. As Hamlett attests, “intimacy between maid and mistress could transcend … spatial divisions.”87 Amante’s knowledge of the chateau and sanctioning of their trespassing into male space becomes essential to rescuing her mistress from its haunting confines. The architectural significance of the ghost story is set out in a metafictional line which interrupts the action of “The Grey Woman”: “To make you understand my story, I must now try to explain to you the plan of the chateau” (307). Although ostensibly referring to Anna’s diary, the story is also Gaskell’s haunted narrative which can only be understood

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in the light of an architectural plan which explains the new additions to the old building. Two pages of the story are then taken up with a detailed description of wings, windows, corners, chambers, galleries, connecting passages and locked doors, all of which reinforce notions of surveillance and spatial restriction. The notion of the “connecting apartments” between the ancient castle and the “modern edifice” is suggestive of the “web of observation” and network of servants, who scrupulously obey their master’s orders. The separate servants’ wing in a castle would have been removed from the main family; as Hamlett reiterates, plans for large residences “sharply divided servant and family space.”88 In les Rochers, however, the servants have assumed control over the mistress, dictating the ways in which she can traverse the space: the servants, as well as he himself, had a knack of turning me back, under some pretence, if ever they found me walking about alone, as I was inclined to do, when first I came, from a sort of curiosity to see the whole of the place of which I found myself mistress. (308)

The repetition of “my husband” in relation to space, “my husband’s study,” “my husband’s dressing-room,” “monsieur’s room,” becomes an increasingly sinister way of signalling patriarchal control. Anna’s fear that some of the servants “might trace our progress towards the part of the castle unused by anyone except my husband” (309) identifies the husbands’ rooms as forbidden space, Lefebvre’s domain of denial. Rooms which open into other rooms and a multiplicity of doors suggest the familiarly labyrinthine Gothic trope, showing how the mistress is powerless to cross thresholds without the help of her servant. Lefebvre notes the two orientations of symbolic doors and windows: “from inside to outside, and from outside to inside,” adding “the object ‘door’ serves to bring a space, the space of a ‘room’ … to an end; and it heralds the reception to be expected in the neighbouring room, or in the house or interior that awaits.”89 The locked “door of communication” into Anna’s husband’s study (309), a typically male space, seems inviolable. The study was a room often exclusive to men which could harbour secrets, here including the father’s letters as well as a dead body. But by blaming her maid for her “unusual timidity,” “urg[ing] her on,” Anna finds the courage to enter: “we turned [the key]” (309). Rebecca Styler writes of Gaskell’s tendency to focus in her Gothic tales on “an interior space which

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houses an evil character” who must be confronted and the evil remedied.90 Here, the women have to flee from the interior space to avoid the violence of the Gothic villain. Left in the dark, once the candle goes out, Anna experiences the study as “that room of horror” (310), in “a house of blood” which returns in nightmares—a room where her father’s letters are kept hidden. Trapped in the “shadowy” room, with its escritoires and “heavy articles,” she feels powerless to open the door, “which was all but closed, and to whose handlings I was unaccustomed” (310). She also thinks of hiding between the locked door to the dressing-room and the portiere but feels she cannot reach it without screaming or fainting (310). The desire to conceal herself between a door and its heavy covering is suggestive of the woman’s need to position herself in an in-between space, on the border of male territory. Instead, she is forced to hide under the table, “a place of comparative safety” (310) to avoid danger, where she inadvertently grasps the hand of the “ghastly” corpse. Shirley Foster has noted the story’s depictions of violence in relation to “Gaskell’s fascination with the macabre,” as in this scene the traumatised Anna, like the lost bride of Clopton Hall, bites out a piece of her own flesh.91 But the servant’s role as rescuer has not been fully explored. Challenged for appearing in his “private room,” “prying into his premises” (312), Amante is initially locked out of the space (servant on one side, mistress on the other). Yet, by speaking “from the outside of the door” (315), in an “authoritative” voice, the lady’s maid, by virtue of her eavesdropping, is able to challenge male control of space: “We kept our dreadful secret close … I suppose she must have been in the dressing-room adjoining, and heard all” (316). The escape route from the castle is also necessarily reliant on Amante’s knowledge of its architecture: she leads her mistress in the dark through the gallery, “past my suite of sitting-rooms where the gilding was red with blood, into that unknown wing of the castle that fronted the main road” (317). Guiding her along basement passages to an open door, though an iron barred window, with two loose bars taken out “with the ease of one who had performed the action often before” (317), the servant is able to escape from the haunted house by her careful navigation. Anna as powerless mistress “did not know the path” (317). In their violation of male territory, “prying into his premises,” mistress and maid navigate forbidden space in order to overturn the household hierarchy and gendered confinement. Their shared occupation of space in Gaskell’s tale is a way of countering the deadening patriarchal order.

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The Ancestral House and Servant Space in “The Poor Clare” and “The Crooked Branch” Spectrality is often mapped onto unstable servant-mistress relations in the Victorian ghost story, at a time when, according to Hamlett, “the desire to distance the family from the servants was complicated by the need to keep a close check on their activities.”92 Noiselessness, quick movements, a spotless reputation and the ability to keep disorder and discomfort at bay were key attributes recommended to servants in nineteenthcentury advice manuals.93 One reflection on “the servant problem” linked domestic “unrest” to the “necessary evils” of service to be “endured” by mistresses, claiming “servants can … work their own sweet wills, [so] that mistresses are consequently very much in their power.”94 Elizabeth Steere has described servants as the “working-class ghostly doubles” of their mistresses in sensation fiction, a doubling which can figure class anxiety and resistance to the mistress’s authority.95 Despite separate staircases, entrances and bedrooms hidden away on the top storey, female servants in particular were often conceived of in terms of proximity rather than distance. Noiseless servants, potential sources of disorder and evil, acquired ghostly characteristics in the Victorian home. Many of Crowe’s narratives in The Night Side of Nature position the spectral encounter or mysterious noises in the night in relation to the movements of servants around the haunted property. Spectral footsteps on the stairs are interpreted by the “lady of the house” as “the nurse … bringing the baby to me, but there was nobody to be seen.”96 The nurse operates as the nobody, the phantom who must watch over the heirs of the family whilst they sleep. Another example records the haunting of “a very handsome woman and two maids” in a Welsh house remarkable to its visitors for “the neglected state of the rooms,” never dusted.97 The ghostly servant, allegedly murdered by her mistress, threatens the house by her frenzied nocturnal cleaning, “their sleep constantly disturbed by the noise of rubbing, sweeping, and the moving of furniture” preventing the live maids from performing their roles. They lament the “impossibility” of doing their work, “exhausted as they were by sitting up all night with their mistress, who could not bear to be alone when she was in bed.”98 The distraught mistress’s entreaties to the dead maid to go away are a twisted version of the instructions that might have been issued whilst she was in service. Crowe’s spectral appearances are sometimes activated by servants being out of place in the domestic economy—a

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mistress opening a door in place of an absent housemaid, a nurserymaid quarantined from the other workers—or servants’ responses to the supernatural related to the difficulties of retaining domestic staff. Victorian ghost stories could be used to expose both the exhaustion and the resistance of female servants, transforming them from nobodies into invisible presences with the power to control the home. The pervasive sense that servants were not only problems but potentially sources of evil, that there was “something terribly wrong in the relations between mistresses and servants” in the nineteenth century,99 was apparent in haunted house narratives. In “The Poor Clare” (1856), the “ancestral house, which had fallen sadly to ruin” (51), mirrors the destabilising of the aristocratic family by intermarriage with the lower classes. The “strange story” of “poor Lucy,” haunted by an evil double, opens with a familiar Gothic set piece of architectural description, linking the lost histories of women to its crumbling facade. Starkey Manor-House, a “great old hall” (49), is a symbol of the fading glory of the old family. Surrounded by ruined cottages, ancient, giant trees with “ghastly white branches” (48) and wild deer, the “dilapidated” Manor-House in north-east Lancashire is “rather like a number of old rooms clustered round a grey, massive old keep than a regularly-built hall” (49). It is also a blend of antiquity and modernity. Making “the best of the old,” the family bring into the ruined house “rare things from the Continent,” carvings, crosses and beautiful pictures. Bridget Fitzgerald, a beautiful servant, had married above her station and developed a close bond with her frail mistress, returning to her service after she had been widowed. The devotion of the female servant is shown to rival that of family ties, as “she and her daughter had followed ‘the mistress’ in all her fortunes” (53). Outcast and mistreated after her mistress’s death, the widowed servant curses the descendants of the cruel new Squire after he shoots her beloved dog. This curse descends on Lucy Fitzgerald, the illegitimate child of her dead daughter Mary, whose apparitional double haunts both the ancestral home and the servant’s cottage. Hudson argues that “the fact that [servants] are liminal figures, a sort of enemy within, allows them to navigate unstable Gothic spaces more efficiently and explore the aspects which they find most relevant or troubling within that space.”100 In this story, the servant’s occupation of space outside the ancestral home renders her witch-like and outcast, an instigator of supernatural disturbance.

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Instability and unhomeliness are emphasised by the collapse of spatial distinctions between family space and servant space. At the beginning of the story Bridget carries Madame Starkey over the threshold into “her husband’s house” with an ominous blessing. This reworking of the ritual of carrying a new bride into her new home not only suggests her usurping of the husband’s power but also indicates the major role of the female servant within the story, despite the liminality her position might indicate. Fears about “inappropriate intimacies” between the family and domestic staff are invoked here.101 The expected contrast between the ancestral house and the servant’s cottage, the dwelling-place of Bridget and Mary, is elided, as the Squire furnishes the cottage carefully and dismantles the desired spatial divisions between servants and family. The symbolic “foreign” portrait of the Madonna, “her heart pierced with arrows” (55), is another gift from the family which hangs in the cottage. The two residences are connected by a path, which allows the servant constant access—she was “constantly up at the great house” (53)—but also allows the mistress to visit Bridget and comfort her when her beloved daughter goes abroad to work. The mistress’s frailty and shunning of decisionmaking meant that Bridget could exert “despotic power” (53). Later in the story the chaplain, remembering the spiritual assistance he has granted to the powerful widow, reinforces her occupation of the Brontësque “wildness” between cottage and ancestral mansion: “I have known her cross the moors on the wildest nights of storm, to confess and be absolved; and then she would return, calmed and subdued, to her daily work about her mistress” (92). The symbolic, “ill-fitting” door to the cottage is often closed against strangers, signifying the alterity of the widow. Bachelard’s notion of “the half-open” boundary is significant in terms of class and gender, as the door is opened to the upper classes when the mistress brings the gift of a dog to appease her servant’s loneliness. The daughter’s “move[ment] from one house to the other at her own will” (53) seems unnatural, a violation of household hierarchies, which fosters suspicion and distrust: “The other servants were afraid of them, as being in secret the ruling spirits of the household” (53). After Mary’s departure, the disappearance of Bridget and the deaths of the Squire and his mistress, both Manor-House and cottage are deserted. The cottage becomes a place of moths and rust, locked yet unshuttered, so available for prying eyes. There are many examples of villagers looking through the unshuttered windows of the cottage (never a place of privacy) where Bridget can be seen “praying wildly” (59) to the Madonna in a

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travesty of religious ritual. Once disconnected from the aristocratic family, the servant’s power and privileges are curtailed, ensuring that the cottage with a special path to the ancestral house becomes a remote witch’s den. In the mid-nineteenth century, the feared figure of the witch, aligned with the supernatural, was connected to that of the widow or isolated older woman, often the subject of male violence.102 Gaskell’s articulation of the servant’s loneliness and helplessness, deserted by her daughter, “her lost Mary” (59), suggests her ongoing sympathy for marginalised single women. The idea of rescuing Bridget’s forgotten furniture “became invested with a kind of horror” (57) for her neighbours, as the ruined cottage is transformed into a haunted space, “her window dead from any glitter” (56). On her return Bridget’s strange appearance and habit of talking to herself set her apart, “it was no wonder that those who dared to listen outside her door at night believed that she held converse with some spirit. In short, she was unconsciously earning for herself the dreadful reputation of a witch” (57). In a later scene, the lawyer narrator tries to gain access to the cottage, “the picture of desertion and decay” (87) to entreat Bridget to lift the curse but is mistaken for a ghost. The lawyer, trained for the legal profession by an uncle, with his “intimate acquaintance with family history,” and interest in “cases of disputed property” (61) represents a threat to the “helpless” woman who lives alone, “a throneless queen” (86), haunting her property in order to secure his future marriage to Lucy. Tortuous ways of dealing with witches are challenged by the lawyer, however, who describes Bridget as “rather a wild and savage woman than a malignant witch” (83), hence protecting her from local superstitions. The dwelling of the grandmother, a place of horror and savagery but also of the Madonna, a realm of the unhomely, will become more important than the father’s house. Lucy’s ghostly phantasm, a supernatural manifestation of someone who is still alive, haunts the houses of both father and grandmother. As McCorristine explains, by the 1880s “phantasms of the living” were being scientifically investigated alongside ghosts of the dead.103 As in “The Old Nurse’s Story,” the phantom, “a loathsome demon soul looking out of the grey eyes, that were in turns mocking and voluptuous” (78), is visible to more than one character, including the sceptical male narrator, and cannot therefore be explained in terms of insanity and hallucination. Melissa Edmundson Makala has traced the Gothic unease in the story back to “the limitations and dangers of a female sexuality that cannot be controlled or denied,”104 but the dangers and denial of space, of

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traversing spatial boundaries, have been overlooked. In Lucy’s embedded narrative, the appearance of the ghastly double can be traced back to growing up “in this grand mansion, in that lonely place” (76). The loneliness of the ancestral house is partly relieved by her companionship with “my dear and faithful Mistress Clarke” (76). Intimate mistress-servant pairings once again become both necessary and a potential source of disruption in the patriarchal mansion. Evoking the violation of social codes and conventions, her distant father Squire Gisborne accuses Lucy of being “of no true blood” (76) in trampling on his flower-beds and displaying an “undue familiarity – all unbecoming a gentlewoman – with his grooms” (77). The double’s disregard of spatial and social restrictions, going out of doors and into the stable-yard, joking with the “wild” and foreign servants, disturbs the domestic economy. This familiarity with the staff recalls her grandmother’s closeness to her mistress, as well as her illegitimacy, the “taint” of servant blood. Whilst Lucy sickens under the knowledge of her shameful self, her “terrible reflection” in the mirror, the double “was seen by all, flitting about the house and gardens, always about some mischievous or detestable work” (77). The ghost’s “flitting about,” reminiscent of the “roaming” around the house by the unrestrained child and her spectre double in Furnivall Manor-house, is suggestive of Lefebvre’s model of the appropriation of space, often “modified in order to serve the needs and possibilities of a group.”105 The effects of this unfeminine appropriation and crossing of boundaries, “every-one shrank from me in dread … my father drove me forth at length, when the disgrace of which I was the cause was past his patience to bear” (77) are revealing of mid-Victorian judgements on women’s uncontrolled and illegitimate occupation of space in their father’s houses. Freeing the disgraced woman from the curse is framed in terms of evil, demonic possession and the punishing of witchcraft. The lawyer’s uncle suggests that Lucy is “too pure and good to be tainted by its evil, haunting presence” (83) and speaks of cases of exorcism. The disgust her father feels for the phantom, “the repugnance which the conduct of the demoniac creature had produced in his mind” (90), signifies the male horror of the “curse” of the sexualised woman. Even the narrator confesses, “At times, I could scarcely bear to own it” (89). Operating as a barrier to Lucy’s marriage to the lawyer, the double articulates the anger of the disinherited female ancestor: “We dared not see each other for dread of the fearful Third, who had more than once taken her place at our meetings” (90), “we dared not speak; for we could not tell but

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that the dread creature was listening, although unseen – but that IT might appear and push us asunder” (78). This dread creature, the fearful Third, also figures the lost mother, Mary, whose mistreatment by cruel men has caused her suicide by drowning. “Driven … forth from her father’s house” (88), Lucy uses the special path, a Lefebvrian “junction point” or “place of passage and encounter” between the accessible and inaccessible,106 to be reunited with her lost grandmother and to stabilise family/servant relations. Outside the cottage, Lucy and Mistress Clarke comfort the grey-haired woman, who lies “convulsed on the earth” at the effects of the curse, though the double prays but in “jesting mimicry” (86). Lucy’s “demoniac visitation” (95) of her grandmother’s cottage mirrors another haunting by a disgraced and absent mother, as Gaskell uses the Female Gothic trope of the absent/dead mother to facilitate inter-generational ties between women. Bridget recalls how the ghost, “that double girl” with “a look of my dead Mary” (88) looked through the window into her cottage, disrupting her prayers. As Wallace suggests, in Female Gothic “the Other is also the (m)other.”107 Like the lawyer, Bridget tries and fails to grasp the phantom, but unlike the men, she is able to set her free by lifting the curse. By becoming a Poor Clare, Bridget is hidden away in a “cloistered shelter” (100), repositioned in a confined, female space where her wildness is no longer a threat. On her convent deathbed, she “seemed like one who watched the disappearance of some loathed and fearful creature” (102), as her granddaughter is “freed from the curse” (102). The lawyer’s uncle finds the “requisite testimonials” relating to Lucy’s descent and birth, proving that she will inherit “the great Fitzgerald property” in Ireland. This reinforces the importance of the female ancestor, “the ancestress of her we sought to reclaim” (83– 84), suggesting that the supernatural disturbance within the story can be traced back to the forgotten history of the Fitzgeralds, the servant family, now established as the rightful heirs. The servant’s cottage as uncanny space is also explored in another neglected narrative of “household difficulties” (229), the Hardyesque tale “The Crooked Branch” (1859), which appeared in the Haunted House sequence in Household Words. Originally titled “The Ghost in the Garden Room,” it is on the border between the ghost story and the tale of working-class life. Set in a house “little better than a cottage,” a place of “homely comfort” (255) yet unshuttered and pitch black at night, it renders family life as dark and menacing, haunted by loss. Told partly from the terrified perspective of adopted niece Bessy, it centres on the missing

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dysfunctional son Benjamin and his unscrupulous methods of getting his hands on the family’s savings. Presumed dead, the mourned-for son’s return to steal from his own parents takes on the status of a supernatural disturbance. The son’s forsaken bedroom, not slept in for nine years, has become a shrine, “a receptacle for all unused things” (255), a store-place for apples. The mother, Hester, a former servant, is shown to be representative of her class and time in her endorsing of spiritualist communication, “she believed that, if all natural means of communication between her and him had been cut off at the last supreme moment – if death had come upon him in an instant, sudden and unexpected – her intense love could have been supernaturally made conscious of the blank” (251). In her discussion of notions of evil in Gaskell’s short fiction, Rebecca Styler has noted the important deconstruction of the ideal of domestic space as “sacred.”108 Parental over-indulgence and gender inequalities, Styler argues, contribute to the Gothic “monstrosity” of the son.109 In the final trial scene, the testimonies of the traumatised parents dwell on the urgent pleading of the ghostly son to be let in, whilst trying to occlude his cruel urging of violence towards his mother, now blind and “careworn” (268) as the collapse of the domestic ideal is made public. Yet paying attention to the gendering of servant space can also enrich our reading of the story. Sasha Handley argues that ghost beliefs, particularly for the lower classes, were “intimately connected with mortuary culture …[expressing] important emotional and spiritual meanings for individuals and communities that were confronted with their own mortality or with that of loved ones.”110 Confronted with the possible death of their son and cousin, the working-class family are open to the emotional and spiritual meanings attached to his uncanny reappearance within a home less sacred than sinister. Architectural descriptions acquire an ominous significance in the final third of the story, as the vampiric “dead” son begs to be let in to the family home. Lambert has highlighted the ways in which, for Gaskell, doors and windows let in disease, death, and those who wish to harm the occupants of the home, linking this to the destabilising of the concept of home as a secure sanctuary.111 The trope of the locked door is almost over-used in this sequence: Bessy sees “the wooden latch of the door gently and almost noiselessly lifted up, as if someone were trying it from the outside” (254). Gaskell itemises the doors leading off the house-place, a communal hall in a cottage, and where they lead to, including the cryptlike “closet under the stairs with household treasures” (255). Bessy cannot

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forget the lifting door-latch so that “her thoughts ran uneasily on the supernatural; and thence to Benjamin” (256), a train of thought which foregrounds the uncanniness of homeliness and feminine fears about the “wrongs” of men. Like a terrified Gothic heroine, she is shown running barefoot for help from the unexplained curses and violence of night-time intruders: A sudden terror came over her; she perceived, in that strange way in which the presence of a living creature forces itself on our consciousness in the darkest room, that someone was near her, keeping as still as she. (258)

The son hiding in his former home is referred to as an “unknown” presence with animal-like “creeping movements,” “robber,” “her terrible companion,” “the unseen witness” (258). She is unnerved by the proximity of this apparitional presence, “possibly even with keener and stronger sight than hers… able to discern her figure and posture, and glaring at her like some wild beast” (258). Like a ghost, the son passes “stealthily through the inner door” (258). Hiding in the treasured space he formerly occupied, the apparitional son becomes the source of disruption. Despite locking her cousin into the closet to save him from harm, Betty is persuaded to let him out, inadvertently sanctioning his behaviour. The locking and unlocking of doors signifies Bessy’s entrapment in the home, and her capacity to grant her adoptive brother his freedom: masculinity cannot be contained in closets under the stairs. Styler links Gaskell’s unflinching Unitarianism to “a supremely rational Gothic, her tales not so much the literature of nightmare,”112 yet the nightmarish elements are clearly evident in the crookedness of family relations here. The final line, “the mother was stricken with paralysis, and lay on her death-bed” (270), with its echoes of the “death-stricken” Grace Furnivall at the end of “The Old Nurse’s Story,” is suggestive not only of maternal responsibility and punishment for family breakdown but of the paralysed women trapped in the home, terrified by what lurks in the darkest rooms. Spectral appearances in Elizabeth Gaskell’s writing are activated by servants, mistresses and daughters violating spatial boundaries or trespassing into forbidden zones. The appearance of ghosts in forbidden wings or threatening the doors and windows of the family home, seeking what Crowe called “a rapport with certain inhabitants,”113 allowed for an overturning of Victorian spatial divisions and a questioning of the gender and class ideologies they were meant to reinforce. Often ending with the

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tableau of the weeping or “stricken” woman, Gaskell’s stories critique the legitimacy of spatial codes which reinforced female confinement within the drawing-rooms and locked apartments of the ancestral home. Intimate mistress-servant pairings, and the placing of the female servant at the centre of the narrative, however, offer a potential source of disruption in the patriarchal mansion. Gaskell adapted the nineteenth-century haunted house narrative to counter women’s disorientation and loneliness within the sprawling ancestral home with the enabling appearances of female ancestors, re-configuring mistress-servant relations as a way out of the oppressive laws of space.

Notes 1. Isabella van Elferen, Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2005), 8, 9. 2. Kate Krueger, British Women Writers and the Short Story: Reclaiming Social Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 64. 3. Alexandra Warwick, “Victorian Gothic,” in The Routledge Companion to the Gothic eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London, Routledge, 2007), 30. 4. John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in The Stones of Venice, II (1853) in John Ruskin, Selected Writings ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 32, 51. 5. Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (1867; Farnborough: Gregg, 1971), ix, 40. 6. Charles Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (1872) ed. J. Morduant Crook (1872; Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1970), 1, 8. 7. Dale Townshend, Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 335–36, 337. 8. Peter N. Lindfield, Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730–1840 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016), 195. 9. Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” 33. 10. Lindfield, Georgian Gothic, 196. 11. Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008), 454. 12. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, eds., The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (Manchester: Mandolin/Manchester University Press, 1997), 158, 161. Gaskell also mentions a letter received from Charlotte Brontë referring to The Stones of Venice, which suggests that the two women writers had discussed Ruskin together.

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13. Sasha Handley, Visions from an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 3–4. 14. Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost Seers (1848; Ware: Wordsworth, 2000), 218. 15. Ibid. 16. Henry James, “Lichfield and Warwick,” (1872) in English Hours (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co, 1905), 87. See also Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 58–61, for an account of the story of the elopement of Dorothy Vernon from the Hall in 1558. 17. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” (1919) in The Uncanny trans. David McLintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 132. 18. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 17. 19. Crowe, The Night Side, 219. 20. Ibid., 237. 21. Ibid., 237, 238. 22. Ibid., 238. 23. Ibid., 228. 24. John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (1990; London: Sage, 2011), 14. 25. Emma McEvoy, Gothic Tourism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 133. 26. Elizabeth Gaskell, “Clopton House,” in The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Vol. 1: Journalism, Early Fiction and Personal Writings ed. Joanne Shattock (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), 39. 27. Ibid. 28. Urry, Tourist Gaze, 16. 29. Gaskell, “Clopton House,” 40. 30. Ibid. 31. Diana Wallace, Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 75. 32. Ibid., 77. 33. Gaskell, “Clopton House,” 39. 34. Ibid. The letters suggest a preoccupation with nurseries and their potential links with disease. When moving house Gaskell notes that “the nurseries were not healthy in the otherwise perfect house in Cheetham Hill.” Three cousins in Knutsford die of scarlet fever in 1850 leaving a “childless mother,” “the poor little Knutsford children! And the desolate nursery swept bare.” See Letters, 91, 102. 35. Crowe, The Night Side, 238. 36. Letters , 44. 37. Ibid., 91.

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38. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 39. 39. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Vol. 1 (1854; New York; Cosimo, 2006), 14. The letter is from April 1853. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 15, 16. 42. Ibid., 16. 43. Ibid. 44. McEvoy, Gothic Tourism, 140. 45. Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2001), 58. 46. Lucie Armitt, “The Gothic Girl Child,” in Women and the Gothic eds. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 62. 47. Letters, 81. 48. Jen Cadwallader, Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 8. 49. Louise Henson, “‘Half Believing, Half Incredulous’: Elizabeth Gaskell, Superstition and the Victorian Mind,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24, no. 3 (2002): 251, 253. 50. Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 48. 51. Ibid., 49. 52. Handley, Visions of an Unseen World, 15. 53. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 44. 54. Krueger, British Women Writers, 1, 3. 55. Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House (1871), 3rd edition (London: John Murray, 1864), 67, 66. 56. Jane Hamlett, “‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man’s Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman’s’: Gender and Middle-Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910,” Gender and History 21, no. 3 (2009): 576, 578. 57. Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 41. 58. Mrs. Beeton, Book of Household Management ed. Nicola Humble (1861; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3. 59. Letters, 172, 181. 60. Ibid., 212. 61. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 237–38, 238, 239. 62. Carolyn Lambert, The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2013), 41.

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

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Lefebvre, Production of Space, 87. Crowe, The Night Side, 223. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 403. Ibid., 193. Ilse M. Bussing, “Sequestered Spaces and Defective Doors in Tales by Collins and Riddell,” Ilha do Desterro/Florianopolis 62 (2012): 100. For a reading of Gaskell’s ghost stories in the context of the Victorian supernatural, see the chapter “Victorian Sensations: Supernatural and Weird Tales,” in Emma Liggins, Andrew Maunder, and Ruth Robbins, The British Short Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). Brian W. McCuskey, “The Kitchen Police: Servant Surveillance and Middle-Class Transgression,” Victorian Literature and Culture 1 (2000): 359. David Galef, “‘What Is Done in Youth’: Sibling Rivalry in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story,’” Gothic Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 55, 56. Lambert, The Meanings of Home, 153. Ibid., 153. Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., The Decoration of Houses (1898; New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 20–22. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 176. Ibid., 98. Margarita Georgieva, The Gothic Child (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 175. Armitt, “Gothic Girl Child,” 63. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 227, 228. Kathleen Hudson, Servants and the Gothic, 1764–1831 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019), 25. Diana Wallace, “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic,” Gothic Studies 6, no. 1 (2004): 58. Cadwallader, Spirits and Spirituality, 16. Victoria Margree, “(Other) Worldly Goods: Gender, Money and Property in the Ghost Stories of Charlotte Riddell,” Gothic Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 71. Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 78. Lambert, The Meanings of Home, 141. Wallace, “Ghost Story,” 60. Elizabeth Steere, The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: “Kitchen Literature” (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 162, 163. Hamlett, Material Relations, 62. Ibid., 51. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 209–10.

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90. Rebecca Styler, “The Problem of ‘Evil’ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales,” Gothic Studies 12, no. 1 (2012): 34. 91. Shirley Foster, “Violence and Disorder in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Short Stories,” Gaskell Society Journal 19 (2005): 19. 92. Hamlett, Material Relations, 54. Hamlett does go on to suggest, however, that few middle-class homes had an additional staircase and that boundaries between servants and family were more fluid. See 61–62. 93. See Samuel and Sarah Adams, The Complete Servant: A Practical Guide to the Peculiar Duties and Business of all Descriptions of Servants (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825), 38–39; The Housemaid: Her Duties and how to Perform them (London: Houlston and Sons, 1870), 7–8. 94. Amara Veritas, The Servant Problem: An Attempt at Its Solution by an Experienced Mistress (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co, 1899), 4, 5. 95. Steere, The Female Servant, 34. 96. Crowe, The Night Side, 219. 97. Ibid., 222. 98. Ibid. 99. Veritas, Servant Problem, 8. 100. Hudson, Servants and the Gothic, 200. 101. Hamlett, Material Relations, 56. 102. Foster, “Violence and Disorder,” 16. 103. McCorristine, Spectres of the Self , 138. 104. Melissa Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 57. 105. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 165–66. 106. Ibid., 193. 107. Wallace, “Ghost Story as Female Gothic,” 66. 108. Styler, “The Problem of ‘Evil,’” 38. 109. Ibid., 37. 110. Handley, Visions of an Unseen World, 15. 111. Lambert, The Meanings of Home, 9. 112. Styler, “The Problem of ‘Evil,’” 46. 113. Crowe, The Night Side, 237.

Bibliography Adams, Sarah and Samuel. The Complete Servant: A Practical Guide to the Peculiar Duties and Business of all Descriptions of Servants. London: Knight and Lacey, 1825. Armitt, Lucie. “The Gothic Girl Child.” In Women and the Gothic edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 60–73. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

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Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas. 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014. Beecher Stowe, Harriet. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Vol. 1. 1854; New York; Cosimo, 2006. Beeton, Mrs. Book of Household Management ed. Nicola Humble. 1861; Oxford: World’s Classics, 2000. Bussing, Ilse M. “Sequestered Spaces and Defective Doors in Tales by Collins and Riddell.” Ilha do Desterro/Florianopolis 62 (2012): 99–125. Cadwallader, Jen. Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. Chapple, J. A. V. and Arthur Pollard, eds. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell. Manchester: Mandolin/Manchester University Press, 1997. Crowe, Catherine. The Night Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost Seers. 1848; Ware: Wordsworth: 2000. Dickerson, Vanessa D. Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Eastlake, Charles. A History of the Gothic Revival ed. J. Morduant Crook. 1872; Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1970. Eastlake, Charles. Hints on Household Taste. 1867; Farnborough: Gregg, 1971. Edmundson Makala, Melissa. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010. Foster, Shirley. “Violence and Disorder in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Short Stories.” Gaskell Society Journal 19 (2005): 14–24. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” (1919) In The Uncanny trans. David McClintock, 121–62. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Galef, David. “‘What Is Done in Youth’: Sibling Rivalry in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story.’” Gothic Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 52–65. Gaskell, Elizabeth. “Clopton House.” In The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Vol. 1: Journalism, Early Fiction and Personal Writings edited by Joanne Shattock, 39–41. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005. Gaskell, Elizabeth. Gothic Tales ed. Laura Kranzler. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. Georgieva, Marganita. The Gothic Child. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Hamlett, Jane. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Hamlett, Jane. “‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man’s Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman’s’: Gender and Middle-Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910.” Gender and History 21, no. 3 (2009): 576–91. Handley, Sasha. Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007.

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Henson, Louise. “‘Half Believing, Half Incredulous’: Elizabeth Gaskell, Superstition and the Victorian Mind.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24, no. 3 (2002): 251–69. Hill, Rosemary. God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008. Hudson, Kathleen. Servants and the Gothic, 1764–1831: A Half-Told Tale. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019. James, Henry. “Lichfield and Warwick.” (1872) In English Hours. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co, 1905. Kerr, Robert. The Gentleman’s House. 1864; London: John Murray, 1871. Krueger, Kate. British Women Writers and the Short Story: Reclaiming Social Space. Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2014. Lambert, Carolyn. The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2013. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lethbridge, Lucy. Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Liggins, Emma, Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins. “Victorian Sensations: Supernatural and Weird Tales.” In The British Short Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. Lindfield, Peter N. Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730–1840. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016. Mandler, Peter. The Rise and Fall of the Stately Home. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. Margree, Victoria. “(Other) Worldly Goods: Gender, Money and Property in the Ghost Stories of Charlotte Riddell.” Gothic Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 66–85. McCuskey, Brian W. “The Kitchen Police: Servant Surveillance and Middle-Class Transgression.” Victorian Literature and Culture 1 (2000): 359–75. McCorristine, Shane. Spectres of the Self: Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. McEvoy, Emma. Gothic Tourism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. London: Vintage, 2001. Ruskin, John. Selected Writings ed. Dinah Birch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. 1853; London: Kluwer Press, 2003. Steere, Elizabeth. The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: Kitchen Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Styler, Rebecca. “The Problem of ‘Evil’ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales.” Gothic Studies 12, no. 1 (2012): 34–50. The Housemaid: Her Duties and How to Perform Them. London: Houlston and Sons, 1870.

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Tinniswood, Adrian. The Polite Tourist: A History of Country House Visiting. 1989; London: National Trust, 1998. Townshend, Dale. Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Urry, John and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. 1990; London: Sage, 2011. Veritas, Amara. The Servant Problem: An Attempt at Its Solution by an Experienced Mistress. London: Simpkin and Co, 1899. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992. Wallace, Diana. “‘A Woman’s Place.’” In Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 74–88. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Wallace, Diana. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales, 2013. Wallace, Diana. “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic.” Gothic Studies 6, no. 1 (2004): 57–68. Wharton, Edith and Ogden Codman, Jr. The Decoration of Houses. 1898; New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.

CHAPTER 3

Left Out in the Cold: Exclusion and Communications with the Female Ancestor in the ghost stories of Margaret Oliphant

In her Stories of the Seen and Unseen (1889, expanded in 1902 after her death), Margaret Oliphant explored the legal and financial exclusion of women in relation to their yearning for space, their sense of being shut out from domestic comfort. Oliphant’s ageing female householders, disinherited daughters and ancestors with buried stories are used to examine society’s uncertainties and fears about the older woman and female inheritance. The spectral narrative is often organised around an encounter with a ghostly ancestor in order to reflect on the importance of inter-generational ties and legacies. Helen Hanson points out that “A ‘backstory’ forms a key part of the female gothic narrative, specifically what it reveals about another woman, and her relations to the gothic husband/lover. Understanding another woman’s story is at the centre of the female gothic heroine’s own.”1 Often key figures and narrators in Oliphant’s narratives, male visitors act as intercessors to the spectral world, mediating or reinterpreting the buried stories of female ancestors who have trouble speaking for themselves. The spectral backstories are not always organised around husbands and lovers, however, but comment more specifically on women’s relations with other women. Reviewers admired Oliphant’s supernatural writing for its “weird and gruesome excursions into that unseen world” and her sympathetic depiction of “the pathetic loneliness of the unclothed soul – separated by © The Author(s) 2020 E. Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_3

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an invisible but impregnable barrier from all that it loves.”2 Her work is particularly significant in terms of the concept of invisibility, because of her complex play on the notion of “the seen and the unseen,” an opposition she used throughout her supernatural tales. Vanessa Dickerson’s influential discussion of the ghost’s important correspondence to the Victorian woman’s visibility and invisibility has shaped our understandings of the gendering of the spectral encounter.3 But there is more to be said about haunted space in relation to geographies of privacy and spatial freedom or restriction, and more than one way of being invisible. Writing on the “invisible identities of the visible,” spatial theorist Henri de Certeau argues that, “sites that have been lived in are filled with the presence of absences … every site is haunted by countless ghosts that lurk there in silence, to be ‘evoked’ or not.” These haunted sites contain “fragmentary and convoluted histories, pasts stolen by others from readability, folded up ages that can be unfolded but that are there more as narratives in suspense, like a rebus.”4 The pasts stolen from readability are unearthed, uncovered in the ghost story, not only to offer a revelation about the past but to offer a revelation about the site itself as a place of absence or trauma. The 1860s to 1880s has been identified as the “golden age of spiritualism” when séances, mediumship and communication with the dead attracted public attention.5 Clearly influenced by spiritualist debates, Victorian women writers often represented the trauma of mourning and spectral encounters in relation to the yearning to communicate or speculation about the afterlife. Tatiana Kontou has written of “the thrilling and unsettling ambiguity of the séance” with its unfiltered messages, a paradigmatic means of communication between the living and the dead.6 Sigmund Freud too recognised the importance of scientific uncertainty to an experience of the uncanny in his discussion of the return of the dead. The fear of the uncanny can be activated by residual or repressed beliefs about the supernatural: “as soon as something happens in our lives that seems to confirm these old, discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of the uncanny,” argues Freud, “[as if to acknowledge] that the dead really do go on living and manifest themselves at the scene of their former activities.”7 According to Elizabeth McCarthy, Oliphant’s scepticism towards spiritualism, despite its comforts, is at odds with the prevailing sense in her ghost stories that “the supernatural is not destructive”; instead, mourning and the possibilities of connection with the dead are crucial to ghostly behaviour.8 Her female ghosts often

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express the difficulties of communicating across generations and between the living and the dead, exploring the potential crossing of the “invisible but impregnable barrier” in the spaces of the drawing-room, the library and the garden. Architectural historians have highlighted the “matrix of the performative, the textual and the spatial [which] created the late-Victorian domestic interior,” where the usages of rooms and the social interactions within the private sphere conditioned the ways in which domestic space was experienced by women.9 Drawing on Oliphant’s autobiographical writing about her own occupation of gendered space and her understandings of home, this chapter argues that Victorian domestic interiors and gardens were rendered uncanny by absence, overwhelming domestic responsibilities and women’s lack of space for themselves. Luce Irigaray has written about the paradoxical fixedness of women’s place in a patriarchal economy. Addressing a representative masculine figure, she laments, “[You] deprive me of the place where I take place … Everywhere you shut me in. Always you assign a place to me.”10 Both shut in and shut out, the Victorian woman struggles to find her place in a rigidly gendered domestic regime. In her polemical essay, “The Grievances of Women” (1880), Oliphant discussed the “science of housekeeping” in terms of the burdens of running the home. The wife has to “watch over all the minutiae of household living … keep a careful eye upon weekly bills, and invent daily dinners, and keep servants in order, and guide the whole complicated machinery so that nothing shall jar or creak.”11 This sense of the “complicated machinery” of the domestic underpins the disruptions to household harmony occasioned by female ghosts who seek to correct or atone for the ominous creaking of unlivable homes. The haunted space and its attendant thresholds offer a commentary on the positioning of women within the home and the estate, which is shown to be tied up with the vanishing of the aristocratic way of life in Scotland as well as anxieties over women’s property rights. Like other Victorian and modernist women writers, Oliphant singles out the drawing-room and the library as haunted spaces, oppressively gendered. Her focus on all-female, female-headed or all-male households, however, becomes a way to disrupt the gendering of the home. In “The Library Window,” a young girl is drawn to a phantom library visible from her aunt’s drawing-room recess, whereas in “The Portrait,” father and son are lured out of the library to be haunted by the absent mother in

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the deadly drawing-room. The lesser-known stories “Earthbound” and “The Lady’s Walk” are more unusual in their exploration of the haunted garden as a place both domestic and unhomely, a place, according to Sarah Bilston, “reserved, private, an extension of the domestic sphere, yet … necessarily outside the home.”12 The chapter also rereads “Old Lady Mary” in terms of the invisibility of older women and the maternal line. Tracing the connections between female ancestors and their descendants is revealing of the difficulties as well as the necessities of spiritual communication in Oliphant’s haunted spaces.

Strangers in the Drawing-Room: The Horrors of Visiting The slippage of terms between the ghost, the guest, the visitor and the stranger in Victorian ghost stories is indicative of the ways in which nineteenth-century households were constantly being “invaded,” disrupted or disturbed by those outside the family. In his discussion of Victorian tourism, Peter Mandler identifies the 1850s onwards as “the first age of mass visiting” of country houses and medieval castles, with visitors particularly attracted by the combination of old and modern features, as well as the romantic or tragic histories attached to the edifices. “In any Victorian competition between taste and history” argues Mandler, “history would always win out.”13 Over a hundred houses were advertised as open to the public in the 1860s and 1870s.14 By this period the visitor in the ghost story often operates like a tourist. The reader is encouraged to share the narrator’s admiration for the period features and his/her vision of a violent past, often marked by female mortality. Visitors are often invited to admire the portrait gallery, a key feature of the aristocratic residence whose Gothic resonances were well established by the mid-nineteenth century. Gothic texts tend to identify elements of evil or degeneration in family portraits, thus raising questions about inherited taints within the family. As Kamilla Elliott has argued, aristocratic portraiture can be remythologised in the Gothic text in order to “co-opt it for bourgeois ascendancy.”15 Visiting practices in the mid- to late-Victorian period took a variety of forms. The practice of visiting aristocratic houses, which were designed with multiple guest bedrooms, was to facilitate marriage, business and inheritance, and therefore stabilise class identity and wealth. House-parties, or “prolonged visits,” often during the dark winter months, relieved the boredom of upper-class daughters

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and allowed for mixed-sex interaction.16 If, as Luke Thurston argues, the ghost story can be seen as “both a host story and a guest story,” then the arrival of the guest seems to activate spectral encounters.17 The male visitor/guest/tourist also disrupts household hierarchies and threatens the position of the daughters of the house, looking in as an outsider in the same way that the daughter, imprisoned within the domestic routine, might look hopefully out. In Oliphant’s autobiography, both the childhood and the marital home are figured as patriarchal places of confinement, loss and overcrowding. Her vision of home, like Elizabeth Gaskell’s, was shaped by her experiences of motherhood and family; in addition to raising three children, she took in and helped to raise four children of her widowed brother who then died in 1875. Always struggling to support her family on her writer’s income after her husband’s death, Oliphant moved house on a number of occasions, shuttling between Scotland and England in order to be near family and friends. The return to the childhood home in Wallyford in Scotland is framed by its absence, as the house had been pulled down and an “aggressive and very commonplace new farmhouse built in its place.”18 Trying to reimagine a house “of which I had no recollection,” she thinks of it as “a pleasant homely house,” its homeliness associated particularly with an imagined “delightful large low drawing-room” with five windows overlooking Arthur’s Seat.19 This could be read as a version of Gaston Bachelard’s dream house, where “the houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us,” often generating “a sort of remorse at not having lived profoundly enough in the old house.”20 Her sense of the household as ruled by men is evident in her descriptions of her childhood home: Oliphant’s father had a “horror of strangers, and would never see any one who came to the house, which was a continual wet blanket to my mother’s cordial, hospitable nature,”21 so that hospitality is here shown to be an attribute of the feminine. Of her marital home she records, “It looked all happy enough but was not, for my husband and my mother did not ‘get on.’”22 She writes of keeping her husband and mother apart, “while I stole to her daily though she never crossed my doors,” showing women’s ability to creep across boundaries in male-ordered space.23 The lost homeliness of the house, a haunting homelessness, is connected to the patriarchal order which becomes part of what Henri Lefebvre has identified as the “rules of space” with its “networks of exchange.”24 According to the Victorian architect Robert Kerr in his influential guide The Gentleman’s House (1864), visitors were key figures in the household economy, who would have been ushered on set routes or

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“thoroughfares” through the house. The family apartments, argued Kerr, should be designed for “quiet comfort for [a gentleman’s] family and guests,” so that the ideals of spaciousness, privacy and convenience were available for both.25 Privacy, the most desired of these ideals, could be attained by preserving the boundaries between the family and the staff: “let the family have free passage-way without encountering the servants unexpectedly; and let the servants have access to all their duties without coming unexpectedly upon the family or visitors.”26 These unexpected encounters in the thoroughfares, the undesired visibility of groups who should remain invisible to each other, sound like the spectral encounters in which guests also play a key role. Ghosts are usually restricted to, or transgress, particular domestic zones, which fit with the stories they have to tell. Gendered divisions are also preserved in Oliphant’s own visiting practices. On a visit with her artist husband to another artist’s house nearby, she: joined the wife in her little drawing-room, while he went upstairs to the studio. (They all had the drawing-room proper of the house, the first-floor room, for their studios). We women talked below of our subjects, as young wives and young mothers do … the men above smoked and talked their subjects, investigating the picture of the moment, going over it with advice and criticism.27

This gendering of space with the “proper” drawing-room reclaimed for the men is suggestive of its hierarchical structure, with the women below and the men above. Transformations in domestic architecture towards the end of the century affected visiting practices and the behaviour of guests, whose claim to space within the home was declining. Yet as late as 1911 the guest chamber was still recognised as an important room within the smaller house, and making it into a comfortable space a key factor in stabilising hostess/visitor relations.28 The reappearance of visitors from the dead activates the uncovering of a story to be interpreted by the household inhabitants, as what Thurston refers to as “the narrative encounter between host and guest” becomes a way of uncovering the secrets of the past and questioning household organisation.29 Architectural and design advice on the mid-Victorian drawing-room, a space associated with women and visitors, hinted at its Gothic undertones, with its sepulchral qualities attracting more attention towards the end of the century. Kerr defined the drawing-room, one of the “lady’s apartments,” as a “ladylike” space, a place of refinement and elegance.30

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In The Drawing-Room: Its Decorations and Furniture (1877), Lucy Orrinsmith begins with a vision of the “evils” of the ordinary Victorian drawing-room, “the very head-quarters of commonplace, with its strict symmetry of adornment and its pretentious uselessness.”31 As if to enforce submission, the furniture acquires sinister properties, “the cold, hard, unthinking white marble mantlepiece, surmounted by the inevitable mirror … the fireplace a marvellous exhibition of the power of iron and blacklead to give discomfort to the eye.”32 “Spider-legged” chairs are dangerous in their instability, the over-patterning of the carpet borders on “frenzy.” Because of the “showy discomfort” of the room, where visitors “do penance” at morning calls and “the pursuit of brightness leads to tawdry garishness,” this rather alarming space is “avoided, except on occasions, by the dwellers … deterred by its lack of comfort.”33 Bad taste comes to take on the characteristics of evil which can only be remedied by an attention to design: as Orrinsmith remonstrates, “if an Englishman’s house is his castle, he has no right to make it a suite of artistic ‘chambers of horrors,’” which may be unduly distressing to innocent visitors.34 In her vision of the importance of decoration, the “numberless trifles in a well-garnished drawing-room” can afford great pleasure to onlookers, so that “it would be impossible to commit a mean action in a gracefully furnished room.”35 Yet the disturbing language she uses suggests that even well-decorated rooms might generate horrors. In The Art of the House (1897), Rosamund Marriott Watson mourned the loss of some of the traditions of the country house and its replacement by the cramped modern villa whilst recognising that shaking off the shackles of Victorianism could be liberating for female inhabitants of the house. She writes of the tendencies of the white and gold drawing-room to resemble a “painted sepulchre” and wonders how this garishly decorated space, bordering on the obsolete, will fare in the future.36 The average parlour is characterised as “a dispiriting combination of flimsiness and ambitious pretence. It is the decorative insincerity of the present day, the simulation of old-world feeling in ornament and furniture that seems to forbid, for the time being at least, any really estimable or spontaneous development.”37 This emphasis by women designers on the dangers of discomfort, deformity and bad taste in a room meant for show but instead “crowded with ugly shapes”38 is suggestive of the unnerving experience of occupying the drawing-room, where women had to contend with the evil symmetry of its furniture as well as the stifling conventionality it represented.

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The Haunted Garden: “Earthbound” and “The Lady’s Walk” Haunted gardens and spectral ruins on the edges of the estate are recurring features in Oliphant’s ghost fiction. Detailed descriptions of the features of the grounds pander to the tourist gaze whilst revealing the uncanniness of architectural design, as the garden, like the haunted house, becomes gloomy, unnerving and difficult to navigate. The grounds of country houses were a key aspect of the visiting experience of Victorian tourists, who flocked in their thousands to the pleasure gardens of Enville Hall in Staffordshire or Chatsworth in Derbyshire, which boasted vast conservatories, Gothic follies, aquariums and fountains.39 Jenny Uglow characterises the Victorian garden as “a showcase for display” with its exotic flowers and topiary but also a place of seclusion, a retreat from the outside world.40 In the editorial foreword to the volume In Praise of Old Gardens (1901), abandoned and forsaken gardens are seen as aesthetically pleasing, not least because of the “beauty in decay” they might display.41 In her essay in this volume “Old Italian Gardens,” Vernon Lee shows how gardens lend themselves towards the ghostly. Such enchanted realms are never perfect unless “furnished” by Time with “weather stains and mosses,” with their “mysterious chambers roofed in with ilex and box.”42 Pondering the question of the garden’s relationship to its spectral owners, Lee suggests that “it is not the whole ghosts of the ladies and cavaliers of long ago who haunt the gardens; not the ghost of their every day, humdrum likeness to ourselves, but the ghosts of certain moments of their existence … momentary transcendent graces and graciousness, unaccountable wistfulness and sorrow … which have permeated their old haunts.”43 The unaccountable sorrows of ghostly ladies are memorialised in these green spaces with their hidden secrets and mysterious chambers, “what these gardens must be when the key has turned in their rusty gates, and the doorkeeper gone to sleep.”44 One of the first well-known female gardeners, Gertrude Jekyll, in her popular book with Lawrence Weaver, Gardens for Small Country Houses (1912), emphasised “the right relation of the garden to the house,” advising, “the connection must be intimate, and the access not only convenient but inviting.”45 The gendered repercussions of the garden as an alternative form of intimate space, both inviting and mysterious, repurpose the spatialities of women “shut out” from, or choosing to temporarily escape, the domestic economy.

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In “Earthbound” (1880) the male visitor to Daintrey, a house of mourning, encounters the ghost of a female ancestor who haunts the borders of the estate, an encounter which temporarily distracts him from his courting of the second daughter, Maud Beresford. Despite the father expressing his distaste for visitors, Edmund Coventry, formerly the ward of Sir Robert, is a frequent addition to the household, who, “now in his manhood calculated upon being a member of the Daintrey party at all those periods which are specially dedicated to home” (138).46 The male visitor’s replacement of the dead male heir, usurping his role as member of the household, can be seen as an attempt to assert his legitimacy and masculinity. Daintrey, a church-like house “of no particular period,” with a court “shut in” by a high wall (141), becomes gloomier with its dark procession of female members in their black mourning dress. It is a place where the visitors discuss spiritualism and the “older ghostly traditions, which we are all half glad to think cannot be explained” (140), where the masculine dismissal of the ghost at Daintrey is countered by Lady Beresford’s cautious response, “I believe there is something – very vague” (140). This feminine acknowledgement of ghostly traditions and the unexplained heralds the uncovering of the buried story of the earthbound Maud Beresford, one hundred years dead, who is both inside and outside the family home. As her portrait is hidden away, her spectral appearances in the garden become the only way to communicate. Elliott writes of the ways in which an unnamed and unnarrated ancestress “forces her own picture identification when she appears as a ghost” in Walter Scott’s “The Tapestried Chamber” (1828), a story Oliphant is likely to have read. Female spectrality forces narration of “revisionist histories” which can only be guessed at by contemplating ancestral portraits.47 The portrait gallery, “the vacant old place” (165) which hides her dusty portrait, is paired in this story with the walled garden as a repository of female secrets. As an “other” realm, the garden is paradoxically under patriarchal control (and often under surveillance) but also outside it, a non-domestic environment which offers women freedom and access to the forgotten past. The visitor to Daintrey is invited to admire, “a green terrace, as high as the windows of the sitting-rooms, ascended by handsome marble steps ornamented with vases as in an Italian garden, and separated by the brilliant parterres of the flower-garden from the house” (141–42). According to Lee, the many monuments, vases, sarcophagi and broken statues, “stacked up in every empty space” in the old Italian garden, prompt the

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viewer to contemplate the past, as its outside rooms become a space of connection between “those ancient times and these modern ones.”48 The Victorian garden, argues Sarah Bilston, symbolised “not-home,” “a freer space than the home in an entirely concrete and immediate fashion,” as well as a “broader and even public realm for women’s activity,” linked to the rise of the female gardener and designer.49 But its not-homeliness can also signal the uncanny and the unknown, linked to Certeau’s conceptualisations of alternative spaces, “non-sites carved out by the law of the other.”50 The beauty of the Lime-tree Walk in “Earthbound” is marred by “a high brick wall, quite out of place, screening in a square and rather gloomy angle of grass,” which contains a pedestal holding an ugly, “funereal” vase “raised to commemorate no one knew what” (142). Walled gardens, even if they were not fully enclosed, operated as places of “privacy, protection, practicality and pleasure,” secret enclosures for “private talks or romantic dalliances.”51 The Victorian fashion for secret gardens and what Jekyll and Weaver describe as “green parlours”52 also raised concerns about what or who is excluded or screened from view, as well as who gains privacy and pleasure. A hundred years old, the wall is an object of mystery, “perhaps … built to stop some right of way” (142). The door in the wall, “built to shut out no one knew what” (142), is sometimes locked and the key misplaced. The opening of the forbidden door, as Bachelard claims, can generate the telling of the story, as hovering on the threshold of “the doors of mere curiosity” activates the desire for “an unknown that is not even imagined.”53 The uncertainty about the architectural design of the Victorian garden clusters around the door into the unknown. Walled into her estate, the spectral female ancestor’s visibility to the visitor is a plea across the generations to rescue her namesake from a similar fate of confinement. Edmund’s twilight encounters with a mysterious lady dressed in an “entirely inappropriate” (145) white dress take place in this space of uncertainty, as the ghost of another Maud, who he initially mistakes for “one of the girls masquerading” (143), passes through the portal in the wall. Also mistaken for the daughter of the lodge-keeper, the ghostly Maud is an ancestor with a buried secret; her inappropriate dress and freedom of movement outside the house appear to have been punished in an undisclosed past, as hers is the untold story commemorated by the funeral urn. Both ghost and ghost-seer occupy similarly liminal positions; of their meeting Edmund considers his raising of his hat, “a thing any gentleman ought to have done, meeting her there,

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all alone, a stranger in the place, where he was himself at home” (152). Yet they are both strangers in a place which can only become home through marriage and the stabilising of class identity. Both the ward of the family, a figure supposedly “free of the house” (160), and a disgraced daughter feel more at home on the outskirts of the estate than within the walls of Daintrey. Jekyll and Weaver write of the yew hedges which give “good protection and [a] sense of enclosing comfort,” whilst recommending that walls of brick or stone, particularly with the “precious patina” of age, offer “the best of garden boundaries.”54 The ghostly Maud experiences some of this “enclosing comfort” in the garden, unable to move beyond her invisibility within the house. She only has a limited freedom of movement around the home and is not visible to the family: I go all about … sometimes into the house; but no one sees me … I have seen a great many, a great many … they all come and go, but they do not see me. That is the punishment I have. The house is altered. But I take a great interest in it; I was always fond of it. (155)

Her look when he offers to take her home is “almost mocking” (155) as if she recognises the impossibility of her finding sanctuary; the alterations in the house contrast with the fixity of her position on the border between the seen and unseen. Her position in the walk does not depend on the gardeners’ keys, and she can appear and vanish at will. Edmund’s position, “leaning against one of the lime trees, gazing at the green space which contained the pedestal and the urn,” indicates that he, like the ghost, has become “fond of this place” (163). The enabling “green space” in this story, haunt of outsiders, is paired with the traditionally Gothic confines of the old portrait gallery, which has “all the accumulations of an old house – all kinds of grim portraits of early Beresfords” (164). With a direct route to the master’s library, it is a more fitting spot for a potential heir to be cautioned by the household patriarch. The revelation that Maud is a Beresford daughter from 1777 is linked to the possibility of his sighting being a “delusion” linked to a repressed childhood memory. Elliott has noted “portraiture’s long-standing associations with absent presence,” linking these to middle-class narratives of class contest,55 but the absent presence of the ancestress here also draws attention to her forgotten history, “No one sees me” (168). The “earthbound” female ancestor cannot pass on her story, though perhaps the final marriage between Edmund and Maud, “which Lady Beresford had

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always thought would be so very suitable” (170) is a form of atonement for her undisclosed sins. The ambiguity of the final sentence, “Perhaps her time of willing punishment is over, and she is earthbound no more” (170) suggests that her appearance has guaranteed the outsider’s infiltration of the aristocratic house, and the daughter’s respectability. The commemoration of a threatened race in this house of mourning lacks coherence, as if to emphasise the fragility of the ties between ancestress and descendant. A challenge to this fragility is mounted in the more complex haunted garden narrative “The Lady’s Walk,” set in the Scottish Highlands, published in two parts in Longman’s (1882–1883), before appearing, with some additional scenes, as a one-volume novel in 1897. Often neglected by critics or missed out of anthologies, the 1882–1883 version is an interesting variation on the lost mother motif, with a ghostly visitant communicating from the lime avenue frequented by the ladies of the house. In “The Lady’s Walk,” a motherless family are taken care of by the “sister-mother” (17) Charlotte Campbell, who raises her younger siblings whilst her brothers work in the family firm.56 On the death of her daughter, Oliphant recorded in her autobiography her recognition that she had “no-one to help me to make a bright home for [her sons],”57 indicating the ways in which women are left to bear the responsibility of homemaking for men alone. The domestic environment of an imposing Scottish mansion-house, Ellermore, is both traditional and modern, its relative newness showing the clash between the declining aristocracy and the rise of the commercial classes, “perhaps more like the house of a rich merchant than of a family of long descent” (15). Significantly, the narrator is an English lawyer, Mr Temple, who will rescue the family from the loss of wealth which forces them to put the house on the market. Boasting a loch, “Scotch-French tourelles ” and a “sweep of emerald lawn” (152), the estate is differentiated from English culture; Oliphant teaches the reader the word “‘policy,’ as the grounds surrounding a country house are called in Scotland” (18). Probably based on Ederline House in the Highlands, which had its own loch, it also, according to her cousin and biographer, incorporated some of the hidden history of Drayton House, in Northamptonshire.58 Oliphant’s visit to Drayton House is likely to have included an amble around the extensive gardens, which included a sundial, statues, and a lime-tree avenue. The lime-tree avenue, or “walk,” is a haunted space, a site of liminality far enough from the house to ensure privacy or solitude, but within calling distance of the family.59 The secluded walk has become the domain of women, a place to escape from

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the never-ending round of domestic duties, often occupied by Charlotte at twilight once her young charges have gone to bed. But the privacy of green space is short-lived: twice in the story the “sister-mother” is called to the house away from her walks with the narrator. The ghostly footsteps which echo in the walk, “an aural delusion,” come from a parallel path which has fallen into disuse; Mr Temple speculates about whether the path was “a byroad to the farm or the stables which …echoed back the sounds of passing feet in some subterranean vibration” (32–33). The footsteps are identified by Charlotte as those of the Lady of Ellermore, who guards the family from misfortune: She was the eldest daughter like me; and I think she has got to be our guardian angel. There is no harm going to happen as long as she is here …. She lived here all her life, and had several generations to take care of. Oh no, there was no murder or wrong about our Lady; she just loved Ellermore above everything; and my idea is that she has been allowed the care of us ever since. (20–21)

The symbolic wringing of the hands, a gesture shared by daughter and ghost, unite the ladies of Ellermore in their anxious guardianship of the household. The narrator’s feelings of “great compassion for the lonely watcher thus rebelling in a heavenly way of love against the law of nature that separated her from visible life” prompt a rumination on the doubling between daughter and ghost: “My old idea that it might be Charlotte herself in an unconscious shadow-shape, whose protecting, motherly love made these efforts unawares, glided gratefully into the feeling that it was an earlier Charlotte, her very kin and prototype, who could not even now let God manage her race without her aid” (182). The footsteps of the daughter also echo around the house, as she noiselessly tends to her siblings and her widowed father, taking up the role of lost mother, the guardian of the race. In a story which dwells on “the freedom and quiet of a rural walk” (58), walking in the grounds is a way for women to access the “freedom and quiet” denied within the structure of the house whilst ostensibly remaining within the domestic domain. The haunted walk, owned by the ladies, is a space of reassurance, a reminder of an eldest daughter’s need for privacy and reflection. In the Gothic narrative, according to Ilse Bussing, “people react physically and emotionally to haunted space,” often exhibiting a “peculiar sensitivity to architectural space.”60 For the daughter of the house, the ghost is

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a reassuring presence, a reminder of her caring role. For the male visitor, she arouses an erotic reaction through the excess of his fear, as well as a forward-looking distaste for the entrapment of the traditional woman within the home. Being confined to the grounds in Mr Temple’s eyes is “a poor sort of reward for a good woman. If she had been a bad one, it might have answered very well for a punishment … there is such a thing as being too devoted to a family” (87). But despite being within calling distance of the family, the lady’s walk is less a confinement than a sanctuary. The quasi-domestic space of the grounds is a refuge from domestic duty: her brother tells the narrator, that to avoid infecting her older siblings with the children’s scarlet fever, she “shut herself in … she would only go out for her walk when all of us were out of the way” (7). Reworking the trope of the lost mother familiar from the Female Gothic narrative, Oliphant repositions spectral maternity outside the domestic interior where it is sometimes contained or contaminated. Oliphant’s familiar concerns about inadequate communication between the living and the dead are again emblematic of the difficulties of communicating across the generations. The ghost who approaches Mr Temple laments, “I cannot speak to them. I must not speak to them … I can do nothing; nor even speak, nor even speak” (46). The ghost cannot communicate directly with her kin but chooses to issue her warnings about the dissipation of the oldest son, Colin, via the visitor—operating as an “invisible visitor” (43) to the estate in her turn. Charlotte is upset that the message about her brother has been confided to a “stranger.” As Gaston Bachelard has argued in his troubling of the opposition between inside and outside, the two terms operate more as a dialectic; “inside and outside, as experienced by the imagination, can no longer be taken in their simple reciprocity.”61 The ghost’s liminality, often likened to the visitor or stranger within the home, raises questions about the opposition between inside and outside, between insiders and outsiders. Significantly, the patriarchal father believes the warning issued by the ghostly lady to be that of “some intrusive woman … some busybody” (72), as if women should have no control within the family. Spectral messaging appears as an outdated and limited means of communication compared to the telegraph station in the little village, perpetually used by men of business who “flashed messages about continually” (57). The uncanny speed of modern communication systems to the Victorians has been identified as one aspect of the transformation of daily life by modern technologies, here set against the inadequacies of spirits struggling to speak.62

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The limited agency and powers of the female ghost symbolise women’s difficulties in protecting the family. According to Simon Hay, the haunted space in the nineteenth century is often “an aristocratic property into which commoners are moving”; such “aristocratic residences, either falling into decay or newly inhabited by the bourgeoisie,” symbolised fears about class mobility.63 The family dreads that Englishmen will buy the loch and bring “a horde of Cockney sportsmen” (157) to their traditional home. This threat of new bourgeois inhabitants in Oliphant’s ghost fiction is annexed to lone women’s inability to inherit the estate or to pass on property to their female heirs. The lawyer narrator’s compassion for the ghost, for her potential suffering if her house were occupied by “an alien family” (159), cannot disguise his own desire for possession of the estate and the daughter. The ghostly footsteps precipitate the male urge for mastery, “I began to speculate on the possibility even yet of saving the old house” (157). Charlotte’s “panic” about losing her home is typically couched in terms of the ghost’s failure to prevent trouble for the family: Perhaps to die does not make a woman wise any more than life does … She will think that she can stop any harm that is coming being here, but if it was not God’s pleasure to stop it, how could she … “Oh go back to your home, my bonnie lady and let us trouble you no more!, we are of one stock … go back to your pleasant place, and say to my mother that I will never leave them …Oh you know how anxious she was; but neither her nor me could do it – neither her nor me! (163–65)

The links between female ancestors here are seen as fragile. Despite the suggested communication with the lost mother and the references to their “stock,” the shared anxiety of both ladies of Ellermore is not enough to challenge patriarchal power, “neither her nor me could do it.” Both women tempt fate by “trying to be the providence of the house” (182). Oliphant recorded in her autobiography the responsibilities for mothers and aunts of filling an absence after deaths in the family, “My heart fails me when I think how entirely I represent home to the others.”64 By representing home and guiding its machinery, women seek to atone for absence, but only on their own terms. Charlotte’s claim that she cannot “recompense” Temple for his inheritance, “that is out of my power” (200), is also a refusal to grant him affection, repositioning the male in the state of “longing.” The ghost’s refusal to answer Temple’s final call is interpreted as an acknowledgement of this limited power, “Had she gone

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back heart-sick to her home in heaven, acknowledging at last that it was not hers to guard her race?.” Yet these two refusals of male demands, by both ghost and new wife, suggest that women deploy their limited agency to guard their descendants.

Ghostly Communication and Female Inheritance: “Old Lady Mary” The traumatic loss of family members was a stark reality of the Victorian period, an age of high infant mortality. In their ghost stories, women writers drew on their own mourning practices and experiences, which often, as Oliphant’s autobiography attests, encouraged a reflection on the possibilities of communication with the dead. Three of Oliphant’s children died as babies, she was widowed in 1859, her daughter Maggie succumbed to fever aged ten in Rome, and her two grown-up sons died in their thirties shortly before her own death. Writing in 1864, Oliphant frames the death of her daughter both in terms of the desperate desire to communicate and in terms of a haunting absence: Oh if I could but see you, could but hear of you, only for a moment. My heart yearns for sight rather than faith. But vain, vain are all the yearnings of the heart. It is not yet six weeks that she has gone from me and already new habits, new arrangements are rising over the vacant place. The place that has known her knows her no more and I must go though my darling has stopped short … I have to bear the loss, the pang unshared.65

The “vacant place” of the dead daughter, a spatial as well as a spiritual absence, is quickly replaced by new routines which disrupt the mourning process. The haunted “place that has known her” is the place where the mother “yearns for sight,” an anticipation of the yearning for the unseen in Oliphant’s ghost stories. Reduced to “a curl of the dear hair and another name upon the marble out at Testaccio,”66 the Protestant cemetery in Rome where she was buried in her father’s grave, the ghostly daughter activates the loss which is here figured as a burden to be borne by women alone. Perceptions of mourning as a “sad horror,” her life “darkened” are heightened by Victorian uncertainties about the desired communication with the dead.67 The emptiness in the house, “the blank deepening down, the immoveable darkness, the silence” after her son Tiddy’s death, is also figured in terms of a menacing horror, “When I am left alone at night I feel as if I am left to meet the shadow that has

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been waiting for me all the day.”68 In both instances, absence is associated with speculation about the ghostly. The grieving mother is unsure whether she has imagined feeling her dead son’s presence in her bedroom, wondering, “was it he?, or was it only some trick of the mind? I cannot but think it was some momentary contact, permitted to give me a little strength.”69 This “momentary contact” with the dead becomes a way of assuaging loss, in a home of blankness and darkness which “knows [them] no more.” The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1874 and 1882, endorsing women’s ownership of land, houses and capital, shone a spotlight onto the female householder, or feme sole. This legal term, used in discussions of property and on census returns, referred to a widow or spinster, usually an older middle- or upper-class woman, who supported herself in a home without male adults. In Scotland, which had a different legal system relating to marriage, a less extensive series of Women’s Property Acts were passed, in 1877, 1880 and 1881, under which women were restricted by the need to ask their husband’s consent to make investments or decisions about property, though they gained greater ownership rights than English women.70 As a Scottish woman writer, Oliphant drew on the differences between Scottish and English law in relation to marriage and property, and often brought the figure of the lawyer into her narratives to mitigate against women’s decisions about money and management of the estate. In their discussion of the role and function of the older woman in Gothic narratives, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik have posed the pertinent question, “Does Gothic fiction reiterate the prejudices of a society which finds the older woman either redundant or threatening?”71 Certainly, the redundancy of women outside heterosexual marriage was a talking point at mid-century, and those women who had outlived their husbands, or had always been “old maids,” were perceived as threatening to the social order, not least because of the possibilities of financial independence. To consider the representation of the ageing mistress of the house in Victorian ghost stories, and the effects of her haunting on younger members of the family, is to question the extent to which the female householder ever attains a position of power within the Gothic mode. Issues of inheritance and inter-generational communication generate trauma in one of Oliphant’s most original ghost stories, “Old Lady Mary,” in which an eighty-five-year-old wealthy widow, living only with a beloved god-daughter, ignores her doctor’s and lawyer’s requests to finalise a will to provide for her young namesake. Lady Mary then dies

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intestate, having concealed a hastily written testament in a secret drawer of an Italian cabinet in her bedroom. As a ghost she must suffer the consequences of ignoring her lawyer’s advice. Innovatively told from the perspective of the dead woman, the story is an anguished account of the difficulties of communicating with the living, which denies the fortuitous discovery of the lost will until the final page. The “panic in the house” (265) occasioned by the servants’ hysterical rumours about the ghostly lady with her sweeping skirts implies another panic about inter-generational ties, about the passing of wealth and wisdom between women. Only the female members of the household, as well as children and dogs, are able to sense the ghostly presence of the former owner, though they cannot understand her messages: the dead mistress cannot open the secret drawer, nor guide her god-daughter towards it. According to Jennifer Bann, ghostly agency is on the increase in the later nineteenth century, after the development of spiritualism, so that in the ghost story “death began to bring freedom … and ghosts became active figures empowered rather than constrained by their deaths.”72 Yet these failures of spectral communication suggest the vulnerability of the female householder and the collapse of the bonds of loyalty and trust which secure household hierarchies. The nouveau riche family who rent the house after Lady Mary’s death operate as “strangers” within the community, whose encounters with the disinherited ward and with the old lady ghost are marked by class antagonism and snobbery. That the ghostly must be aligned with the old aristocracy is reiterated in Mary’s thought that “to suggest that a new family, a city family, should have brought an apparition of their own with them, was too ridiculous an idea to be entertained” (249). The new owner’s dismissal of the notion of haunting as “vulgar” is significantly seen by the younger Mary as “a desecration of her home” (248), suggesting that spectral occupation becomes necessary to retain links with the traditions of the past. To revisit the lost home, as Bachelard suggests, is to cross a threshold into unreality.73 It is to be confronted with the architectural uncanny, concurs Anthony Vidler, the familiar coziness now “oozing dread.”74 The spectral return to Lady Mary’s old home is a return to a place that is “all shut up and silent – not a window lighted along the whole front of the house which used to twinkle and glitter with lights” (240). The house that is “shut up,” abandoned, in the process of being passed over to the new family, is transformed from a site of aristocratic privilege and patronage to a place of isolation and self-interest. Terror becomes the

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experience of the unseen ghost, “condemned to wander for ever among familiar places that knew her no more,” where none can “see her, or hear her cry, or know of her presence” (240). Descending “below stairs,” the ghost is attracted to “the warmth and light rather than to the still places in which her own life had been passed” (241). One of the few examples of the servants’ quarters as haunted space in the Victorian ghost story, this scene shows the dead mistress as a “stranger” in the cosy housekeeper’s room, hopelessly out of touch with her domestic staff. She has to listen to the animosity of the disinherited female servants who upbraid her as a “selfish old woman” (241) for not leaving them a reward for service, jeopardising the economic security and domestic positions of the next generation of women, including her god-daughter. In this unusual rendition of the architectural uncanny, the cheerfulness of the housekeeper’s room is dimmed by the “faint disturbance” of the invisible ghost, whose “anguish” cannot be transmitted to the angry women, “she stood outside their circle” (242). The dead mistress and her disinherited ward both occupy the position of the ghost in this narrative, circling the household and mourning its takeover by the new family. As in “The Lady’s Walk,” the ghost is a guardian of aristocratic values, but has limited power in a shiny new world of commerce and brash behaviour. The ghostliness of women figures their exclusion, alienation and invisibility: Lady Mary feels herself “a lost creature,” “a poor dependant,” doomed “to be thus left outside of life, to speak and not be heard, to stand, unseen, astounded” (240), like her ward’s growing sense of her destitute and powerless position. The ghost’s lament about being “left out in the cold when others go into their cheerful houses” (240) finds an echo in her ward’s sense of “wounding” when the house is let, and her desire “to go there unseen, to look up at the windows with their alien lights” (246). Unseen and humiliated in rooms now alien and strange, the Victorian mistress cannot assert her agency at a time when servants were starting to claim a new power and the nouveau riche were moving in. Linking the female ghost’s invisibility, voicelessness and helplessness to the legal disabilities of the Victorian woman, Vanessa Dickerson makes the telling point that the female householder “is not even directly responsible for the financial restoration of her ward” at the end of the story.75 The ending which allows male inheritance rights to prevail is a stark reminder of the need for women to communicate with each other and to pass on the knowledge of how to combat dependency if they do not wish to be “left out in the cold.”

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And yet crossing thresholds and spatial boundaries can be a form of empowerment for the Victorian woman. According to Irigaray, men set up “empty frame[s]” within the house to assuage their fear of losing their property: “You mark out boundaries, draw lines, surround, enclose.”76 Doors and windows in Oliphant’s writing, according to Jenni Calder, acquire sinister characteristics, becoming “not just ways of going and seeing in and out but … accessories in furtiveness and secrecy.”77 Once apparitional figures cross the threshold into the desired domestic space, however, their power to communicate and to destroy men’s empty frames can be strengthened. The bonds between women are reaffirmed in the excluded ward’s occupation of her old bedroom when she re-enters the house as a governess. Directed to a room full of nightmares of failed communication with her lost god-mother, the younger Mary feels trapped by her memories; “there was no escaping this room, which was haunted by the saddest recollections of her life” (252). It is a “desolate” room dominated by the familiar photograph over the mantelpiece, in which she hears a dozen times her god-mother’s “soft call through the open door” (253). The open door between life and death initially seems as impenetrable as the adjoining door, “shut closely and locked by the sisters who now inhabited the next room” (253), which separates the guest from her new charges. And yet the scene of haunting ends with the elder girl in the next room, dismissed as one of “those strangers,” communicating her fears about ghosts through “the door of communication” (254). For Kerr, doors of communication might be necessary for women: “One advantage … of a door of intercommunication between Morning-room and Drawing-room is that it provides for the ladies what is called escape in a manner the most legitimate of all.”78 The legitimacy of escaping from duties or domestic confinement through such portals is here transformed into the importance of exchange between women. Mary then overcomes her feelings of haughtiness and humiliation to offer comfort in the form of shining her light under the door. She remembers “what a consolation and strength in all wakefulness had been the glimmer of light under her god-mother’s door” (254) and smiles through her desolation in “afford[ing] this innocent comfort to another girl” (254). The importance of the “social-spectral connection between … two women” in the Victorian ghost story, noted by Edmundson Makala,79 is reinforced by a crossing of boundaries, a denial of their patriarchal power.

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Between the Drawing-Room and the Father’s Library: “The Portrait” and “The Library Window” Victoria Rosner has noted “the powerful or magical qualities that attach to domestic spaces,”80 a sentiment which seems particularly apposite to the forbidden magic of the patriarchal library. Women’s fondness for this realm of learning partly derives from feelings of exclusion and the devaluing of female study, yet the prominence of the haunted library in women’s ghost stories suggests that this is not the whole story. In the first volume of Ann Radcliffe’s influential Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the father’s ghost seems to occupy his abandoned library after his death. Emily’s terror of the supernatural finds expression in this space, with its bookcases and opened books, where she seems almost able to glimpse her absent father out of the corner of her eye. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, books on interior decoration recommended the inclusion of bookcases and writing-desks in drawing-rooms and other communal spaces, often printing pictures of women contentedly reading in order to challenge gendered divisions of space. In Clarence Cook’s The House Beautiful (1877) “gentlemen’s libraries” are “rarely intended for use, but … only part of the general upholstery and furnishing of the house, the same as the pictures and bric-à-brac. The architect in planning the house put in a ‘library,’ as of course, and what is a library without books?.”81 The answer seems to be, some kind of façade, as Cook goes on to ridicule the fake books displayed in certain libraries he has seen. According to Jane Hamlett, however, the library was often occupied by the family rather than being “a sacred male preserve,” or it was subsumed into another “ambiguous space” such as a breakfast room.82 For women brought up in small houses, the library (or study) is either missing, seen as inappropriate for female occupation or given over to the needs of other family members. In her autobiography Oliphant reflects on the lack of individual space for the woman writer, who must write in the midst of family life and be prepared for interruption: I had no table even to myself, much less a room to work in … Our rooms in those days were sadly wanting in artistic arrangement … I have never been shut up in a separate room, or hedged off with any observances. My study, all the study I have ever attained to, is the little second drawingroom of my house, with a wide opening into the other drawing-room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on; and I don’t think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night, when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life.83

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This repurposing of space, so that the drawing-room becomes a study with a “wide opening” into the feminine centre of the house, is suggestive of the disturbances which might arise from this lack of privacy. Significantly, a study is made for Oliphant’s reprobate brother Willie within her parents’ home, which he uses to read old books and smoke. In a female-headed household there is no masculine library, prompting the feminising of space, though this is still constrained by her small income and dependents. The dangers of an all-male household and men who spend too much time in the library are explored in the often neglected ghost story, “The Portrait” (1885), which stresses the importance of the “unseen” influence of the dead mother. Diana Wallace has drawn attention to the preoccupation in Female Gothic with the spectral mother, drawing on Claire Kahane’s conceptualisation of “the dead-undead mother, archaic and allencompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront.”84 Yet in this deviation from Gothic conventions, it is the hero who must acknowledge that the problematics of femininity are essential to the running of the domestic economy. Brought up in “the gravity and silence of a house without women” (276), the reserved narrator Philip Canning and his unemotional father, a harsh landlord to his impoverished tenants, suffer from the lack of female influence. This lack is remedied when an inherited portrait of the lost mother is positioned in the disused drawing-room, kept as a shrine with the work-basket containing a “half done” knitted item for an infant. The hanging of the portrait symbolises “her return to her old place” (290). The mother’s ghostly presence, felt after the portrait is brought into the house, exercises an uncanny influence over her son, enabling him to break down his father’s cruelty and repression and the “stagnant atmosphere” (284) of a house of men. Reworking the popular Gothic convention of the ancestral portrait, Oliphant shows that the female predecessor cannot be exorcised from the house but is instead able to reconfigure relations between men by the communication of her feminine compassion. Supernatural disturbance functions as a way of destabilising the oldfashioned gendered spaces of the drawing-room and the library. Typically, the opening of the story lingers on the setting of the old house, the Grove and its irregular features, its “wide passage, wide staircases, broad landings … the arrangements leaving much to be desired, with no economy of space” (275). The father and son are the “last inhabitants” of this almost obsolete dwelling, about to be demolished “to make room for

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more streets of mean little houses – the kind of thing, and not a dull house of faded gentry, which perhaps the neighbourhood requires” (275). The word “house” appears ten times and the word “home” only twice in the opening paragraph, as if homeliness has been lost with the death of the mother. The only female influence is the rarely seen housekeeper, Mrs Weir, and some maids, only glimpsed, ghostlike, “disappearing at the end of a passage, or whisking out a room when one of ‘the gentlemen’ appeared” (276). Philip admits that in his all-male world, “the idea of connecting [women] at all with my own home never entered into my head” (276–77), though the façade of “comfort perfect” is to be destroyed. His childish wonder for the “deadly-orderly drawing-room” (277), that sepulchral Victorian chamber of horrors, here stems not from the horror of visitors and social niceties but more from their absence, from an order become deadly because over-balanced towards the masculine. The supernatural power exercised by the lost mother through the son lures the father away from the male space of the library towards the deserted, feminised drawing-room, now transformed into disturbing portrait gallery. If space, as Henri Lefebvre reminds us, is divided into “designated areas … and areas that are prohibited,”85 then the men of the household occupy the designated areas which allow them to spend time alone. Philip has a little study or smoking-room “of my own,” complete with his “special treasures” (290) but is drawn to look in at the drawing-room windows at night. The father seems typical of his gender and class in spending most of his time in the library. Since Philip’s childhood “the aspect of the library was much changed,” now more of an office than a library, with many “business-like” (279) books which have to be kept out of view. The servant’s guarding of the nefarious secrets of the older man’s business with the phrase “master was very busy” (280) are a way of keeping the son out of the library. But he also has to be kept out of the feminised space; his father corrects his son’s childish awe of his mother’s room with the dictum, “a man by himself … has no occasion for a drawing-room” (285). The drawingroom, only previously visible through the windows, and hence at a distance, is “a place of deadly good order, into which nobody ever entered” (276), as to enter is to admit the dangers of the repression of the feminine. Reminiscent of Jane Eyre’s red room, with its uncannily glittering surfaces, it contains “looking-glasses which never reflected any living face” (276). Gothic conventions are also evoked in Philip’s quickened breathing once the portrait is to be revealed, his perception that “in this dull respectable house of ours, where everything breathed good

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character and integrity, it was certain that there could be no shameful mystery to reveal” (285). Descriptions of the room often play on the familiar/unfamiliar distinction: Philip “scarcely knows” the room and is uncertain where to hang the portrait because he has “never been familiar with this room” (288) nor its contents. The deadliness of the drawingroom, a supposedly homely space, makes it into the unhomely and the unknown, where shameful mystery can be harboured. The masculine routines of the household are disturbed by the mysteries of the feminine. Communications between father and son are stilted and minimal, their lives ruled by a regimented routine, set against the raptures of communication with the dead. Reading the story in terms of the “emotional sterility” of the men, Victoria Margree has highlighted the economic undercurrents of Oliphant’s treatment of maternal absence: Mr Canning has not used his wealth to make his house a homely one, hence the return of the ghost.86 Confronted with the portrait, the father becomes “restless in the strange disturbance of his habitual calm” whilst the son experiences “a curious vertigo and giddiness of my whole being in the sense of a mysterious relationship” (287). The dead mother is doubled with the shadowy form of the poor woman who appears at twilight outside the front door, haunting the family with her revelations of living in one room emptied of its furniture, leaving the surprised son to go indoors “disturbed and troubled” (282). In her plea for money she voices the perception, “Oh, gentleman, it is easy for the likes of you, that, if you ain’t comfortable in one room, can just walk into another” (281). Walking between rooms of comfort and discomfort becomes key to understanding this particular story. This supernatural intervention allows the feminised son to adopt a more humanitarian approach to property favourable particularly to the starving mother, who pleads for the restoration of the furniture and bedding removed by the father for non-payment of rent. The Blackwood’s reviewer’s opinion that in her writing Oliphant “treats men with contempt” is perhaps pertinent here, as the harsh behaviour of the Victorian patriarch is punished in the story.87 The father’s admission that he has made a mistake in “sever[ing] [his son] entirely from her side of the house” because he “did not care for the connection” (284) refers not only to the severing of ties with his mother’s relations but also with the feminine rooms of the Grove, “her side of the house.” As Irigaray suggests, the debt to the maternal needs to be acknowledged to prevent the entombment and effacing of the feminine.88 The inheritance of the mother’s portrait and of her spectral compassion mitigates against the

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harsh decisions of the male head of the household. However, as Margree notes, the agency of the female ghost is “significantly circumscribed,” as she can only intervene in her husband’s financial decision-making through the “forced mediumisation” of her son.89 He who “owns all the house property about” (282) may listen to maternal advice but the legal disabilities of women and male ownership and control of property remain. “The Library Window” (1896), set in St Andrews in Scotland (referred to in the story as St Rule’s) at a time of debates about women’s admission to the ancient university, can also be read in terms of the older generation haunting the younger. Jen Cadwallader describes it as “a story about a young woman … haunted by repeated sightings of an unknown man … a story about liminal spaces.”90 Calder reads it in terms of sterility and longing.91 But the spatial implications of its title and the ghostly room have not been fully explored. Its unnamed female narrator is an adolescent daughter, a “poor bit honey [with] no fortune to speak of” (387), a guest at her aunt’s house in order to recover her health. She encounters the ghost of a male library student glimpsed in the window of the old College Library on the opposite side of the High Street from her position in the “recess” of her aunt’s drawing-room. The Scottish townhouse is not her own home but an alternative “other” space, away from her mother’s rules and regulations. Her vision of the scholar at his desk is framed as “a glimpse … of an unknown life” (378), a life beyond narrow domestic duties: I saw as I looked up suddenly the faint greyness as of visible space within – a room behind, certainly – dim, as it was natural a room should be on the other side of the street – quite indefinite … for certainly there was a feeling of space behind the panes which these old half-blind ladies had disputed about whether they were glass or only fictitious panes marked out on a wall. (370)

Her increasingly rapturous vision of the library window is a reaching back into the past towards the “visible space” of the male scholar, a “feeling of space” missing from her confinement with her aunt’s older friends. To borrow from Lefebvre, the imaginary elements of this representational space have “no rules of consistency or cohesiveness,”92 its indefiniteness atoning for the absences of her stultifying recess. The narrative shows the difficulties of communication between the woman in the “old-fashioned”

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(363) drawing-room and the man in the library, both trapped within dominant Victorian models of gendered space. The recess, according to Diana Wallace, often functions in female Gothic fiction as a place of entombment and live burial, symbolising “the erasure of the feminine within history.”93 Yet Oliphant’s recess with a view is refashioned into a space of feminine empowerment as well as a retreat from gender roles, where the half-hidden heroine, who is less entombed than tucked away from visitors, “can take refuge from all that is going on inside and make myself a spectator of all the varied story out of doors” (363). The story’s meditation on the window as a threshold into the unknown suggests that what is outside the confined domestic space is the longed-for ghostliness of a space of one’s own. Cadwallader argues that “the window seat – on the margins of the drawing-room, at the edge of social life, in the liminal space between inside and outside worlds – is the only place where the narrator feels comfortable,” so that her imagined occupation of the library “literally pushes back the grey spaces of the room.”94 The grey spaces of domesticity, however, are also a source of discomfort because of the strained relationship between the middle-class woman and her servants. In her London house, the heroine is likely to be interrupted by her mother’s demands to carry messages to the housemaid, whereas her role as mistress-in-training is suspended in her aunt’s house. The female-headed household of her aunt is ruled by “a routine never broken” (363) and a seemingly never-ending round of visitors. The ghost is always sighted in the summer twilight, the moment when the women of the house ring for the servant to light the lamps, as if the ghost represents a break from this stultifying and dull routine. The heroine tries to set herself apart from the servant Janet but notes towards the end of the story the similarity of their ages, a doubling which proves more precarious when Janet is unable to share her vision of the ghost through the drawing-room window. Her conviction that “If I had called up Janet, she would have seen it all” (393) is proved wrong when the servant bursts into tears and “fled before me with a rustle and swing of haste, as if she were afraid” (394). This invisibility of “another world” (394) to her servant double, “not even a girl like myself, with the sight in her eyes, would understand” (394) suggests that the “second sight” of the heroine is linked to her middle-class status and the longing for the phantom library which her servant does not share. The contrast between gendered spaces, between the niece’s secluded window seat, and the space beyond the library window, which recalls

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her father’s London library, mentioned several times in the story, is a reminder of women’s restricted entry to higher education and knowledge in the 1880s. From her window seat it appears that “there was so much going on in that room across the street” (380) where the ghostly scholar reproduces her father’s absorption in his writing: “Papa is a great writer, everybody says: but he would have come to the window and looked out” (380) to aid the creative process. Her knowledge of her father’s behaviour in his library suggests that both she and her mother have observed his habits. The old library, significantly positioned near the Abbey, acquires the qualities of a museum and is aligned with “the old castles and curious houses” (387) nearby, which her aunt imagines might be a distraction but her niece dismisses as inferior to the shadow world of the library. The suggested visit to the conversation party in the handsome Library Hall makes her aunt shiver and the heroine wail, “I hate parties” (389). Once in the Hall it is Mr Pitmilly, one of her aunt’s friends, who escorts her around the dazzling Hall with its books and ornaments, taking her “to see the curiosities” (391) and objects displayed in glass cases. At a loss in the strange space, confused by the line of bookcases on the street side of the room, the heroine is unable to reconcile the picture she recognises with what is missing: “If there were no windows on the wall to the street, where was my window?” (391). Her attempts to navigate the space result in the diagnosis of hysteria: “I walked straight across the room, always dragging Mr Pitmilly, whose face was pale, but who did not struggle but allowed me to lead him, straight across to where the window was – where the window was not; where there was no sign of it” (392). The man’s response, “Mind that you are in public. Mind where you are” (392), coupled with a male professor’s confirmation that she has been “taken in with what appears outside … it never was a real window” (392) is a telling reminder of her function as a trespasser. “Her” window appears to be an illusion, a trick effected by the masculine public space, a “dazzle of shining” with its “vulgar lights” (392, 393). Yet in the next section of the story, the heroine assumes control by “pushing” Mr Pitmilly across the street and up the stairs to her recess where: “Never in all these days had I seen that room so clearly” (393). This clear vision of the phantom library however can only be achieved from a distance, as the Victorian woman stakes a claim, however fragile, on the masculinised space of learning. The story also plays on the dangerous legacy of the older woman, and the need to protect the younger girl from her own desires and visions. As her aunt’s visitors crowd in to see the library window she speaks of, the

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niece feels them “pressing into my recess, pressing upon me … the wall of old ladies in their old satin gowns all glazed with age” (366), their age threatening her occupation of her private territory. Her haunted vision of the window, “a very dead thing without any reflection in it” (366), is feared and interpreted by her aunt’s friends as a delusion, not a real window. And yet the witch-like “strong-minded” Lady Carnbee, with her black Spanish lace and sharp ring, with its oversize diamond “like some dangerous thing hiding” (367), is less dismissive of the younger girl’s vision. Lady Carnbee asks whether the young girl is “bewitched … bound to sit there by night and by day for the rest of her days? You should mind that there’s things about, uncanny for women of our blood” (371). By directing the light from her ring at her, she laughs and claims to have “wakened you to life and broke the spell” (372). According to the aunt, the lonely scholar in the library disinterested in women had attracted the attention of an unspecified “light woman, not like you and me” (399), whose constant waving and flashing of her ring as a token had caused her angry brothers to curtail the romance, possibly by his death. Whilst it is suggested that the light woman was Lady Carnbee, now in possession of the ring, it is hinted that “women of our blood” “all saw him in our time – that is … the ones that are like you and me” (399). Both the aunt and Lady Carnbee hint at the repercussions of gazing out of windows at unknown men, “You and me know what comes of that” (380), as if to assuage the “feverishness” and symptoms of desire brought on by looking at the ghost. The communication with the dead in the form of waving seems to offer a recognition of the “second sight” of women who need “a feeling of space” to atone for the limitations of the domestic economy still governed by patriarchal rules. Elizabeth Grosz has suggested that, in rethinking space to mitigate women’s feelings of homelessness in houses not built for them, one possible change might be “transformations in the way the motherdaughter relation is both conceived and mediated.”95 When the mother arrives to take her daughter home where her erratic behaviour can be moderated, the narrator has a “wild thought” that she would refuse, though this refusal of her mother’s house is shown to be an impossibility: “how can a girl say I will not, when her mother has come for her, and there is no reason, no reason in the world, to resist, and no right!” (401). In the final pages, she returns widowed and alone with two young children from India and sees a hallucinatory, ghostly vision of the male scholar in the crowds: instead of representing “a face I knew … someone who

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would help me,” the vision “disappeared, as he did from the window” (402). The story ends with the diamond-ring “locked up in an old sandalwood box in the lumber-room in the little old country-house which belongs to me, but where I never live” (402). The ambiguities of this ending are not resolved: Is it a reminder that women’s longings for the freedoms of male space are overwhelming and must be locked up like useless lumber? Perhaps it bears out Grosz’s point that “the containment of women within a dwelling that they did not build, nor was even built for them, can only amount to a homelessness within the very home itself.”96 Her sense of homelessness persists in the ambiguous resolution of the story, where she also occupies an unspecified space of her own, refusing to live in the country house she has inherited. Like her aunt, she may be the female head of the household who owns her own space yet she remains trapped within a spatial economy organised around men. Margaret Oliphant’s stories of the seen and unseen linger on the figure of the excluded woman, left out in the cold, distanced from the comforts of home. Even when women occupy their own houses and inhabit their secluded lady’s walks, they inherit homelessness. The haunted garden and the forgotten maternal drawing-room offer empowering spaces for the possibilities of communication with the female ancestor, though the fragility of ties between generations prevails. If, as Certeau claims, “the narratives of sites are makeshift. They are made of fragments of world,” then the buried narratives of the Victorian haunted house remain incomplete and half-understood, “articulated by lacunae.”97 In order to effect Grosz’s reconceptualisation of space for women, the effacement of the maternal, the unseen at the heart of the Victorian home, needs to be challenged. The agency of the ghostly woman, and her freedom of movement around her own home or garden, is limited in Oliphant’s ghost stories, signalling the difficulties women encountered in bearing the responsibilities for the family or becoming heads of the household. The return of the lost mother provides one way of countering women’s exclusion.

Notes 1. Helen Hanson, Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 60. 2. “A Little Chat About Mrs Oliphant,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 133 (January 1883): 78.

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3. Vanessa Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 5. 4. Henri de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practices of Everyday Life in The Certeau Reader ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 114, 115. 5. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in LateVictorian England (London: Virago, 1989), 3. 6. Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 7. 7. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” (1919) in The Uncanny trans. David McClintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 154. 8. Elizabeth McCarthy, “Haunting Memories: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the Ghost Stories of Margaret Oliphant,” in The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story eds. Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 111, 114. 9. Trevor Keeble, “‘Everything Whispers of Wealth and Luxury’: Observation, Emulation and Display in the Well-to-Do Late-Victorian Home,” in Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950 eds. Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 84. 10. Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (London: Athlone Press, 1992), 24. 11. Margaret Oliphant, “The Grievances of Women,” Fraser’s Magazine (1880) in Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Nineteenth-Century Writing on Women by Women ed. Susan Hamilton (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1995), 237. 12. Sarah Bilston, “Queens of the Garden: Victorian Women Gardeners and the Rise of the Gardening Advice Text,” Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008): 6. 13. Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 63, 71. This is linked to the rise of the railways, day trips and the introduction of Public Holidays. 14. Ibid., 207. 15. Kamilla Elliott, Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 5. 16. Pamela Horn, Ladies of the Manor: How Wives and Daughters Really Lived in Country House Society Over a Century Ago (Stroud: Amberley, 2012), 151. 17. Luke Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 3. 18. Elisabeth Jay, ed., The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 35. 19. Ibid., 35.

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20. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 77. 21. Jay, Autobiography, 29. 22. Ibid., 36. 23. Ibid., 37. 24. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 85. 25. Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House (1864; London: John Murray, 1871), 66, 67. 26. Ibid., 68. 27. Jay, Autobiography, 44. 28. Mrs Eustace Miles (Hallie Killick), The Ideal Home and Its Problems (London: Methuen, 1911), 37. 29. Thurston, Literary Ghosts, 3. 30. Kerr, Gentleman’s House, 111. 31. Mrs Orrinsmith, The Drawing-Room: Its Decoration and Furniture (London: Macmillan, 1877), 1. 32. Ibid., 1, 2. 33. Ibid., 2. 34. Ibid., 6. 35. Ibid., 8. 36. Rosamund Marriott Watson, The Art of the House (London: George Bell & Sons, 1897), 8, 10. She also mourns the decline of the hall in “modern villadom,” which in its absence makes the welcoming of guests difficult. See 18. 37. Ibid., 85. 38. Orrinsmith, The Drawing-Room, 8. 39. Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, 96, 197. 40. Jenny Uglow, A Little History of British Gardening (London: Chatto and Windus, 2004), 223, 242. 41. T.B.M., “Foreword,” In Praise of Old Gardens (Portland Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1912), x. 42. Vernon Lee, “Old Italian Gardens,” in In Praise of Old Gardens, 38, 42. 43. Ibid., 56–57. 44. Ibid., 59. 45. Gertrude Jekyll and Lawrence Weaver, Gardens for Small Country Houses (Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 1981), i. The chapters were first published as articles in the magazine Country Life in 1912. 46. All quotations are taken from Margaret Oliphant, A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and the Unseen ed. Jenni Calder (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000). 47. Elliott, Portraiture, 8.

112 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

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Lee, “Old Italian Gardens,” 46, 47. Bilston, “Queens of the Garden,” 2. Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 112. Leslie Geddes-Brown, The Walled Garden (London and New York: Merrell, 2007), 6. Jekyll and Weaver, Gardens, viii. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 239. Jekyll and Weaver, Gardens, x. Elliott, Portraiture, 5. All quotations for this story are taken from the one-volume novel edition, Margaret Oliphant, The Lady’s Walk (1882–1883; London: Methuen, 1897). Jay, Autobiography, 5. Annie L. Walker Coghill, ed., Autobiography and Letters of Mrs MOW Oliphant (Edinburgh and London: Blackwoods, 1899), 287. Jekyll and Weaver, Gardens, 16. Ilse Bussing, “Complicit Bodies: Excessive Sensibilities and Haunted Space,” Horror Studies 7, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 46, 47. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 231. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell, “Introduction,” in The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. Simon Hay, A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 2, 8. Jay, Autobiography, 59. Jay, Autobiography, 8. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7, 9. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 59. Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 121–23. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, “No Country for Old Women: Gender, Age and the Gothic,” in Women and the Gothic eds. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 193. Jennifer Bann, “Ghostly Hands and Ghostly Agency: The Changing Figure of the Nineteenth-Century Specter,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 4 (2009): 664. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 77–78, 79. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 8. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts, 143. Irigaray, Elemental Passions , 25.

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77. Jenni Calder, “Through Mrs Oliphant’s Library Window,” Women’s Writing 10, no. 3 (2003): 495. 78. Kerr, Gentleman’s House, 113. 79. Melissa Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), 106. 80. Victoria Rosner, Modernism and The Architecture of Private Life (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007), 2. 81. Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (1881; New York: Dover, 1995), 169. 82. Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 50, 51. 83. Jay, Autobiography, 30. 84. Diana Wallace, Female Gothic Histories (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 17; Claire Kahane, “The Gothic Mirror,” (1980) in The Mother Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation eds. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 336. 85. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 319. 86. Victoria Margree, British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019), 37. 87. “A Little Chat,” 78. 88. Irigaray, Elemental Passions , 24, 47. 89. Margree, British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 39. 90. Jen Cadwallader, Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 112. 91. Calder, “Through Mrs Oliphant’s Library Window,” 493. 92. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 41. 93. Wallace, Female Gothic Histories, 52, 53. 94. Cadwallader, Spirits and Spirituality, 107. 95. Elizabeth Grosz, “Women, Chora, Dwelling,” in Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 123. 96. Ibid., 122. 97. Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 113–14.

Bibliography “A Little Chat About Mrs Oliphant.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 133 (January 1883): 73–91. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas. 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014.

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Bann, Jennifer. “Ghostly Hands and Ghostly Agency: The Changing Figure of the Nineteenth-Century Specter.” Victorian Studies 51, no. 4 (2009): 663– 85. Bilston, Sarah. “Queens of the Garden: Victorian Women Gardeners and the Rise of the Gardening Advice Text.” Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008): 1–19. Bown, Nicola, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell, eds. The Victorian Supernatural. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Bussing, Ilse. “Complicit Bodies: Excessive Sensibilities and Haunted Space.” Horror Studies 7, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 42–57. Cadwallader, Jen. Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. Calder, Jenni. “Through Mrs Oliphant’s Library Window.” Women’s Writing 10, no. 3 (2003): 485–502. Certeau, Michel de. “Walking in the City.” In The Practices of Everyday Life in The Certeau Reader ed. Graham Ward. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Cook, Clarence. The House Beautiful. 1881; New York: Dover, 1995. Darling, Elizabeth and Lesley Whitworth, eds. Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Dickerson, Vanessa D. Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Edmundson Makala, Melissa. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010. Elliott, Kamilla. Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” (1919) In The Uncanny trans. David McClintock, 121–62. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Geddes-Brown, Leslie. The Walled Garden. London and New York: Merrell, 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Women, Chora, Dwelling.” In Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Hamilton, Susan, ed. Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Nineteenth-Century Writing on Women by Women. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1995. Hamlett, Jane. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Hanson, Helen. Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Hay, Simon. A History of the Modern British Ghost Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik. “No Country for Old Women: Gender, Age and the Gothic.” In Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion edited

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by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 184–98. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik, eds. Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Irigaray, Luce. Elemental Passions trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still. London: Athlone Press, 1992. Jay, Elisabeth, ed. The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Jekyll, Gertrude and Lawrence Weaver. Gardens for Small Country Houses. 1912; Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 1981. Kahane, Claire. “The Gothic Mirror.” (1980) In The Mother Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation edited by Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Keeble, Trevor. “‘Everything Whispers of Wealth and Luxury’: Observation, Emulation and Display in the Well-to-Do Late-Victorian Home.” In Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950 edited by Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth, 69–84. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Kerr, Robert. The Gentleman’s House. 1864; London: John Murray, 1871. Kontou, Tatiana. Spiritualism and Women’s Writing from the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Lee, Vernon. “Old Italian Gardens.” In In Praise of Old Gardens edited by T.B.M. Portland Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1912. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lyndon Shanley, Mary. Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Mandler, Peter. The Rise and Fall of the Stately Home. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. Margree, Victoria. British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019. Marriott Watson, Rosamund. The Art of the House. London: George Bell & Sons, 1897. McCarthy, Elizabeth, “Haunting Memories: Death, Mourning and Memory in the Ghost Stories of Margaret Oliphant.” in The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story edited by Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston, 106–15. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. McCorristine, Shane. Spectres of the Self: Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Miles, Mrs Eustace (Hallie Killick). The Ideal Home and Its Problems. London: Methuen, 1911.

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Oliphant, Margaret. Autobiography and Letters of Mrs MOW Oliphant ed. Annie L. Walker Coghill. Edinburgh and London: Blackwoods, 1899. Oliphant, Margaret. A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and the Unseen ed. Jenni Calder. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000. Oliphant, Margaret. “The Grievances of Women.” Fraser’s Magazine (1880) in Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Nineteenth-Century Writing on Women by Women ed. Susan Hamilton. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1995. Oliphant, Margaret. The Lady’s Walk. 1882–1883; London: Methuen, 1897. Orrinsmith, Mrs. The Drawing-Room: Its Decoration and Furniture. London: Macmillan, 1877. Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Rosner, Victoria. Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007. Steere, Elizabeth. The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: Kitchen Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. T.B.M., ed. In Praise of Old Gardens. Portland Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1912. Thurston, Luke. Literary Ghosts, from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval. London: Routledge, 2014. Uglow, Jenny. A Little History of British Gardening. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Wallace, Diana. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales, 2013.

CHAPTER 4

The Rapture of Old Houses: Dust, Decay and Sacred Space in Vernon Lee’s Italian ghost stories

Unusually for the woman writer of supernatural fiction, Vernon Lee wrote extensively about French and Italian churches and cathedrals, describing their darkened, candlelit interiors and impressive vastness in terms of the aesthetics of decay. Her ghost stories are saturated with descriptions of gloomy, crypt-like interiors, ruined facades and broken statues and furniture, which disclose forgotten histories antithetical to the typical tourist’s experience. The uncanniness of Italy in her writing has been addressed by critics such as Catherine Maxwell and Alex Murray.1 Patricia Pulham and Stefano Evangelista have linked Lee’s sense of inspiration in damp churches and chilly art galleries to her preoccupation with sculpture, aestheticism and Hellenism.2 None of them have fully investigated the significance of haunted space and ruined architecture. Lee’s biographer Vineta Colby argues that it is “instructive to read [her] stories of the supernatural, her works of pure imagination, alongside her travel writings, based on the reality of geography,” as according to her friend John Singer Sargent, the ghost story becomes “an excuse for indulging the genius loci,” the spirit of place.3 Lee’s rapturous responses to the old houses of the past, to the dark side of the Italian city, to Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, transform the haunted site into a sacred space, whose affinities with the crypt and the museum become necessarily unhomely. Discourses of decay and ruin operate throughout Vernon Lee’s work, in which the viewer is often invited to dwell on decaying surfaces, walls

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_4

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and works of art in order to access unknown histories. The Gothic appreciation of ruins is annexed to a fin-de-siècle preoccupation with dust, decline and burial, with the exhumation not only of the ancient or medieval world but of art exhibiting its own deterioration. In her monumental work, The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), the modernist novelist Rose Macaulay reflected on the process of “progressive ruining” in Rome, reading this in terms of the observation of the “mystique” of Italy by generations of travellers: “Rome in ruins is a symbol of a lost world: the emotional impact is intense.”4 This process is also juxtaposed with the archaeological impulses of the nineteenth century, as on the previous page Macaulay describes Victorian excavations in Athens, the “reconstructions, the clearing away of debris and of medieval accretions […] the digging up of statues and sculptures, the placing of fallen columns where they did or did not belong, the storing of moveable exhibits in museums, the shoring up of unsteady edifices, the discovery of ancient foundations, the repairing of broken friezes and columns” all of which beckon the scholars and tourists intent on reaching “the very centre of ruin-pleasure.”5 According to Ellis Hanson, “decadence is an aesthetic in which failure and decay are regarded as seductive, mystical, or beautiful.”6 The seductions of decay, “ruin-pleasure,” are evident in houses or cathedrals which operate as crypts, offering access to other eras, “the discovery of ancient foundations” and stimulating reflection on gendered occupation of space in different time periods. If “our ruin gaze is informed by centuries of images and their interpretations,” as Julia Hall and Andreas Schönle suggest,7 then gazing at decay makes the “unsteady edifices” of the past reflect the uncertainties of a troubled modernity. In his philosophical work on the aesthetics of decay, Dylan Trigg has interpreted the relationship between ruined space, memory and mourning in terms of nothingness and decline. He argues that “the art of memory falters in the ruin, because place and temporal continuity are discontinuous. Unlike the demand domestic place makes upon subjectivity to recollect what has since been destroyed in time, the ruin is not determined by what is absent to complete it.”8 Yet to separate ruin from the domestic is not so simple, as ruined sites of all kinds are haunted by absences, necessarily incomplete. If ruins embody “notions of progress, forgetfulness, and reclamation,”9 they are also inherently bound up in the ontology of decline. Trigg compares the exterior and interior of the ruin, arguing:

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In the ruin, there is never a moment in which you feel alone. Always some glance is just out of view. From the exterior, where coldness and austerity define the ruin as a “dangerous site,” the thought of feeling intimate toward the ruin is remote. On the inside, however, a dialogue unfurls between those who have passed through the place and left their indelible mark in the process and those who are presently experiencing that passing. It is a private dialogue, reinforced by the ruin being physically enclosed. The question of a fixed division between inside and outside is illusory.10

The dangers of the site pertain to what is hidden and cold. Yet this history of decay excludes women writers whose perceptions of decline and intimacy with the ruin open up an alternative dialogue between the gazer and the forgotten makers of “indelible marks.” Ruins constitute a particular form of the uncanny, as, according to Trigg, dereliction “foresees the future of decline while retaining the disused aspects of the past.”11 Lee’s narrators step inside the ruins to uncover the stories of those who have passed through the place, to enclose themselves within decay, even as the intimacy of absence reinforces the limitations of modernity. This chapter develops notions of haunted spatiality in ruin studies in order to argue that in Vernon Lee’s Italian ghost stories, the ruin becomes an uncanny, “in-between” space.12 Drawing on Lee’s travel writing about Italy and her notes on visiting galleries and cathedrals, it argues that her supernatural tales similarly reinvent tourists’ visions of old Italy, transforming it into a crypt-like space of darkness and decay. In “Winthrop’s Adventure” and “A Wicked Voice,” the haunted interiors of churches and crumbling palaces becomes dangerous sites of fragmentation and decay. The male narrator eager to access the splendour of the old church or ballroom finds himself trapped in the lumber-room, amidst rubbish and dust. In the decadent tale, “The Legend of Madame Krasinska,” the old Italian house becomes a crypt, enclosing the hidden histories of a suicidal Italian mother and medieval Florence. “The Doll,” with its female collector narrator, offers an alternative vision of the old house as a museum of female entrapment, with the decaying doll itself uncannily evoking the unease within the home.

Spectres and “Definite Places”: Museums, Crypts and the Sacred Lee’s representations of the supernatural have often been read in terms of affect and psychology, with critics taking their cue from the famous

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comment on the genuineness of “spurious ghosts” in the preface to her ghost story collection Hauntings (1890). Proclaiming that “educated folk of modern times” should get their ghosts from “the Past, the more or less remote Past,” she distances the “scientific” hauntings identified by the newly formed Society for Psychical Research from her own writing, which, she claims, tells “of no spectres that can be caught in definite places.”13 From its inception in 1882, the SPR regularly published proceedings and reports, in which haunted houses and apparitions were discussed alongside theories about telepathy, hallucinations, mesmerism and spiritual communication. Its Committee on Haunted Houses and Apparitions, which amassed huge amounts of data in the 1880s, stipulated that multiple witnesses were required in order to grant credibility to a claim. According to Shane McCorristine, the sceptical credentials of the SPR meant that they often had “recourse to the physiological theory of apparitions as spectral illusions,” reinforcing the psychic aspects of hallucination.14 In her Preface Lee writes that “the supernatural, in order to call forth … sensations [of doom and horror]” must remain mysterious.15 Yet attention to architectural details was a hallmark of finde-siècle ghost stories which has often been ignored. The spatiality of haunting was an important consideration alongside what McCorristine refers to as the “tellability” of the discourses on ghost-seeing in this period.16 Karl Bell claims that “supernatural narratives were but one of many adaptive spatial strategies employed by nineteenth-century urban dwellers to locate themselves in their environment,” as the “magical imagination” ultimately “reconfigure[d] physical spaces into a (re-)enchanted terrain.”17 The geography of haunting linked abandoned sites, busy taverns, churchyards and the home, places “where people mourned the dead and were surrounded by memories of their presence,” as Owen Davies has argued.18 Locating apparitions drew on communal memories and imaginings, rendering both domestic and urban spaces uncanny. Churches, crypts and museums are crucial to Lee’s vision of haunted space. As Dale Townshend has argued, ecclesiastical ruins are an important aspect of the Gothic architectural imagination and its fascination with antiquity, antiquarianism and a mythical past.19 Lee’s important essay, “Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art” (1880) centres on the paradox of “that supernatural which really deserves the name, which is beyond and outside the limits of the possible, the rational, the explicable,” which originates from “the imagination wrought upon by certain kinds of physical surroundings” (296). These are typically sacred, dark, hidden spaces:

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To the monk arose out of the silence and gloom of the damp, lichen-grown crypt, out of the foetid emanation of the charnal-house [sic], strange forms of horror which lurked in his steps and haunted his sleep … devils and imps, horrible and obscene, which the chisel of the stonecutter vainly attempted to reproduce, in their fluctuating abomination, on the capitals and gargoyles of cloister and cathedral. (298)

Horror emanates from the “foetid,” “lichen-grown” sites of decay, from the Gothic “cryptic space” marked by “vestiges of death” and “symbolic artifacts,” according to Jerrold E. Hogle.20 These artefacts also operate, in Lee’s essay, as the “remnants of the supernatural, some labelled in our historic museums … others dusty on altars and in chapels … relics of dead and dying faiths, of which some are daily being transferred from the church to the museum” (309). This articulation of the supernatural in terms of remnants and relics, of crypts, cloisters and charnel-houses, suggests that for Lee, the church becomes a key haunted space, drawing together its function as both museum, visible reminder of the past, and burial ground. The nineteenth-century transference of relics between church and museum may testify to a general process of desacralisation, but it also emphasises the museum-like qualities of sacred space defined by its haunted objects. If the ghostly includes “the damp, the darkness, the silence, the solitude … the sound of our steps through a ruined cloister … the scent of mouldering plaster and mouldering bones from beneath the broken pavement” (310), then Lee’s conception of the supernatural is bound up with notions of the crypt, as well as the brokenness and “mouldering” decay of the ruin. By reinforcing the standpoint of “we moderns,” a recurring phrase in her writing, Lee raises key questions about how haunting and “the Past” (often capitalised to signal its importance for Lee) are transformed by the advent of modernity. Her use of “spurious” in relation to the ghostly, with its meanings of fake, counterfeit, false, as well as illegitimate and nameless, is reflective of new ways of conceptualising the supernatural. Elaborating on the notion of the counterfeit, Hogle has argued that “the Gothic is … continuously based on ghostings of the already spectral, or at least resymbolizations of what is already symbolic and thus more fake than real.”21 In Lee’s writing the ghost is often symbolic or fake, conjured up to fill a lack. In an early story, “Winthrop’s Adventure,” the artist narrator accounts for his visions in terms of “delusion,” “hallucination” and “nightmare phantasm, due to over-excitement and

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fever, due to the morbid, vague desire for something strange and supernatural” (74).22 This “morbid, vague desire” could be interpreted in terms of decadent longing, for the exquisite sensation of being frightened. Psychoanalytic readings of Lee’s work have emphasised the nature of the supernatural encounter and its links to repression but have often paid less attention to setting and space. The Italian settings of many of her stories, and the extensive descriptions of architecture, cathedrals, interiors, thresholds, streets and staircases, suggest that the fakery of her spectres is not independent of “definite places.” The ghostly is connected to “the weird places we have seen, the strange stories we have heard” (39). If the supernatural calls forth sensations which are “terrible to our ancestors and terrible but delicious to ourselves, sceptical posterity” (37), then modern scepticism, with its delicious enjoyment of what Hogle calls “counterfeitings of the past,”23 becomes a crucial element of the terror of the ghost-seeing experience. In his work on Victorian sacred spaces, the historian William Whyte emphasises the secrets of the church in an era when the building and rebuilding of ecclesiastical architecture was at its height in Britain. Churches which transgressed architectural and religious rules were abominated by some with a dislike for the Gothic as places of sin, infection and misplaced materialism, criticised for their secret stairs, gloomy crypts and pointed arches and therefore seen as “theologically and emotionally troubling.”24 Emotional responses to the sublimity of ecclesiastical architecture had been voiced in the early nineteenth century, as Townshend has pointed out, with figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge recording his feelings of awe, devotion and “self-annihilation” on entering a vast cathedral.25 Encountering the architectural became an aspect of engaging with and processing the movement towards modernity in a period of rapid industrialisation: “buildings were constructed not only to be lived, worshipped, or worked in, but also to embody specific cultural values, including political and religious beliefs.”26 As Whyte goes on to argue, “each community – each era – understands and experiences sacred space differently.”27 The new understandings of architecture generated by shifts in religious thinking and the vogue for medievalism created a sharp break with the past which troubled those who feared a potential slide towards Catholicism. Both Lee and John Ruskin rhapsodise about the harmony between old and new in Gothic architecture, particularly sacred spaces. Ruskin wrote about the importance of “reading a building” as one would read

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Milton or Dante, getting delight out of the stones,28 something that resonates with Lee’s appreciations of place. In Modern Painters (1856), Ruskin renders symbolic a neglected old tower of Calais church, with its gloomy façade, “the noble unsightliness of it; the record of its years written so visibly, yet without sign of weakness and decay.”29 The old church “completely expresses that agedness in the midst of active life which binds the old and the new into harmony … on the Continent, the links are unbroken between the past and present … in unbroken line the generations of spared buildings are seen succeeding each in its place.”30 It is to be admired for “its largeness, … its permitted evidence of slow decline … its poverty, … its absence of all pretence, of all show and care for outside aspect,” prompting a meditation on “the strange pleasures and thoughts” occasioned by these ruined sites of Continental Europe as opposed to “new countries” or “modern England.”31 As shown by his outraged italics, Ruskin was not impressed with the facades of some Venetian Renaissance churches that appear “entirely destitute of every religious symbol, sculpture, or inscription.”32 Nor did he enjoy the grotesque gargoyles adorning church exteriors, characterising them as “inhuman, and monstrous – leering in bestial degradation,” evidence of the “evil spirit” of the Italian Renaissance.33 His association of church architecture with Protestantism set him apart from the architect Augustus W. N. Pugin, an influential builder of Victorian sacred spaces, whose conversion to Catholicism in the 1840s meant that he embraced, rather than decried, the visual excesses of the Catholic church.34 Lee drew on this Ruskinian vision of the “strange pleasures” of gazing at churches in her responses to Italian architecture. She records her retracing of her steps in Rome, “if not materially, in fancy at least, to such parts of the city as bear witness to the strange meeting of centuries, where the Middle Ages have altered to their purposes, or filled with their significance, the ruined remains of Antiquity.”35 The visual appeal of the old-new in architecture, of an aestheticised antiquity,36 is a significant strand of Macaulay’s argument about ruined Rome. She writes, “still on every street you may come on ancient Rome built into medieval, into Renaissance, into baroque, and feel that lift of the heart which imperishable beauty, persisting through changes, brings, the pleasure of ruins perpetually re-ruined, perpetually re-formed, perpetually old-into-new.”37 This process of “re-ruining” is significant in terms of ongoing decay; the desire of the “ruin-taster” for “antiquity, abandonment, decay, a magnificent and forbidding site” can only be satisfied by the visibility of crumbling, shattering, mouldering,

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“time-struck” deterioration.38 Lee’s writing would continue to record this “re-ruining,” the clashes between the ancient, medieval and Renaissance which constituted the “strange meeting of centuries” in Italian sacred spaces.

Gothic Italy and the Allure of the Church In the late nineteenth century, Italy was a revered space for both Gothic and decadent writers. Commenting on travel writers’ perceptions of “old Italy” in the mid-nineteenth century, often admired because it seemed to be “preserved from modernity” or “untouched,” James Buzard has noted common mythologies of the Italian city which exude “the intoxicating sense of a place kept still for the delectation of visitors.” Travellers often admired “the stillness that facilitates the free play of visitors’ reveries,” where “the truly still place may be the city-as-ruin.”39 For nineteenthcentury women writers, according to Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler, “Italy … is a place of Renaissance, usually signified by Florence, but also decay and the sepulchre, usually figured by Rome.”40 As a resident in Florence born in France, Lee was perhaps better placed than most women writers to describe Italian cities, but was also very much bound up in mythologies of her adopted country, partly drawn from her reading of Gothic texts by Ann Radcliffe and others.41 The viewing of Italy had also been transformed by Ruskin’s descriptions of Italian Gothic architecture in all its grotesquerie and splendour, which were widely read in the nineteenth century. In her travel writing on Rome, Lee always emphasised the uncanny vastness of the city’s old buildings, such as the “dark and mysterious” church of the Santi Quattro Coronati, which looks like “a remote abbey one would drive to, forgotten, hidden, unheard of,” yet is incongruously situated “above the modernest slums of modern Rome!”42 The ornate exteriors of churches and cathedrals, with their towers, loggias and domes, displayed the Catholic past as well as satisfying the taste of Victorian tourists. Viewing religious architecture alongside art galleries had always been a central component of the Grand Tour, essential to traversing Italian cities.43 Tess Cosslett has analysed the “textual construction” of Italy at the fin de siècle in terms of tourism and the desire for authenticity. In the attempt to avoid a predictably stultifying vision of the Italian past, Cosslett argues, writers such as Lee and E. M. Forster sought “to reveal and affirm a ‘real’ Italy that escapes the already ‘scripted’ and expected.”44 The “re-scripting” of Italy turns it into “a space of

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spiritual transformation,” though this remains detached from notions of established religion.45 At a time when Catholicism was becoming newly fashionable, what Ellis Hanson has identified as “the allure of the Church” manifested itself in architectural descriptions of sacred space as haunted and haunting.46 According to Hanson, “Roman Catholicism is central to both the stylistic peculiarities and the thematic preoccupations of the decadents,” who introduced “a taste for all that is sumptuous, brutal, and bizarre in Christian traditions.”47 Decadent writers became fascinated with the ornateness of ecclesiastical art and the excesses and “clutter” of Catholic spaces and rituals.48 The tourist view of Italy hovers behind its Gothic representations at the fin de siècle, as the flamboyant excess and decorative interiors of its sacred spaces invite both aesthetic admiration and a new spectralisation of the sacred. Writers on Victorian architecture recognised the ways in which “the taste for Continental Gothic” impacted on the building of highly decorative English churches. Charles Eastlake, in A History of the Gothic Revival (1872), noted the “revival of Ancient Church architecture,” and in the close attention he paid to both the exteriors and what he called “the furniture of the Church” contributed to the aestheticisation of the sacred.49 For Hanson, the Church is itself a beautiful and erotic work of art … a great museum in its solemn respect for art and its extraordinary accumulation of dead and beautiful things. It is a relic of itself, and like all saintly relics it commands devotion … In their lives, no less than in their art, [the decadents] enacted the romance of faith as a tenuous possibility for modernity – a proposition at once beautiful and improbable.50

This new response to church interiors, sites of death and beauty, modified the tourist gaze to bring it in line with the admiration of darkly Decadent excess. The church or cathedral was recognised as a space crammed with relics and hidden histories, as well as a memorial to the dead, a mausoleum. The Decadent tendency to conceptualise the church as a haunted space chimes with the struggle to reconcile “the romance of faith” with a brooding sense of disbelief; as Colby notes, Lee described herself as “an old agnostic adorer of true Catholicism.”51 If “the decadents … were the culmination and the ironic reversal of an already popular tradition that regarded the Church as a decaying empire,”52 modernity’s leanings towards scepticism and agnosticism helped to shape new understandings of the sacred.

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The new viewing of the exteriors and interiors of Gothic churches in terms of psychological aesthetics rather than religious awe is evident in the essay “Beauty and Ugliness” (1897) which Lee co-wrote with her lover Kit Anstruther-Thomson. With a nod to Ruskin, the central section of the essay, written by Anstruther-Thomson, focusses on the “aesthetic pleasure” of the viewing of architecture as opposed to art. She distinguishes between “architecture as pattern,” which can be admired for its complexity of surface, and the “more complex phenomena of architecture as spatial enclosure and architecture as suggestive of force and movements ” (187).53 In this scheme, the façade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, with its arcade and arches, “elicits in our body sensations more complex than those of which we were conscious while looking at the pattern” (188). High-ceilinged buildings can awaken an alternative vision, heightened after stepping inside: This double phenomenon of aesthetic emotion … becomes almost inextricable as soon as we consider architecture as an art of spatial enclosure, or, in other words, as soon as we cease contemplating the outside of a church and submit ourselves to the extraordinary forces of its interior … Coming into a large church we are conscious of a sudden and total change in our mode of being. (188)

This extraordinary experience of entering a large church (or palace) becomes a set piece of Lee’s writing which draws on earlier literary descriptions of sacred architecture. Viewing interiors, according to Anstruther-Thomson, can offer “a sense of completeness in ourselves, and at the same time a closer relation with the not-ourselves,” replacing a sense of isolation with “a condition of satisfaction and serenity” (191). Enclosure, often associated with negativity and entrapment, is here a way of gaining an out-of-body experience, completeness yet also “notourselves.” “The specific sensation of architecture considered as spatial enclosure” (193) is related to the vastness of the church, as opposed to our more “ordinary” reactions to forms of intimate space. In his discussion of “intimate immensity,” Gaston Bachelard suggests that “intimate space and exterior space keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth.” Yet, whilst he sees “vast space” or immensity as characteristic of “quiet day-dreaming,” the “limitless world” of the vast as explored by Lee also takes the viewer beyond into the uncanny.54

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Lee’s gallery notes from 1901 to 1904 of the museums, galleries and churches she visited in France and Italy develop her perceptions of sacred space as potentially uncanny. Heightened by the gloom of the vast, candlelit interiors, the experience of crossing the threshold into the “comparative dark” of St Mark’s in Florence makes the church come alive and the viewer “unwilling to leave” (305). Freud links “solitude, silence and darkness” to the “infantile anxiety” never wholly overcome in his conclusion to “The Uncanny,”55 a point reiterated by Vidler in his lingering on the strangeness of “dark space.”56 The tomb-like darkness of the vast Italian space becomes over-determined in fin-de-siècle Gothic. According to Eastlake, “it had long been a popular objection to Gothic [architecture] that it involved a dark and gloomy interior.”57 Drawn to shadowy, indeterminate figures, the curtains which veil the sacristy and hidden tombs, Lee accentuates the gloomy interior in order to render the “sensation of architecture” an unsettling one. Punctuated by references to “mannerless” tourists (303) and even once “a Cook’s touring party” obscuring a Michelangelo sculpture (317), the diaries suggest that the uncanniness of the church is mediated through a refutation (or reconceptualisation) of the tourist gaze (though like other visitors she tips the sacristan at the end of a visit). In their analysis of dark tourism, Craig Young and Duncan Light have argued that in the nineteenth century “death spaces” such as cemeteries were “no longer places intended to separate the dead from the living” but every-day, recreational spaces admired for their “distinctive architecture, monuments and statuary.”58 The admiration of the Italian church as a death space, complete with tombs and stone angels and often surrounded by a burial ground, makes it a potential site for dark tourism, a form of “alternative space” catering to those with a fascination for the macabre. The nocturnal viewing of cathedrals meant that the diminished number of tourists, who often impede Lee’s aesthetic appreciation, are transformed into ghosts, rendering the shadowy interiors half-invisible, both familiar and unfamiliar: Florence, January 19-20, 1902. Note on the interior of the Cathedral at nightfall. It is on such misty days, and towards dusk, that churches reveal their qualities of spatial arrangement. The people become mere faceless gliding ghosts; one is alone with the building. I note the emotion of heightened being, of vitality as it were from one’s head, which is carried higher than usual. I feel lifted with a lighter tread … but not any of the excitement of the French Gothic. How any one can feel religious awe in

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such a church, I cannot conceive: one becomes a kind of god, and the place is a god. The next day under crude light, the people, the ugly arches become visible too much.59

Typically, in the gallery diaries, sacred space is awe-inspiring because of its partial invisibility, prompting an impression of inanimate statues appearing half-alive. A similar passage records the “greatness” of viewing the interior of Saint Peter’s, Rome, “towards dusk,” where her admiration of “the pale shimmer of the marble and the gold” and the distant lights are heightened by its deserted, twilight aura, “the spaciousness, vast airiness and emptiness, which seem in a way to be rather a mode of myself than a quality of the place” (314). In the Capitoline Museum, “the statues seem infinitely more intrusive than the moving crowd of tourists; all agog, gesticulating idiotically, a bedlam.” Paradoxically unghostly and haunting, the statues are disturbing in their stillness, “oddly the vague, shifting, gravityless movements (if such they can be called) of the crowd do not worry me: they are like ghosts compared with the statues and me.”60 The “pleasurable palpitations” experienced on viewing the statues, frescoes and ornate decorations become dependent on a spectralising of the tourist crowd, an “alone[ness] with the building” achieved through an alternative viewing of the shadowy interiors. Landscapes of decadence, argues Alex Murray, are animated not only by depravity but also by artifice and uncertainty, as fin-de-siècle writers set out “to challenge any easy means of mapping morality onto place.”61 Decadent writers, rather than always dwelling on melancholy, disease and decline, “were self-consciously attempting to emphasise the artificial, constructed nature of place.”62 Leonie Wanitzek, one of the few critics to consider the importance of a spatial approach to Lee’s work, argues that “A particular state of feeling and a particular type of imagined place become tied to an actual, perceived geographical site in a process that is frequently triggered by an intense sensory perception.”63 Yet this does not take into account the connections between feelings about the supernatural and the imagining of a haunted space. The adjectives Lee used to describe Italy, “lovely, terrible, picturesque,” as well as one of her favourites, “ineffable,” suggest the duality of its meanings.64 Catherine Maxwell argues that Lee offers a nostalgic vision of the Italian past, alluring readers with “a series of receding vistas.”65 Yet it is also important

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to stress her sense of the terror of the picturesque, linked to an imagined Italy. What Wanitzek refers to as “the space of a quintessential ‘Italy’ emerg[ing] in the textual fusion of the real and the remembered” is a necessarily haunted space.66 Gothic Italy, in all its Ruskinian splendour, is a cartographical construct in which distinct cities shade into each other.

Italy as a Haunted Museum: The Lumber-Room of the Past The growth of museum culture in the nineteenth century underpins the ways in which writing about Gothic architecture becomes bound up with notions of the tourist gaze and the consuming of images. According to Barbara J. Black, the Victorian museum was at once emblem, historical event, institution, image and practice, as well as an important civic space.67 The historian Kate Hill notes the similarities of nineteenthcentury museums to temples, exhibitions or mausoleums, which displayed commodities, religious artefacts and dead ancestors.68 Museum spaces had gendered implications, as women visitors valued their accessibility and the opportunity to dream or enhance their knowledge, even as their visiting involved them in “an exercise in negotiating rules and norms.”69 In an age which valued collection, antique-dealing, archaeology and excavation, the desirability of “old things” increased around the turn of the century. This veneration for oldness is part of Lee’s manifesto for the supernatural in “Faustus and Helena”: “To raise a real spectre of the antique is a craving of our own century.” David Harvey suggests that “We appropriate ancient spaces in very modern ways, treat time and history as something to create rather than to accept.”70 Lee’s reproduction of an alternative vision of decadent Italy, to be revered by “we moderns,” can be read in terms of her appropriation of ancient spaces, her responses to a past inhabited by forgotten musicians and artists. Daniel Darvay’s work on Gothic Italy situates modernist writing in relation to both the cultural practice of the Grand Tour and the birth of the public art museum, showing how Italy operates in this period as both a “museum of antiquities,” “a living museum of art” and a place to be plundered for art treasures to be displayed in the English country house.71 These constructions of the museum as mausoleum, as an enchanted space which welcomed but potentially restricted women visitors, illuminate the double-edged accessibility of haunted Italian space, with its exhibiting of the old and evoking of a buried past.

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It has become commonplace to dismiss “Winthrop’s Adventure,” as an inferior and much less chilling version of “A Wicked Voice,” but on re-examination it offers a subtle and quite different version of the architectural uncanny.72 Originally subtitled “A Culture Ghost,” the story positions the talented and eccentric Winthrop, with his devotion to all kinds of art, in relation to an unnamed “quaint Lombard city” (47). His supernatural communication with the murdered eighteenth-century singer, Ferdinando Rinaldi, evokes not only a fascination with the effeminate portrait with its compelling eyes, but a dangerous admiration for the crumbling walls and “tumbledown” ruins of a past civilisation. Descriptions of the decaying old palaces where the hauntings take place dominate the narrative, even as the bewitched Winthrop finds himself obsessed with locating the place where the ghostly musician was stabbed to death. As a visitor to Italy, the English ghost-seer is interrupted on his “rambling” around the country by the revelation of Rinaldi’s story by the collector Maestro Fa Diesis, known for his “perfect museum” of musical objects and instruments, displayed in a handsome old palace, “literally tumbling to pieces” (43). As Kristin Mahoney argues, Winthrop as ethical consumer with his “authentic reverence for the otherness of objects” reinvigorates “a silenced and discarded object,” the hidden portrait.73 The “spacious rooms, with carved oaken ceilings and painted window frames” which house the objects are maintained by the sale of “[the collector’s] furniture, his tapestries, his plate, his family papers, his own clothes,” sacrificed in order to spend his life “dusting, labelling, counting and cataloguing” (43). Both men operate within the economy of tourism and collection, observing, purchasing and dusting the objects of the past in order to satisfy their obsession with art. In “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault identifies the museum and the library as “heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.”74 These “other spaces,” which break the rules of spatial divisions and binaries, are “unlike ordinary cultural spaces” and can combine “in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.”75 The archival, organising function of the museum can be linked to an admirable modernity, but also ruptures notions of history by the “will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages.”76 According to Black, the museum “purports to be the site of origins, continuities, and traditions, yet is equally the site of ruptures, fractures, and conflicts.”77 Entering

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a museum is not only a visual experience, but also a spatial experience, often organised in terms of routes, rooms and tours, which can be related to ways of appreciating the domestic interior. Fa Diesis’s “strange silent house full of musical things” (44) becomes a “grotesque” yet charming place, with no easy route around its interiors. Its spatial impossibilities constitute part of its charm: it is “a queer old place, full of ups and downs and twistings and turnings” with a “narrow and wriggling corridor” (45), as if the building itself were alive. The architectural uncanniness of the museum chimes with its rupturing of time, its queering of the tourist gaze. Lumber-rooms, museum-like spaces of memorialisation and tradition, repositories of strange and half-forgotten objects, are an often ignored haunted site. As a store-room for unwanted or outdated furniture or objets d’art, usually locked, inaccessible or hidden away, the lumberroom is both an oubliette, where unwanted ancestors can be forgotten, and a treasure trove. Eighteenth-century Italy is characterised in terms of “the remote lumber-room full of discarded mysteries and of lurking ghosts” in Lee’s first book of essays, in which she ponders the capacity of the “things moth-eaten and dust-engrained” to be transformed into something wonderful and enchanted.78 Leighton is right to identify Lee’s uses of the lumber-room as a playroom, which can transform “the jumbled idea of the past itself.”79 Significantly, the hidden portrait which Fa Diesis displays to his visitor is contained in a “bleak,” whitewashed lumber-room, “peopled with broken bookshelves, crazy music desks, and unsteady chairs and tables,” one of a gallery of “time-stained” and dust-covered ancestral portraits (45). The forgotten music, “quite a treasure” which triggers Winthrop’s buried memories in the opening of the story, has also been discovered “among a heap of rubbish” in an old lumber-room (36), the duality of the room and its objects signalled in the Countess’s remark that it is “as good as a wrought-iron ornament found among a heap of rusty nails, or a piece of Gabbio majolica found among cracked coffee cups” (36). The dual function of a lumber-room as secret portrait gallery and repository of hidden treasure shows the uses of broken furniture and dusty artefacts to signal lost histories. Lumber becomes treasure, a “wonder-world” for the imagination, according to Lee,80 where ghosts come out to play. The Italy of “the imaginative tourist” made up of “crumbling villas” and “picturesqueness,” “a land where the Past haunted on … strange,

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weird, curious” is evoked in this early story, according to Lee’s retrospective account of 1927.81 As a “foreigner” in Italy, Winthrop enters the uninhabited villa Negri, where Rinaldo had been found stabbed, in the same spirit of consumption in which he enters the old curiosity shops, full of “the spoils of centuries of magnificence” (55) in the desolate square. A fine house “left to rot,” “deserted and falling to pieces” (52), with distinctive vases and obelisks outside, it is a monument to a forgotten past. Located near a Carthusian monastery with frescoes which “all the foreigners go to see” (57), the deserted villa invites the tourist with his “desire to see it again” at his peril. The word “mechanically” recurs throughout the story, as if the tourist is going through the motions of consumption and sightseeing, doomed to chase “the object of my search” (61). The supernatural, “such trash” is both feared and mocked by the superstitious peasants who recognise that the villa is “a bad house to live in” but “did not wish to talk about ghosts” (63). Lee evokes Winthrop’s dismissal of the traditional supernatural—“In my present highly wrought, imaginative mood, an apparition in a winding sheet, a clanking of chains, and all the authorized ghostly manifestations seemed in the highest degree disgusting; my mind was too much haunted to be intruded on by vulgar spectres” (63)—but the haunting cannot be separated from the potential vulgarity of the tourist gaze. Taking up the challenge to sleep in the “crypt-like house” (69), Winthrop’s status as tourist and foreigner, his “mad infatuation” (67) for ruin, is called into question. Through the old rotten door is the “desolate” entrance saloon, with its broken chairs and the sacks of corn kept there by the peasants. Reinforcing associations with the tourist attraction of the neighbouring monastery, there is a “vague, musty smell of decaying wood and plaster” and some remains of tracery and fresco (67), which prompt a meditation on the limits of his ruin-pleasure: All this solemn, silent decay impressed me deeply, far more than I had expected; all my excitement seemed over, all my whims seemed to have fled […] I was in the house; further I neither ventured to go nor dared to think of all the dare-devil courting of the picturesque and supernatural which had hitherto filled me was gone; I felt like an intruder, timid and humble – an intruder on solitude and ruin. (67–68)

Wrapped in the peasant’s cloak, Winthrop combines the status of intruder and inhabitant. The impression of decay is exquisitely satisfying yet

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fleeting and unobtainable, like his dangerously eroticised “courting of the supernatural.” Dylan Trigg claims that “the ontological implication of decay is simultaneously material and immaterial” as the physical manifestation of decline “creates a unity between space and the idea dormant in that space.”82 The sound of silvery music and a “strange exquisite voice” (69) beckons the intruder towards a threshold at the top of steps, with a view of a dark empty room with “the cold, damp feeling and smell of a crypt” (68), its materiality gesturing to the decaying past it symbolises. He looks through an oval ornamental window oeil de boeuf , standing on a broken table to look through some “dust-dimmed glass” (69). Doubling the ancestral portrait, the figure at the harpsichord looks him in the eye as he watches, “spellbound,” “paralysed” before being plunged into darkness as he hears the terrible cry of the musician’s murder. On entering through the door, the room is empty except for a stained wall, and stagnant water, a fallen beam and an open harpsichord “encrusted with dust and split from end to end, its strings rusty and broken, its yellow keyboard thick with cobweb” (70). The emptiness of the room and the panic at the broken instrument are perhaps an instance of what John Urry describes as “artefactual memory,” in which artefacts “provoke memories, often in forms which are unpredictable and disruptive.”83 After losing consciousness in the entrance hall, Winthrop wakes up in the morning light on the “dust-encrusted” marble floor. As he leaves, he looks back at “the great bare hall, with its mouldering rafters and decaying frescoes, the heaps of rubbish and garden implements, its sad, solemn ruin” (71), his fright and loss of consciousness in the villa now making him “shudder and shrink” from the deserted building, tortured by fears of lying motionless, “mouldering underground” (72). His infatuation with the aesthetics of decay produces a fever, as the haunted villa ejects the tourist and strips him of his rapture. To enter a haunted space unprotected by the peasants, who mock him the next day for trying to “do the devil’s picture” (73), is to expose himself to witnessing a murder in a lumber-room, the forgotten trace of lost music. His spectral encounter is made up of incongruous fragments, like the “dust-encrusted” faded splendour of the ruined villa. Christa Zorn has argued that Lee’s fantastic tales, with their neurotic, obsessive narrators and unstable, incoherent narratives, are comparable to the decadent Gothic.84 But, like other critics of Lee’s work, she reads the hysterical narrators’ obsession with the past in terms of historical myths and the unknowability of women rather than in architectural terms. Lee’s most famous tale of the supernatural “A Wicked Voice” dwells on the

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“intoxication” of this “strange Venice” which is said to be “floating, as it were, in the stagnant lagoon of the past” (163), punctuated by haunting melodies which induce a state of panic for Magnus, its male composer narrator. As Maxwell and others have pointed out, this story can be read alongside Lee’s later essay, “Out of Venice at Last” (1925) which locates this stagnancy within the city’s “shifting iridescent sanguine splendours” (339).85 The essay equates ruination with the fakery of this splendour, “all the dead greatness and the happiness which has never really been, the crumble of endless neglect and the creepy life of obscure baseness seem all to be in their ooze” (339). The creepiness of the Italian city is anchored in this duality of stagnancy and splendour, and the haunted objects which testify to its mausoleum-like status: “its own long, shameful, crumble, ending in a sale of shrines and heirlooms, and dead women’s fans and dead babies’ shoes at the curiosity dealers” (341). The repeated references to crumbling, akin to the “evidence of slow decline” which Ruskin admires in the façade of Gothic buildings, induce horror in the face of a disappearing history. In his discussion of haunted place, Julian Wolfreys conceptualises Venice in terms of “the city as revenant constituted through its shifting traces,” referring to its “phantom topography,” “that other city, the city’s other” that lurks beneath the surface.86 If Venice, with its echoes of the “pleasure-seeking” of the past, is envisioned in Lee’s essay as “too much and too much so,” it threatens to submerge its inhabitants with its “dead greatness” (340), its history in ruins. These sepulchral traces, the clash between old and new, are also evident in a key scene in “A Wicked Voice” set in the cathedral of Padua, which stages the unnerving splendour of sacred space. With its disconcerting confusion between Venice and Padua, the opening sequence evokes a hostile topography of dreary streets and “ill-plastered palaces, with closed, discoloured shutters” (172), a site of the architectural uncanny, with its “gardens without gates, gates without gardens, the avenues leading nowhere” (172). A cacophony of “Hoffmanlike” strange music within the cathedral seems at odds with “the piles of sculptured marbles and gilded bronzes,” as if the “immense sums” invested in monuments and decoration in the previous century had desacralised the sacred space, a “grotesque performance” of “profanation” (172). Drawn back to the cathedral in order to listen again to the “ineffable concert of impossible voices” he has enjoyed in the afternoon, Magnus’s re-entering—“I pushed my way under the heavy leathern curtain” (173)—is a crossing of

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a threshold into a scene of terror. The darkened “vast” cathedral is overpowering with its “smell of stale incense” and “a crypt-like damp [which] filled my mouth,” where the half-light makes the muscles of the sculptured figures appear to be “plaqueing with yellow” (173), subject to an unnatural decay. If in decadent writing, as Hanson argues, “Catholicism is embraced even as it falls to pieces,”87 this ruination becomes apparent in the discourses of decay and disintegration which seep into descriptions of the church interior. The panic induced by the “strange music” of the organ also finds its origin in the cathedral turned crypt, both exquisite and grotesque, evoking the sensation of live burial. If a crypt is usually a subterranean burial place beneath a church or cathedral, then what Hogle calls the mysterious “power of the cryptic space” with its “age-old ciphers” in an interior open to visitors becomes uncanny.88 Moreover, the very vastness and emptiness of cathedral space are threatening, going beyond Anstruther-Thomson’s notion of “that special sense of completeness and harmony given by architecture which encloses” (193) to offer a haunting sense of the decaying monument. Magnus’ fear of being “turned out” by the sacristan intent on closing the doors (173), aligns him with the unwanted tourist, admiring the artefacts of a mysterious enchanting world. The extremity of his emotional and physical reactions, the clamminess, “enervating heat” and “vague panic” (174) testify not only to the supernatural music but also to the chilling architecture, making him “hurr[y] into the open.” The blurring of architectural categories between ballrooms and sacred spaces is also apparent in the last haunting scene at the rural Villa of Mistra, which develops this reverence for the ancient and the broken. From his bedroom Magnus can hear the village church bell striking one, and on beginning his random wanderings through long passages and empty rooms, his steps “re-echoed as in a church” (178). In her architectural work The Decoration of Houses (1898), Edith Wharton advised that ballrooms, typically large and elaborately decorated, should not be “overcrowded with furniture,” as “a gala room is never meant to be seen except when crowded: the crowd takes the place of furniture.”89 Earlier in “A Wicked Voice,” St Mark’s Square is likened to a “great open-air ballroom” (167), as the crowds disperse. The haunted space Magnus looks down on in the villa becomes visible from a “dark box in a half-lighted theatre,” reminiscent of “those little galleries or recesses for the use of musicians or lookers-on … under the ceilings of the ballrooms in certain old Italian palaces” (178). The ballroom, a huge space enclosed within

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a palace interior, seems incongruous in a rural villa, its vastness akin to that of an echoing church. As Wharton noted, “an immense ball-room with gilded ceiling” becomes “cheerless” if only occupied by “a handful of people sitting after dinner,” as the relative emptiness of its immensity makes it “unfit” for purpose.90 The “faded frescoes” and “time-blackened canvases” (178) are transposed from the eighteenth-century ballroom in which Zaffirino’s voice had its fatal effects, as if the modern composer has stepped back in time. This recalls Magnus’s earlier dream of “a real ballroom” with its spider chandeliers and yellow satin sofas, where he witnesses the death of his friend’s grand-aunt Pisana Vendramin, and can sense the invisible crowd with their “smothered exclamations,” “the dark figures moving to and fro in the room” (165). Punctuated by references to the unlit rotating chandeliers “like gigantic spiders,” this hallucinatory scene includes spectral music which echoes like the singing in the “deserted cathedral” (178). After a feverish struggle with the locked door, the “big saloon” is revealed to be “a kind of submarine cave, paved with moonbeams,” and a supernatural light, but also “completely empty, like a great hay-loft” (180). The only things remaining in this crypt-like (lumber)room smelling of “damp and mildew” are the left-over ropes from the chandelier, and a cracked harpsichord with broken strings. Certeau’s discussion of our necessary inhabitation of “only haunted sites,” which offer “fragmentary and convoluted histories, pasts stolen by others from readability, folded up ages that can be unfolded” seems pertinent here.91 This evoking of silent ghosts reiterates Certeau’s notion of the site as “filled with the presence of absences,” like the “cellars and attics everywhere,” which “stor[e] up pregnant silences and inarticulate stories.”92 The disappearing phantom ballroom is suggestive of magical splendour reduced to a mouldering and fractured emptiness, the leftovers of an eighteenth-century beauty which can only be accessed temporarily.

The Exquisite Creepiness of Old Houses: Where Devious Routes Lead in “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” and “The Doll” In Vernon Lee’s essay “In Praise of Old Houses” (1897) from her collection of essays Limbo, she outlines her arguments about the “rapture” of the past and the endlessly charming concept of the old house with its evocative history.93 Rather than giving her “the creeps,” old houses

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generate an emotional response to the past which becomes “exquisite” (29), a decadent experience. She admires the way in which Nature “smears weather-stain on weather-stain and lichen on lichen” (29), adding to the layered beauty, the visible strata, of temples, churches and palaces. In her view, the loss of history in the modern age is at odds with the lure of the past. She writes of the “ineffable, indescribable” sensation “of being companioned by the past, of being in a place warmed for our living by the lives of others” (30). The simultaneity of past and present, old and new, strikes Lee as she waits for a tram in a church-porch outside Florence. The baldacchino-like structure of the church contrasts with the stained and “insignificant house” (35) next door, the tombstones of dead noblemen juxtaposed with the Strozzi coat-of-arms (later called an escutcheon) on the house. Decorative escutcheons, visible on the corners of Italian houses like strange faceless gargoyles, are often mentioned in Lee’s writing to signal both the endurance of the patriarchal family and the possibilities of its demise. Macaulay writes of the fragments of ruined abbeys and churches, such as chancel arches and Gothic windows, visible in English domestic buildings, “all over the country manor houses, farms and cottages are haunted with strange intimations from shadowy vanished worlds.”94 If for Lee, the past is “the unreal and the yet visible,” its ever-receding unreality making it “rich in possibilities” (40), then this has specific architectural resonances. The visibility of bygone ages in the stained strata of buildings, this “strange meeting of centuries,” is a key component of Italian haunted space. In Lee’s neglected morality tale, “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” (1892), the cosmopolitanism of fin-de-siècle Florence lures its heroine towards the darker side of its medieval streets, as her imitation of the grieving, down-at-heel widow Sora Lena takes on a life of its own. Appearing in a collection of decadent tales Vanitas (1892), it was not specifically framed as a ghost story. Leighton notes its “challenge to fin-de-siècle frivolity” in the context of an Italy “associated with an aestheticism that claims its own modernity from the contradictions of the past,”95 but does not explore the strange attraction of the haunted house in the final scenes. If mapping ghostly tales onto the local environment was a potent “expression of the past in the present,” as Bell attests,96 then in this story the location of the spectre of the suicidal mother in the gloomy Jewish quarter of Florence offers a particular vision of female ancestry. Constructed as a decadent playground, with its endless masked balls and pageants, its “riot of amusement” (320),

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Florence becomes tainted (and enlivened) by its harbouring of forgotten women.97 As explored in “In Praise of Old Houses,” the “faceless crowd of ghosts” who haunt the urban borderlands are not the unknown “magnificos”, but “a crowd of nameless creatures” symbolising “daily life” and “suffering” (40). For Lee, the clash between past and present in Italy becomes unnerving as well as aesthetically satisfying. Prompted by the “constant blind turnings behind the great giant palaces” which invite “cut-throat” violence in The Spirit of Rome, she muses, “If one lived in all this picturesqueness, the horrors of the past, the vacuity of the present, would drive one I know not whither.”98 Her sense of “horror at this absorbing Italy” is partly located in the “barbarism” of the past civilisation and its stories of violence and death,99 partly in the squalor and emptiness of its late nineteenth-century manifestations. Doomed to walk the streets near the station in anticipation of her longdead sons returning from the Second Italian War of Independence, Sora Lena offers an alternative way of traversing the city than the bored chaperoned journeys of her upper-class double, Netta Krasinska. The “strange, strange contrast” between the two women in the eyes of the male artist narrator is anchored in their class difference and their physical appearance, the one a “hulking old woman, with her vague, starting, reddish face,” in “her extraordinary costume of thirty years ago, her enormous crinoline, on which the silk skirt and ragged petticoat hung limply … one of several outfits, all alike, of that distant period; all alike inexpressibly dirty and tattered” (309), the other “a radiant impersonation of youthful brightness and elegance,” a model of “refinement, high-breeding, luxury” (308, 309). After dressing in the older woman’s “extraordinary costume” for a fancy-dress ball, Netta also mimics her window-shopping and compulsive walking in order to counter the ennui of modernity. Like a tourist attraction, Sora Lena is a figure to be noticed, “one of the most conspicuous sights of the town,” as if “she must always have been there, like the olivetrees and the paving stones” (309). She is, in the artist’s view, older than Giotto’s tower, a medieval emblem of Gothic architecture which dwarfs Florence’s Piazza del Duomo with its renowned sculptures. The asylum S. Bonifazio, the carceral space of “wretched, dirty, wicked, wicked old women,” is another conspicuous sight, “that strange, lofty whitewashed place, which [Netta] had never seen, but which she knew so well” with its beds of “horrid slobbering and gibbering old women” (323). The “dirty” woman trapped in the past, whose freedoms must be contained in strange enclosed spaces, is a key motif of the story.

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Reinvented as a cosmopolitan tourist, whose alternative mapping of the city alters and displaces spatial possibilities and interdictions, to borrow from Certeau,100 Netta relishes the dark pleasures of slumming. Reenacting Lena’s “daily walks towards the station,” and the “strange forebodings of evil” and death they generate, she begs her friends to accompany her to the low theatres and music-halls, to dress up and go for “evening strolls in the more dubious portions of the town” (320). In “The Uncanny,” Freud describes the disorientation of getting lost in the deserted streets of an Italian town, a town “strange” because unknown, but also strange in its unmappability. Trying to escape from the narrow street of painted women, he wanders around but twice ends up “by devious paths in the same place,” “where my presence was now beginning to excite attention.”101 The uncanny experience of involuntary return to the brothel zone seems a typically fin-de-siècle preoccupation. Freud’s relief at “get[ting] straight back to the piazza” suggests the dual nature of the disorienting Gothic city and the invisible class boundaries in the narrow streets. Julian Wolfreys argues, “there are … always two cities at least in any urban space,” the real and that “other city, the city’s other.”102 Off the beaten track, Netta flouts interdictions by: strolling around in that damp May twilight among the old, tortuous streets … [entering] that labyrinth of black narrow alleys [surrounding the large court] … not unlike that of a castle, between the frowning tall houses of the old Jews’ quarters; houses escutcheoned and stanchioned, once the abode of Ghibelline nobles, now given over to rag pickers, scavengers and unspeakable trades. (324)

These “unlikely streets” for a lady out at twilight, her Freudian “devious paths,” lead her to a Gothic threshold, as if she were “a woman … hiding disgraceful proceedings” (325). The iron gates of the old Jewish quarter admit her into the dank, crypt-like house of the widow. Resident in Florence from 1889 and a Member of the Society for the Protection of Old Florence, Lee wrote a telling letter to The Times in 1898, protesting against modernisation and the sacrifice of Florence’s ancient heritage.103 Passing through an “oozy ill-smelling archway” observing the rags hanging from the iron hook, the narrator concludes that it was one of the houses “condemned to destruction for sanitary reasons, and whence the inmates were gradually being evicted” (325), evoking the dirtiness of the slums of “old Florence” Lee admired. The “half-effaced

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name,” “Little Street of the Grave-Digger,” linking the slum to a burial ground, is reproduced in the newspaper report of the suicide of Sora Lena noted throughout Florence for “her eccentric habits and apparel” (313). The performance of eccentricity leading to live burial is equated with the “half-effaced” yet “escutcheoned” past of the Ghibelline nobles, who haunt the “stanchioned” houses in the realm of unspeakability. If the conjuring up of the past in Lee’s ghost stories can reveal “lost or obscured histor[ies]” of (sometimes mythic) women, as Andrew Smith has argued,104 the secret history of Sora Lena is an alternative one to her Ghibelline ancestors or the Renaissance evil of Lucretia Borgia referenced earlier in the narrative. “That beloved historic emotion” (33) famously explored in “In Praise of Old Houses” is an emotion which “gives strange possibilities of simultaneous presence in various places” (34), as the visible is layered with the imagined. The chilling final scene of “The Legend” shows the ascent of the steep black staircase in the fatal house as an engagement with the past: Its steps, constructed perhaps in the days of Dante’s grandfather, when a horn buckle and leathern belt formed the only ornaments of Florentine dames, were extraordinarily high, and worn off at the edges by innumerable generations of successive nobles and paupers … Madame Krasinska passed on heedless of it all, the front of her delicate frock brushing the unseen filth of those black steps, in whose crypt-like cold and gloom there was an ever-growing breath of charnel. (325–26)

The references to Dante’s grandfather and the “innumerable generations” of rich and poor position this old house in the medieval past, contrasting the movements of the frivolous modern woman with her ornaments and “delicate frock” with those of previous Florentine dames. In “In Praise of Old Houses,” the “ladies of the past” with their dusty dresses are associated with deceit, trumpery, “this dead world of vanity” (40). Yet the line of women behind Sora Lena may also symbolise the valorising of motherhood and family within the Catholic church, which the “heedless” modern woman denies.105 The “unseen filth” and “crypt-like” cold show the slum as a Gothic space which invites suicidal thoughts. Inspiring the emotional rapture of the old house, shot through with the fear of decay, Lena’s attic with its peeling wallpaper and empty birdcage is the antithesis to Netta’s opulent apartments. The open door at the top of the stairs causes Netta to move “mechanically,” imitating the actions of her

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double. The terrifying vision of the ghost of Sora Lena, with her crinoline and “blear stare,” makes the attic a container for the fear of growing old and dirty, evoking Dorian Gray’s attic of dark secrets. The paupers doomed to their charnel-like emptiness in the days of Dante, “she knew it so well” (326), suggest a less enchanting vision of the past. Netta’s attempts to strangle herself with her studded Russian girdle suggest the morbidity which shadows her fascination with the old house and the price of her dark tourism. Haunted by her dirty double, she is placed in the convent, another asylum-like space which terminates the possibilities of her devious routes. The architectural features of an escutcheoned Umbrian palace, another tourist-haunted space, also generate Gothic disturbance in Lee’s lesserknown story, “The Image,” reprinted as “The Doll,” first published in Cornhill Magazine in 1896. Critical attention has tended to focus on the doll as an art object: Patricia Pulham has explored the author’s obsession with sculptures and “still” forms such as models and dolls.106 Reading this neglected narrative as a ghost story with the doll as both haunted object and revenant is revealing of its examination of spatial disturbance.107 Narrated by an unnamed female collector of bric-à-brac, guided by the stories of the curiosity-dealer Orestes and a sinister housekeeper, the narrative draws the reader into her admiring tourist gaze at the late seventeenth-century palace, “with all its rooms as they used to be” (517).108 With its “immense” lions’ heads over the windows, colonnaded courtyard and “colossal staircase,” the neglected palace in the hidden metropolis of Foligno where the narrator goes to purchase a collection of Chinese plates is described as “grandiose, but very coarse” (517). For a collector used to “ferreting about among dead people’s effects” (516), the unused rooms become as available for consumption as the Chinese dessert set. According to Kristin Mary Mahoney, Lee’s ghost stories are “populated with objects that have been degraded, decontextualized, or reproduced for the shopping needs of tourists … a character is drawn to a particular cultural relic because of his or her knowledge of its historical origin, allowing the object to emerge from the past to terrorize the present … historicized consumption retrieves the art object from degradation.”109 The attention paid to the navigation of the route around the palace, the cataloguing of rooms and the reverence for relics frames the revelation of the disturbingly lifelike image of the beautifully dressed doll, as if she, like Sora Lena, becomes a tourist site, a vision of old Italy.

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The palace is twice likened to a sacred space, with the housekeeper behaving like the old women “who raise the curtains for you at church doors” and the ballroom “as big as a church” (518). This evokes Macaulay’s observation that many English mansions display “traces of churches,” as Tudor mansions are haunted by the remains of sprawling medieval abbeys.110 But its sacredness is marred by the passing of time, misuse and modernisation, evident in the dirty floors and “tarnished and tattered” furniture, and even worse, the “horrible racks of faded photographs on the walls, and twopenny screens and Berlin wool cushions, attesting the existence of more modern occupants” (518). The clashing of time periods is everywhere apparent: the late seventeenthcentury palace stands out from the neat, little carved Renaissance townhouses and the tattered doll in 1820s costume. A Miss Havisham-like figure, the doll wears a white satin costume “turned grey with engrained dirt” (519) and a fixed stare, whilst the big hole in the back of her head revealing a cardboard interior connects her to the decaying house she symbolises. The placing of the haunted object is also significant in terms of its “spatial enclosure,” as in a palace seemingly composed of vast high spaces, she has been closeted away. If the walker in his wanderings, according to Certeau, “transforms every spatial signifier into something else … creates discontinuity … [and] dooms certain sites to inertia or to decay,” choosing an alternative route around the house becomes a means of altering neglected or forbidden sites.111 Passing through “an untidy-looking back room,” an ironingroom adjacent to the room occupied by the housekeeper, the visitors take a short cut to the library to see the Count’s medal collection, rather than going the official way through the big hall. By traversing a forbidden threshold, deviating from what Certeau calls “the mapped route,”112 the collector is confronted with the ghostly, motionless image of the 1820s woman, who has been taken out of “her closet” earlier that day “to give her a little dusting” (518). Discovered halfway through the tour of the house, the doll’s spectrality is evoked after the collector records her happiness in “wandering among the ghosts of dead people” (518). The doll’s limbs are manipulated “in a ghastly way” by the smirking housekeeper, seen as an “old witch” for hoping to get a bigger tip for showing off her master’s possessions (517). Following Certeau’s model of spatial transformation through walking, by “avoiding routes regarded as licit or obligatory,” the housekeeper “increases the number of possibilities,”113 therefore revealing what is hidden or illicit within the home.

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In “Faustus and Helena,” Lee singles out haunted spaces such as “the abandoned villas on the outskirts of Italian towns, with the birds flying in and out of the unglazed windows … the long-closed room of one long dead, the faint smell of withered flowers, the rustle of longunmoved curtains, the yellow paper and faded ribbons of long-unread letters” (310). The liminality of the abandoned villa, no longer protected from the elements, and the museum-like rooms of the dead, with the prefix, “un” recurring in “unmoved” and “unread” echoing the adjective “long-closed,” suggest the uncanniness of ruined Italian architecture and of spatial fixity and containment. Hill notes nineteenth-century women’s attachment to old objects and family heirlooms which materialised memories and “created a relationship with the dead.”114 Like a forgotten museum exhibit, the doll gathers dust in a long-closed room. Her dustiness and mustiness evoke the uncanny; as the architect Robert Kerr advised, “the comfortableness of a house indicates exemptions from all such evils as … damp, vermin, noise, and dust … dark corners, blind passages and musty rooms.”115 She is also in the wrong place. The curiosity-dealer Orestes remarks that she used to be “kept in her own boudoir” (518), or what the housekeeper refers to as “the cupboard.” These tiny spaces traditionally associated with women, places to dress or to interact with lady’s maids, are haunted by their buried stories and also by the class antagonisms within the domestic realm. The story told by Orestes is of the old Count’s spending several hours a day in “the poor lady’s room” with her image out of crazy grief for his dead wife, before marrying a laundress, significantly described as another “woman he had in the house” (519). The dead wife’s place within the house had been contested both by her own son and by the laundress’s illegitimate daughter. The collector’s fears about her devoted maid’s responses to the doll also gesture at her function as a sign of domestic disruption. If the doll becomes “a woman whose secret I had surprised” (520), then the imagining of her extreme seclusion and her mistreatment into a kind of living death links to the disrupted household hierarchies within the palace. Like Miss Havisham’s wedding chamber, the wife’s boudoir is preserved as a shrine, “not a thing was moved from how it had been at the moment of her death” (521) and only the bereft husband is allowed entry. Stillness and statis, according to Buzard, enhance the pleasures of the tourist experience, evoking “the sense of a place’s having been somehow kept still, out of history, suspended as if waiting for the visitor to make use of it.”116 Writing on the limits of privacy in the middle-class home, Jane

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Hamlett notes that only a small percentage of homes were able to include morning-rooms and boudoirs, suggesting that this was a luxurious space, but also one where men were not permitted—a space for women and lady’s maids, not husbands and wives, to interact.117 What Orestes calls “the laundress idyll” (521) coexisted with the Count’s visits to the image until other people were sent to dust her and then he died, after living “mostly in the kitchen” (521). The disruption of household hierarchies suggested here is another sign of the disturbed house. The dead wife’s son’s wife was the one who refurnished the boudoir and tried to send the image away, though she was rescued by the illegitimate daughter, “a kind of housekeeper in her half-brother’s palace” (522) and put to “live” in a closet. Significantly, the ironing-room mentioned a number of times in the story connects the closeted image to her laundress rival and replacement. Only when the image is bought by the collector and burnt on her own funeral pyre outside her domestic prison can there be “an end to her sorrows” (523). The questioning of the practice of collecting, linked to the development of tourism, encourages the reader to consider how relics are viewed: “Perhaps also buying furniture out of dead people’s houses to stick it in one’s own is not a great recommendation of one’s character” (523). Mahoney describes the narrative as “the story of a collector’s reformation,” with the final burning of the doll interpreted as a sign of triumph over unethical consumption.118 The devious routes of the tourist, however, suggest that the secrets of the museumlike Italian house exert a continuing uncanniness, inviting an enduring reverence for the strange dustiness of the past. For Murray, Vernon Lee’s supernatural tales reiterate dominant “geographies of corruption,” in which narrators intoxicated by “the negative image of ‘decadent’ Italy” and its sinful past pay the price for their over-investment in history.119 But occupying urban space and recognising the Gothic lure of the city can also be read as an embracing of historical excess, a response to Gothic architecture and evil rather than just a moralising response to decadent desire. The old house which Lee finds so fascinating acts as a refuge from the ennui of modernity, a turning away from a horrifying newness. The back streets of Florence and its Jewish quarter are an alternative haunted space to the stagnant splendours of Venice, offering access to different layers of Italy’s past. The repeated references to decay, crypts and mouldering, as well as to the beauty of artefacts and sacred music, draw on the church’s dual function as museum and mausoleum. Haunted space in Lee’s stories always becomes a sacred

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space, a dark but delicious vision of death and decay. The indeterminacy of the ruin becomes a key part of its appeal. “Place does not legitimize an aesthetics of decay” argues Trigg. “Instead, decay legitimizes the aesthetics of place.”120 Inspired and disturbed by the juxtapositions of old and new Italian architecture, and the aestheticising of decay, Lee relished the ruin as an emblem of antiquity and escape from a modernity increasingly seen as vulgar and unsightly.

Notes 1. Alex Murray, Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 9; Catherine Maxwell, “Vernon Lee and the Ghosts of Italy,” in Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy eds. Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 208. 2. Patricia Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 2–3. She is drawing here on Vernon Lee’s essay “A Child in the Vatican,” in Belcaro: Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (London: W. Satchell, 1881). For a fascinating reading of Lee’s aesthetic arguments about the sculptures of antiquity, see Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 56–61. 3. Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 224, 244. See Vernon Lee, “Introduction,” to For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories (London: Bodley Head/John Lane, 1927), xxxvii. 4. Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker and Company, 1953), 165. 5. Ibid., 164. 6. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3. 7. Julia Hall and Andreas Schönle, eds., “Introduction,” in Ruins of Modernity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. 8. Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 238. 9. Ibid., 249. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 113. 12. Ibid., 138.

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13. Preface to Hauntings (1890) in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham, eds., Vernon Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006), 40. All quotations from “A Wicked Voice”, “Out of Venice at Last” and “Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural” are from this edition. 14. Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 119. 15. Lee, Preface, 37. 16. McCorristine, Spectres of the Self , 120. 17. Karl Bell, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 250. 18. Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 47. 19. Dale Townshend, Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 4, 222–23. 20. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel,” Arizona Quarterly 36 (1980): 330–58 (330). 21. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection,” in A New Companion to the Gothic ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 496–509 (498). 22. All quotations from this story are taken from Vernon Lee, The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction, Vol 1 (Milton Keynes: Leonaur/Oakpast, 2011). 23. Hogle, “The Gothic Ghost,” 498. 24. William Whyte, Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5, 7. 25. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Lecture 1: General Character of the Gothic Mind in the Middle Ages,” (1818) and “Lecture II: General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art,” (1818) in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, 4 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1836), vol. 1, 67–69 (68–69) and 70–78 (71). See also Townshend, Gothic Antiquity, 321, 322, 334, for his discussions of the Catholic vision of the sublime shared by Coleridge and the architect A. W. N. Pugin. 26. H. Horatio Joyce and Edward Gillin, “Introduction,” in Experiencing Architecture in the Nineteenth Century: Buildings and Society in the Modern Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 1. 27. Whyte, Unlocking the Church, 19. 28. John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in Stones of Venice (1853) in Selected Writings ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 51.

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

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Ruskin, “Modern Painters, IV,” (1856) in Selected Writings, 82. Ibid., 83. Ibid. John Ruskin, Stones of Venice (1853; London: Kluwer Press, 2003), 239. Ruskin, Stones of Venice, 238. See Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008), 206–8. Vernon Lee, “A Seeker of Pagan Perfection,” in The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction, Volume 1 (Milton Keynes: Leonaur/Oakpast, 2011), 131. For more on antiquity and aestheticism, see Evangelista, British Aestheticism, 54–55. Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, 203. Ibid., 305, 310. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 179. Chapman and Stabler, “Introduction,” in Unfolding the South, 10. See also John Dickie, “The Notion of Italy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture eds. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 17– 33. Dickie discusses the notion of “imaginary Italies” in a turbulent political period (19). Vernon Lee, “Santi Quattro Coronati,” (1899) in The Spirit of Rome (London: John Lane, 1906), 95, 94. Jane Stabler, “Devotion and Diversion: Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers in Italy and the Catholic Church,” in Unfolding the South eds. Chapman and Stabler, 15–16. Tess Cosslett, “Revisiting Fictional Italy, 1887–1908: Vernon Lee, Mary Ward, and E.M. Forster,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 52, no. 3 (2009): 313. Ibid., 326. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, 23. Ibid., 5. Jessica Gossling, “From the Drawer to the Cloister: Ernest Dowson’s ‘Poésie Schublade,’” in In Cynara’s Shadow: Collected Essays on Ernest Dowson eds. Alice Condé and Jessica Gossling (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 90–91. Charles Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (1872) ed. J. Morduant Crook (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1970), 191, 157, 367. Hanson, Decadence, 6, 9. Colby, Vernon Lee, 241. She relates Lee’s beliefs to “secular humanism” (286). See Lee, “Introduction,” to For Maurice, xvi. Hanson, Decadence, 9–10.

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53. All quotations are taken from Vernon Lee and C. Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty and Ugliness,” (1897) in Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, 1912). 54. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 202–3, 218, 224. 55. Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny trans. David McClintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 159. Nicholas Royle notes Freud’s preoccupation with darkness in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 108. 56. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 70. 57. Eastlake, History, 311. 58. Craig Young and Duncan Light, “Interrogating Spaces of and for the Dead as ‘Alternative Space”: Cemeteries, Corpses and Sites of Dark Tourism,” International Review of Social Research 6, no. 2 (2016): 62, 65. 59. Vernon Lee, “Aesthetic Responsiveness: Its Variations and Accompaniments, Extracts from Vernon Lee’s Gallery Diaries, 1901–04,” in Beauty and Ugliness, 272. 60. Lee, “Aesthetic Responsiveness,” 300, 301. The people also become ghosts inside San Lorenzo, Florence, where “everything is dreamlike” in the “hot evening,” with the sweetness of the incense only marred by the undisclosed “smells” (323–24). 61. Murray, Landscapes of Decadence, 9. 62. Ibid., 11. 63. Leonie Wanitzek, “The South! Something Exclaims Within Me”: Real and Imagined Spaces in Italy and the South in Vernon Lee’s Travel Writing,” Cahiers victoriens and edouardiens [en ligne] 83 Printemps (2016): 4. 64. Lee, “Introduction,” in For Maurice, xxxvi, xli. 65. Maxwell, “Vernon Lee and the Ghosts of Italy,” 208. 66. Wanitzek, “The South!” 5. 67. Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 4. 68. Kate Hill, Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 5. 69. Ibid., 5, 113. 70. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 204. 71. Daniel Darvay, Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 101, 104. He argues that “English Grand Tourists saw in Italy a ready-made

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72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

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museum that was yet to be explored and whose riches were in need of being rescued from the hands of a people who had proved unworthy of them” (104). Colby, Vernon Lee, 245. Kristin Mary Mahoney, “Haunted Collections: Vernon Lee and Ethical Consumption,” Criticism 48, no. 1 (2006): 56. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 26. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 26. Black, On Exhibit, 9. Vernon Lee, Preface to Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880; London: Fisher and Unwin, 1907), xvi. Angela Leighton, “Ghosts, Aestheticism and Vernon Lee,” Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2000): 4. Lee, Studies of the Eighteenth Century, xvi. Lee, “Introduction,” to For Maurice, xxxii, xliii. Trigg, Aesthetics of Decay, 97. John Urry, “How Societies Remember the Past,” in Theorising Museums eds. Sharon MacDonald and Gordon Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 50. Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 140, 167–68. Maxwell, “Vernon Lee,” 219. Julian Wolfreys, Transgression: Identity, Space and Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 150. Hanson, Decadence, 9. Hogle, “The Restless Labyrinth,” 331. Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr. The Decoration of Houses (1898; New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 135. Ibid., 135. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” from The Practice of Everyday Life, in The Certeau Reader ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 115. Ibid., 113. All quotations from “In Praise of Old Houses” are taken from Vernon Lee, Limbo and other Essays (London: Grant Richards, 1897). Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, 335. Angela Leighton, “Resurrections of the Body: Women Writers and the Idea of the Renaissance,” in Chapman and Stabler, 228, 238. Bell, Magical Imagination, 244. All quotations from “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” are taken from The Decadent Short Story: An Annotated Anthology eds. Kostas Boyiopoulos, Yoonjoung Choi and Matthew Brinton Tildesley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

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98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

Lee, The Spirit of Rome, 203. Ibid. Certeau, “Walking,” 106, 107. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 160. Wolfreys, Transgression, 150. Maxwell, “Vernon Lee,” 212. Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story, 1840–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 80, 81. Sharon Wood and Joseph Farrell, “Other Voices: Contesting the Status Quo,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, 141– 43. Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object, 2–3. For a slightly different analysis of this neglected story, see Emma Liggins, “Gendering the Spectral Encounter: Unspeakability in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Stories,” Gothic Studies 15, no. 2 (2013): 44–45. All quotations are taken from Vernon Lee, “The Image” (later reprinted as “The Doll”), Cornhill Magazine 31, (1896): 516–23. Mahoney, “Haunted Collections,” 51–52. Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, 358. Certeau, “Walking,” 107. Ibid. Ibid. Hill, Women and Museums, 92, 93. Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House (London: John Murray, 1871), 70. Buzard, Beaten Track, 179. Hamlett, Material Relations, 49–50. Mahoney, “Haunted Collections,” 39. Murray, Landscapes of Decadence, 29, 35. Trigg, Aesthetics of Decay, 156.

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Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Certeau, Michel de. “Walking in the City.” In The Practices of Everyday Life in The Certeau Reader edited by Graham Ward, 106–15. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Chapman, Alison and Jane Stabler, eds. Unfolding the South: NineteenthCentury British Women Writers and Artists in Italy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Coleridge, Henry Nelson, ed. The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1. London: William Pickering, 1836. Corcoran, Neil. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Cosslett, Tess. “Revisiting Fictional Italy, 1887–1908: Vernon Lee, Mary Ward, and E.M. Forster.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 52, no. 3 (2009): 312–28. Darvay, Daniel. Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Davies, Owen. The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Dickie, John. “The Notion of Italy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West, 17–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Eastlake, Charles. A History of the Gothic Revival ed. J. Morduant Crook. 1872; Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1970. Evangelista, Stefano. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Foley, Matt. Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Melancholy and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” (1919) In The Uncanny trans. David McClintock, 121–62. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Gossling, Jessica. “From the Drawer to the Cloister: Ernest Dowson’s ‘Poésie Schublade.’” In In Cynara’s Shadow: Collected Essays on Ernest Dowson edited by Alice Condé and Jessica Gossling, 90–116. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019. Hall, Julia and Andreas Schönle, eds. Ruins of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Hamlett, Jane. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.

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CHAPTER 5

“Ghosts Went Out When Electricity Came in”: Technology and Mistress-Servant Intimacy in the ghost stories of Edith Wharton

In the stories of the American writer Edith Wharton, ghosts intrude into the domestic interior in the form of unexpected guests, unwanted letters and servants who do not know their place, disrupting routine and habit and mocking the codes of etiquette and politeness which helped to define bourgeois society. The modernist haunted house with its telephones, electricity and radios juxtaposed with the period features so attractive to homeowners at this time embodies the clash between old and new, between tradition and modernity, which impacted on its female inhabitants in uncanny ways. Wharton’s stories of the supernatural have attracted some attention in terms of what Martha Banta refers to as “the ghostly Gothic of [the] everyday world,”1 with critics focussing on issues such as the New England settings, and “the territory between private and public space.”2 Felicitous Space, Judith Fryer’s wide-ranging study of Wharton and Willa Cather, examines American architects, reformers and heroines “in terms of the spaces they inhabit, break free from, transform,”3 yet has little to say about the transformation of space in supernatural fiction. The gendered dimensions of the haunted modernist interior need to be considered in relation to the irruption of the deadly into the new, of the darker side of modernity. Technological advance and its impact on the employment of servants, soon to become a dying breed, disrupted household hierarchies, the effects of which are particularly striking in uncannily ringing bells and telephones and in threshold spaces such as entrance halls, communicating doors and corridors. An exploration of the Gothic dynamics of © The Author(s) 2020 E. Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_5

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the modernist domestic interior, often the site of renovation and reinvention, is necessary in order to re-assess the evolution of the haunted house narrative. Wharton’s exposure of women’s feelings of insecurity and dread within both the old house and the newly modernised household reflects modernist anxieties about the invasion of privacy, at a time when, according to Victoria Rosner, writers were turning away from Victorian “gender- and class-based hierarchies” in the home towards “a new domesticity.”4 New domesticities are an important framework for Gothic modernisms, often more oriented towards questions of form and trauma. Luke Thurston has identified “the challenge … of thinking of modernism … in terms of ghosts,” arguing that the ghost story offered the modernists “an exemplary fracture of narrative consistency, an uncanny telepathic fissure of textual topography.”5 David Punter couples the resurgence of hungry ghosts in the modernist text to broader cultural preoccupations with “death and its endless resurgence at the heart of the new,” to the difficulties of inscribing progress in the shadow of war.6 But the modernist ghost story is also challenging in terms of its mediation of old and new spaces at a time of rapid modernisation. The sinister town houses and haunted mansions in Wharton’s ghost stories can be read in relation to her manifesto for privacy, The Decoration of Houses (1897), jointly written with the architect Ogden Codman Jr. Responding to the trend for home decoration, this fascinating text maps out the “purpose” of each room in the house in relation to its function for the master, mistress, servant and visitor. In such a scheme, the “material livableness” of each space relies on the positioning of doors, windows and fireplaces, as well as the arrangement of the furniture and “the privacy of the room.”7 The livableness of space, supposedly enhanced by technological advance, is threatened by the uncanniness of the new. This chapter develops arguments about privacy by examining the connections between technology, the supernatural and mistress-servant intimacy in ghost stories Wharton published between 1900 and 1937. It begins with a discussion of her neglected Italian story “The Duchess at Prayer,” which shows the influence of Vernon Lee in its revealing of the buried history of the dead Duchess to the male tourist being guided round her decaying ancestral home. Its contrasting of the felicitous garden space with the crypt-like interiors of the house and chapel can be read against Wharton’s history of Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904). Both American town houses and European ancestral houses

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under modernisation become uncanny repositories of half-buried memories which threaten women’s domestic security. In “Afterward” and “Pomegranate Seed” the husband vanishes from the domestic space, collected or lured away, by someone confirmed as dead, leaving the wife abandoned in a place of shadows where technology offers no consolation. The figure of the female servant, who significantly guarantees and disrupts the smooth running of the modern household, has been sidelined in accounts of Gothic modernisms. In the early twentieth century, as Lucy Delap has noted, the spatial segregation of servants from employers was in decline, sometimes resulting in greater domestic informality, yet the mistress’s authority was anchored in roles “that only servant-keeping could sustain.”8 Mistress-servant intimacy breaks down in Wharton’s ghost stories, threatening the authority of the mistress unnerved by transformations in the modern home. The historian Lucy Lethbridge has described servants as “witnesses of the social changes that have taken place in the British home over the last century: changes … in the way we run our homes and our attitudes to family, money, work and status.”9 Similarly in American ghost narratives, servants operate as either silent witnesses to the distress of their mistresses at the failure of technology, as in “All Souls’” or active generators of supernatural disturbance. The servant narrator of “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” has to confront the dead lady’s maid and interpret her ghostly message about the mistress’s suffering. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s discussions of intimate space, I argue that the (dis)connections between haunted rooms, and between members of the household, acquire a new resonance in the interwar period, as the everyday was transformed by the increasing mechanisation of the domestic.

Modernist Domestic Interiors, Privacy and The Decoration of Houses In the Preface to her collected ghost stories Ghosts (1937), Edith Wharton offered a revealing reflection on the genre’s difficulty in moving with the times and the reading public’s failure to appreciate a new kind of haunting. In her opinion, “the ghost instinct” is being “gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema” (3).10 According to this logic, “the hard grind of modern speeding-up” appears antithetical to the “two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind: silence and continuity” (3), which are required

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for the manifestation of the supernatural. Silence and a nostalgic slowness encourage the production of ghosts. As Emily Coit has argued, this modernist investment in silence and stillness becomes part of the allure of the spectral past, “the noise of the wireless muffled, the old forms preserved.”11 Typically ambivalent about the effects of modernity, Wharton also reinforces the links between technology and the supernatural, arguing that: Mr Osbert Sitwell informed us the other day that ghosts went out when electricity came in; but surely this is to misapprehend the nature of the ghostly. What drives ghosts away is not the aspidistra or the electric cooker; I can imagine them more wistfully haunting a mean house in a dull street than the battlemented castle with its boring stage properties. (3)

These remarks frame her collection in terms of new kinds of hauntings made possible by the electric age. Writing about the programmes for the wiring of houses at the turn of the century, Tim Armstrong has emphasised “the flow of desire in an electric world,”12 as social relations and architecture were transformed by the coming of electricity. The aspidistra and the electric cooker, both symbols of suburban social aspiration,13 are more likely to invite ghostly disturbances than a remote Gothic castle in the modernist ghost story. In Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), the aficionado of weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft, drew a sharp distinction between supernatural horror and the everyday, claiming, “the appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.”14 However, this is to make assumptions about the severing of supernatural fiction from the ordinary, when the chilling nature of many modernist ghost stories, what Lovecraft called “a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread,” relied on the fear of the unknown being activated by ghostly happenings which were both macabre and mundane.15 Dorothy Scarborough, author of The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917), was one of a number of writers to pick up on the “unspectral settings” frequented by modern ghosts, who, in her opinion, preferred cheap lodging houses and bungalows to subterranean vaults.16 The claustrophobic fears articulated within the modern ghost story caught the attention of Elizabeth Bowen, who shared some of Wharton’s views on the ghostly everyday. In her introduction to The Second Ghost Book (1952), an anthology edited by Cynthia Asquith,

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Bowen writes not only of the ghosts’ exploitation of “the horror latent behind reality” but of the proximity of the strange supernatural world: “that austere other world, the world of the ghost, should inspire, when it impacts on our own, not so much revulsion or shock as a sort of awe.”17 An alternative explanation for the continuing popularity of the supernatural tale is the retreat offered from technology or war: “deadened by information,” argues Bowen, modern readers revel in “nameless beings as to whom no information is to be had.”18 Yet this namelessness operates both as an escape route and a potent source of paranoia and panic. If modern ghost stories “abjure the over fantastic and grotesque, operating instead through series of happenings whose horror lies in their being just, just out of the true,”19 the horror of the everyday resonates more than the vampires and spectres of the previous era precisely because it invites readers to search for explanations and confront their fears about their new environments. “Just out of the true” is only a step or two away from the everyday. The dynamics of modernist domestic interiors have been explored in terms of the desire for a new domesticity. Victoria Rosner argues that for many modernist writers “the home departs from its Victorian identity as a repository of tradition to become a kind of workshop for interior design and social change.”20 Women architects and designers, although in a minority, were becoming more prominent at the turn of the century.21 Penny Sparke has considered women’s creativity in decoration and design, suggesting that they “increasingly became the key progenitors of the meanings that came to be embedded within the domestic interior.”22 The American interior decorator, Elsie de Wolfe, very much influenced by Wharton’s architectural writing, designed homes and public spaces such as women’s clubs and theatre sets. In her book The House in Good Taste (1913), De Wolfe claimed, “It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses … Men are forever guests in our homes.”23 Women architects and reformers were increasingly putting forward their own ideas about domestic design, taking the opportunities to “influence and make their own spaces” in domestic manuals, polemical texts about the houses of the future and competitions about their “dream homes.”24 In The Decoration of Houses , Wharton notes the tendency to cling to the architectural customs of the past whose meanings have been lost. Many of the most popular features in modern house-planning and decoration have been “revived by the archaeologizing spirit which is so characteristic of the present time, and which so often leads its possessors to think

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that a thing must be beautiful because it is old and appropriate because it is beautiful.”25 Clashes between old-fashioned and “trashy” furniture, between the “gilded” and the “cheap,” should be avoided in the interests of good taste.26 It is precisely this clash which will generate supernatural disturbance in the modernist haunted house. The modern problem of the “indifference to privacy” constitutes a violation of “one of the first requisites of civilized life” in Wharton’s architectural scheme.27 Openings without doors, becoming fashionable in modern American town houses, are equally problematic as they risk “exposing what should be the most private part of the room to the scrutiny of messengers, servants and visitors.”28 Wharton’s advice about decoration matching “the individual tastes and habits of the people who are to occupy [the room]” relates to the gendered conceptualisation of space at the turn of the century: “It must be not ‘a library,’ or ‘a drawingroom,’ but the library or drawing-room best suited to the master or mistress of the house which is being decorated.”29 In The Decoration of Houses , argues Vanessa Chase, “one can see both a traditional gendering of space and an opening for a new equality between men and women” to be achieved through “the new empowerment of female spaces.”30 Yet this empowerment is not in evidence in the guidance about maintaining what appear to be traditional Victorian spatial divisions between master and mistress. A room needs to be “preserved as a small world by itself,” with its openings “properly placed and proportioned” to prevent loss of privacy and rooms not fit for purpose.31 “If “different rooms minister to different wants,”32 then the habits, needs and desires of the mistress are particularly important in Wharton’s ghost stories, where decoration is often integral to the relationship with women in the past and the livability of the haunted house. Acutely aware of the “small worlds” they wished to preserve in their favoured spaces, mistresses are often threatened by the flouting of conventions regarding space and the navigation of the home. Discussions about the American home at the turn of the century often focussed on servants as sources of trouble and unease within the domestic economy. As Clarence Cook argued in his influential book, The House Beautiful (1881), “More than we think, or are willing to allow, of the difficulty that surrounds housekeeping in America – the trouble with servants that makes such a mean tragedy in so many women’s lives, comes from the labor imposed upon the servants and upon the employers by the unnecessary fuss we make about living.”33 In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s more polemical The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), the “domestic myth” of “the privacy of the home” is exploded, as Gilman

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describes the system of surveillance within the home where its inhabitants do not have the right to remain “unwatched.”34 The invasion of the home by strangers, both servants and visitors, is a violation of the privacy and seclusion which might be expected. If servants are in the position of offering “protection” from visitors, visitors are seen to impose particularly on the lady of the house, who “must come forth,” as if against her will, for every interruption. These constant disturbances and invasions threaten domestic femininity, what Gilman identifies as “our filmy fiction of the privacy of the home.”35 The possibilities of the servantless house explored from the 1910s onwards were a response to this desire for privacy. As R. Randal Phillips argued in The Servantless House (1920), eradicating the problems of servant incompetence and expense could make the home more efficient and “comfortable to live in,” but also involved a process of “remodelling,” a new “discovery of the home.”36 The urge to protect domestic privacy clearly conflicted at times with the desire for new technologies, which were sometimes described in terms of vulgarity and unhomeliness. “Domestic technology,” argues Lethbridge, “was far slower to catch hold in Britain than in America or Continental Europe,” partly because of the valuing of “the more labourintensive house” as a nostalgic link to “the old world order.”37 The Ideal Homes exhibitions in London in the 1920s and 1930s may have advocated all the new mod cons and interior design as a route to happiness, but what constituted an “ideal home” remained subject to debate throughout the early twentieth century.38 A “general distrust for new technologies,” according to Lethbridge, was potentially more wide-spread in Britain, where it “percolated through the classes,” with the effect that “too much newness became regarded as vulgar.”39 With the overlit American house in mind, Wharton protested, “nothing has done more to vulgarize interior decoration than the general use of gas and electricity in the living-rooms of modern houses” where the “harsh white glare” of electric light makes the private salon look like a railway station.40 Cook bemoaned the loss of candlelight and chandeliers to be replaced by the “clumsy and mechanical” gas chandeliers. This loss of the old equates technology with monstrosity and alienation: “There is no doubt that we Americans are unreasonably in love with machinery and contrivance, and that the makers of gas-fixtures have played upon our love of ingenuity until they have made us accept the most monstrous and complicated gasmachines for the decoration of our rooms.”41 Cook’s dislike for “modern improvements” and “mechanical contrivances,” despite current problems, is annexed to a plea for a “more domestic, and a less hotel and steamboaty, way of living,”42 where domesticity is revered in opposition to the

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mechanisation of the modern. The common use of small rooms opening off a ground-floor hall in modern town houses as family spaces (distinct from the “discomforts” of the upstairs drawing-room) also suggests the drawbacks of the modern, according to Wharton, as this room is often arranged “less like a sitting-room in a private house than a waiting-room at a fashionable doctor’s or dentist’s.”43 If houses appear more like hotels or overly-lit, transient public places, what Gilman calls “home-sanctity,” the sacredness of the home, is sacrificed.44 Wharton’s predilection for architectural contradictions, and her lingering on doors, windows and the invisible ghost rooms lurking behind the decorative surface, can be further explored in relation to Gaston Bachelard’s theorising of rooms as triggers for memory and a desire for a lost past in The Poetics of Space.45 Rooms which cannot forget the past, or bear mute witness to traumatic events, become crucial to the ghost narrative, so that even though it is claimed that “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home,”46 inside spaces become Gothicised and undomestic, taunting their inhabitants with their failure to live up to their prescribed roles. The house’s fluctuation between the everyday and the buried past not only results in a nostalgic daydreaming for a lost childhood, as Bachelard suggests,47 but can also create fissures in the notion of the marital home, producing estrangement and terror. The home or a certain room then becomes the “hostile space” which remains outside the limits of Bachelard’s conceptualisation of the intimate interior.48 The modernised house is less a museum than a replica of cosy domesticity, whose falsity is exposed by the uncanniness it generates. In his discussion of the difficulties of conceptualising an architectural uncanny, Anthony Vidler has noted that actual buildings and spaces become uncanny, “not because they themselves possess uncanny properties, but rather, because they act, historically or culturally, as representations of estrangement.”49 If nostalgia and homesickness, according to Vidler, emerged in the face of the trauma of the First World War, then this renders the modernist haunted house as a particularly contested site, over-determined by fears about a less than ideal home and the “estrangement” produced by violations of privacy. The shock of the modern haunted house is that it is caught on the border between old and new, between clashing architectural styles and cultural moments. For Bowen, the ghostly preference for “prosaic scenes” meant that “today’s haunted room has a rosy wallpaper.”50 Reading American women’s ghost stories in relation to commodity culture and the “cluttered” middle-class home, Dara Downey has demonstrated the importance of furniture and decoration to the Gothic narrative, as stories

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typically “conjure up closely observed domestic interiors and furnish them with a wealth of material objects, which themselves play key roles in the eerie events they narrate.”51 The materialisation of the everyday, in terms of the development of interior design and the growing number of new electric gadgets, prompted a reorganisation of the haunted house and how it might create terror. But newness does not guarantee a clean break from what has gone before; as Bachelard warns: “An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.”52 Modernist ghost stories ultimately helped to articulate the prevalent sense of estrangement in new domestic spaces so that, for the woman writer, “the real shock of the modern”53 is channelled through the wife ill at ease in a space she cannot control.

Between the Italian Garden and the Crypt: “The Duchess at Prayer” In Edith Wharton’s non-fictional accounts of the dark magic of the architectural uncanny, the pleasures of sightseeing and the tourist gaze are activated by ghostly visions of the past. Writing in her autobiography of the “artless travellers” from America who “enjoyed … scenery, ruins and historic sites; places about which some sentimental legend hung,” she often used ruined historic sites in her ghost stories as emblems of the spatial restrictions of women of the past.54 The tourist’s vision of the old garden and the strange unlivability of the old house are key to understanding one of Wharton’s early stories, “The Duchess at Prayer” (1900). As Hermione Lee has documented, Wharton’s Italian fiction shows the influence of Vernon Lee’s representations of “that wonder world of Italy” and the friendship of the two women writers.55 Registering her “deep contempt for picturesque books about architecture,” Wharton set out to offer an alternative vision of domestic interiors and the relationship between the house and the garden in her non-fictional work Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904). Dedicated to Vernon Lee, “who, better than anyone else, has understood and interpreted the garden-magic of Italy,” Wharton’s enchanting text is steeped in a reverence for the past.56 Seeking to reproduce this magic of the past, modern architects in England and America have placed features such as marble benches and sun-dials in their gardens in order to achieve the desirable “Italian ‘effects,’” though the “not altogether satisfactory” results suggest the inauthenticity this creates.57 Moreover, the organisation of green space is also envisioned in the same terms as the American town house. One “fundamental secret

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of the old garden-magic” is “the essential convenience and livableness of the garden,”58 qualities which link it to the modern domestic interior. Wharton records in A Backward Glance the help Lee gave her with the book when she arrived in Italy in 1903, “guid[ing] me to the right places” and enabling her visiting. As in The Decoration of Houses, the emphasis falls on “the study of small and simple houses” and “the simpler and less familiar type of villa.”59 Her commentary on architectural design sets out to correct the inadequacies of tourist perceptions of the old house, steering her readers towards an appreciation of what is missing. Writing of the “difficulty of discovering the type of villa I was in search of” in the early days of motoring, when many places were “far from the principal railway lines,”60 tourist experiences are conditioned by the search for the unfamiliar and potentially uncanny. In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg notes that our experiences of the ruin as haunted, as existing “on the spectral plane of uncanniness,” stem from its becoming “an altered place,” only a shadow of what it was before.61 The “sentimental sight-seer, sighing for sham Gothic ruins” in Italian Villas may be disappointed by some of the artifice of old Italian gardens.62 Whilst some of the villas and gardens remain well-preserved, a Lee-like rhetoric of brokenness and ruin emphasises the uncanny passing of time. The garden-lover may linger on the “amputated statue, or broken bas-relief, or fragmentary effect,” trying to penetrate the “secret” of the Italian villa, which is a combination of the “unfinished” and the “picturesque.”63 Wharton complains about the “ridiculous Villa Pallavicini at Pegli, a brummagem creation of the early nineteenth century, to which the guide-books still send throngs of unsuspecting tourists, who come back imagining that this tawdry jumble of weeping willows and Chinese pagodas, mock Gothic ruins and exotic vegetation, represents the typical ‘Italian garden,’ of which so much is said and so little really known.”64 The real as opposed to sham ruins should suggest alteration and “erasure,” argues Trigg, rendering place “distant from its origin.”65 This distancing is evident in the green spaces Wharton describes which blend medieval and Renaissance elements, as well as the secret gardens, which satisfy what Hermione Lee calls her “preference for privacy.”66 Sometimes described as “difficult of access” or closed to visitors, these secret spaces are out of reach, have “disappeared” or are only half-visible, “here and there fragments of garden-architecture have survived.”67 The “charming pleasure-houses” which line the shores of the Brenta river are admired for both what has endured and what is lost, “unhappily no traces of their old

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gardens remain, save the statues which once peopled the parterres and surmounted the walls.”68 The half-alive statues which exist as uncanny traces, both ornaments and relics, feature prominently in the modernist ghost story. Pseudo-historical lore associated with ruined Italian pleasure-houses, according to Michael Pantazzi, was used in “The Duchess at Prayer,” in which the jealous husband of the adulterous Duchess Violante orders a statue of his wife to be placed over the entrance to the crypt where she meets her lover, entombing him alive. This may have been a rewriting of the story of Elisabetta Foscari, immured in a Foscari villa, the “Malcontenta,” for three years as a punishment for adultery.69 The story is structured around a male tourist’s visit to an abandoned ducal villa outside Vicenza in order to see the shut-up apartments of the Duchess, unchanged for two hundred years. Inspiration for the setting may have been taken from Wharton’s visits to the “melancholy Malcontenta … now standing ruinous and deserted” and the Villa Rotonda, near Vicenza.70 In the story, statues are over-determined figures of “frozen horror” (113), caught between life and death, “the old memories stand up as distinct as the statues in the garden,” observes the guide (114).71 If, as James Buzard argues, “the tourist trades upon recorded impressions, offering demonstrations of sensitivity to the picturesque in exchange for the status accorded an acculturated person,”72 then the narrative emphasises the terrors of the picturesque, particularly the frozen sculptures, and a contaminating disintegration which leave the tourist pleasurably horrified. The tourist gaze, with all its questioning of the secrets of Italian architecture, is immediately evoked in the opening paragraph: Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a life flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, the villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tall windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside there may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all the arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where bats lodge in the disjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors … (110)

This evocation of the old house with its “impenetrable” secrets draws on the language of Gothic, with its bats, blind windows and rusty keys. The

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Duchess’s hidden space is “beyond” in the “subaqueous gloom” (112). The guide hints at an evil past, “This is a bad place to stay in – no one comes here” (113), as well as drawing attention to ways to navigate the villa, “you may have noticed, sir, there’s a door leads from the chapel into the saloon on the ground floor; the only other way out being through the Duchess’s tribune” (119). The tourist is invited to look down from the grated tribune to the chapel, a “sepulchral place” (113) with its mouldering pictures and dust and cobwebs. As a balcony or raised platform, a tribune offered a vantage point on the “sepulchral place,” as well as a means of connecting the chapel with the apartments; the Duchess uses the passageway between the two spaces to facilitate adultery rather than devotion. If “secret rooms, rooms that have disappeared, become abodes for an unforgettable past,” as Bachelard contends,73 then the crypt and the Duchess’s apartment hide the unforgotten secrets of a threatening female sexuality. Mistress-servant bonds are valued over marital bonds in the story, passed down from the guide’s grandmother, a niece of the upper maid, Nencia. The neglect of the Duke throwing the Duchess into the company of her maidservants and gardeners transforms female behaviour, as both mistress and maid adopt strategies for dealing with a “reworked domestic realm.”74 These Gothic doubles flaunt the rules of the house in order to pursue relations with men: the Duchess’s praying in the chapel is a cover for her adultery whereas the grandmother is frightened about the discovery of her “disobedience,” having “been down the lime-walk with Antonio when her aunt fancied her to be stitching in her chamber” (119). Obliged to creep around outside the house, meaning to “slip in through the scullery” (119), the grandmother mimics the subterfuge of her employer, who also chooses to creep and slip around the patriarchal villa under cover of darkness. Nencia’s partial “mute[ness]” about her lady suggests the level of mistress-servant intimacy, though the servants are unable to prevent their lady’s murder at the hands of her husband. Images of imprisonment recur in the story with the Duchess relishing the supposed freedoms of being left alone in the villa, rather than being “shut up” in the palace in Vicenza, where the Duke was “for ever closeted in his library, talking with learned men” (115). But the closeting of men is out of choice, whereas women, like the nuns mentioned several times in the story, possibly immured due to supposedly transgressive behaviour, are “shut up” on men’s orders. Women are shown to be deluded that they can navigate the house as they please. Although the Duchess ordered her

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maidservants out of her bedchamber to the linen-room and “barred the door, as her custom was” (120), she cannot bar the door against her returning husband with his statue of death. Likewise, her assertion, “No one enters this chapel without my leave” (122) is proved false. The spatial significance of the garden, as Wharton claims in Italian Villas, “must be studied in relation to the house,”75 potentially providing an “other” space for women. Two of the architect’s problems are linked to space and design: “his garden must be adapted to the architectural lines of the house it adjoined; it must be adapted to the requirements of the inmates of the house, in the sense of providing shady walks, sunny bowling-greens, parterres and orchards, all conveniently accessible.”76 As Judith Fryer has noted, the garden in Italian Villas becomes a form of self-conscious “spatial organization” meant to complement the harmony of the house.77 Accessibility, a key issue in the ghost story, is linked to the woman’s movements; as the leisured inmate, the woman will be the one who gets the most use of the well-designed green spaces. The garden is the Duchess’s domain, in which she designed grottoes, placed statues, planted groves and planned “all manner of agreeable surprises in the way of water-jets that drenched you unexpectedly” (115), all key features of old Italian villas observed during Wharton’s visiting. Violante’s dalliance with the Duke’s cousin, the Cavaliere Ascanio, takes place in the garden, a space of female design, playfulness and entertainment, to counter the boredom of the house. However, it is also a space which can be penetrated by the husband; the time spent in the gazebo is curtailed, when the Duke joins them there for chocolate, after which “the Cavaliere never returned” (117). To the tourist, the garden, warm with “the stale exhumation of dead summers,” has become a disturbing sepulchral place of dead flies and “rotting secrets” (114). In Italian Villas, outside space can be marked by “vanishing traces of that fantastic horticulture” (11) of the past.78 With its “maimed statues,” and the mock ruin of a temple, “falling into real ruin in the bright disintegrating air” (111), the Duchess’s domain, with its layers of ruin and alterity, has disintegrated. Women’s unsuccessful attempts to appropriate space are explored in marital disputes about Violante’s unorthodox occupation of the chapel and crypt. The Duchess had asked for the stone slab that covered the entrance to the crypt to be replaced by a wooden one, that she might “at will descend and kneel by the coffin” (118). But the feminine will, which is allowed free play in the garden, is dangerous when applied to a repurposing of sacred interior space. As her double, the shrouded

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statue, “dragged down the passage” before being “haul[ed] across the threshold” (121) into the chapel, represents how she must bow to her husband’s will. As Darcie D. Rives has argued, “reworking spatial relationships within the home could allow some women a measure of domestic power,” but in her Gothic fiction Wharton repeatedly depicts the “deadly problem” of the isolation and abuse of women, a problem perpetuated by the enforced silence of servants.79 The Duke’s orders, “let the image be put in place” (122) have the double meaning of putting his transgressive wife back in her place. Her request that the image “be placed in the remotest part of the chapel” (122) cannot be honoured. “The power of the woman within the house,” as Chase argues in relation to Wharton’s fiction, “is thus a power inscribed within and restricted by an overarching system of male spatial and social control.”80 Patriarchal control of the placing of women within both the sacred space and the master’s house is evident in his rebuke, “If you are fit for my house, Madam, you are fit for God’s, and entitled to the place of honour in both,” after which she “fell back submissively” (122). Their confrontation over the entrance to the crypt, the access point for her lover to enter a space she has appropriated, ends with the Duke’s assertion of a greater authority: “I will at once make this place inaccessible” (123). Jerrold E. Hogle has identified the crypt as “any carved-out and labyrinthine space where vestiges of death are surrounded by symbolic artifacts,” attracting Gothic characters towards “the frightening archives of ancestral violence and guilt.”81 In Wharton’s story the adulterous lover is buried alive in the cryptic space, as the Duke’s powerful violence denies the Duchess access to her selffashioned secret meeting place, supposedly hidden from prying eyes. She responds, “you are cruel, sir, to deprive me of access to the sacred relics that have enabled me to support with resignation the solitude to which your Excellency’s duties have condemned me” (123). His denial of “every request … addressed to him” (124), blocking of entrances and exits and challenging of her spatial appropriations reiterate the embedding of patriarchal dominance throughout domestic and sacred space. Both the marble and the real Duchess, frozen into acquiescence, become instruments of the lover’s death by blocking his access to the steps up to her apartments. Like the statue of Daphne, immobilised by the gods, procured by Violante as a garden ornament, the Duke’s statue is a monument to the “frozen horror” of accepting patriarchal authority. The sympathetic servant, who records her mistress’s story, is “shut out” even as her lady is repositioned from the chapel of her devotions to her

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fatal “lady’s room” with her husband barring the threshold. “Struck … dumb” by the “strangeness” of the sculpture (120), the grandmother cannot reach her mistress in time to warn her. Once the statue is positioned, the Duke significantly steps between his wife and Nencia, in order to stop their conspiracy and the female servants are dismissed from the room where she dies, shrouding her death in mystery. After his male servants pour the poisoned wine for the Duchess, the female servants are allowed back into the room to witness her horrible suffering, “without a word escaping her” (126), an act of silencing which puts her back in her place under her husband’s eye: “The Duke watched by her” (126). The grandmother who “worshipped the Duchess as a girl of her years will worship a beautiful kind mistress, spent a night of horror … shut out from her lady’s room, hearing the cries that came from it, and seeing, as she crouched in her corner, the women rush to and fro with wild looks, the Duke’s lean face in the door” (126). The arrival of a new Duchess who bears six children is another form of replacement for the disordered woman. The tourist’s horror at the statue mimics that of the grieving servant, who steals “unobserved” to the chapel to “say a prayer for her dead mistress” and is confronted with the terrible look of horror on the statue’s face. Significantly, after she swoons, she comes to her senses “in her own chamber,” hearing that the Duke had locked the chapel door and “forbidden any to set foot there” (126). This suggests that the insensible servant has also been put back in her place, “in her own chamber,” “forbidden” to enter the chapel now redefined as male, with the dying body of the lover encrypted beneath the marble image. Only on entering the chapel ten years later, after the Duke’s death, did the other servants see “for the first time the horror that my grandmother had kept in her bosom” (127). The tourist’s concern about the statue and the unopened crypt is met with the old man’s fearful response, “Was it not the Duchess’s express wish that the relics should not be disturbed?” (127). The story instead suggests that the “shrouded rooms” of the old house still encrypt the story of the Duchess’s inability to have her wishes granted. Her apartments are a mausoleum, but also a space in which she seems to be buried alive, as her portrait, with more than an echo of Robert Browning, seems to take on a life of its own, “the Duchess tossed me a sidelong smile” (122). Chase argues that Wharton tends to “depreciate the role of male spaces within the home … [whilst] contend[ing] that restricting women to their homes, and thereby limiting their roles, is suffocating.”82 In this

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early story, women suffocate in the ancestral home with the freedoms of the garden curtailed. Only the male descendant has the power to unlock the room and display its secrets to another male, passing on the female servant’s story about imprisonment and male control of space.

Letters, Electricity and Household Hierarchies in “Pomegranate Seed” and “Afterward” The embracing of modernisation in the form of new machinery, electricity and more advanced communication systems troubled the revered distinction between public and private. Deborah Sugg Ryan has written about the interwar home as “a dynamic site of rapid change in which women experienced major shifts in spatial organisation, domestic practices and technologies,” during a time of the promotion of labour-saving appliances.83 Historians have addressed the ways in which servants’ occupation of space shifted after the Victorian period. As Judy Giles argues, “despite the changing nature of domestic service in the first half of the twentieth century, it nonetheless continued to provide a means of expressing and maintaining differences between women within the middle-class home.”84 Yet a new fluidity of spatial arrangements became possible, as many households now employed fewer servants, who might no longer live in; as Delap reminds us, “the home was not a static physical space.”85 “The increased visibility of domestic service,” according to Giles, “as employers’ discourses of anxiety continued to construct both the occupation and its employees as a ‘problem,’ made possible changes that not only altered the forms of service but shifted the relations around which these forms were organised.”86 Changing relations between mistresses and their staff, coupled with preoccupations with the Servant Problem, or the servant as problem, meant that the home continued to be constructed in terms of anxiety and discomfort, a construction often exaggerated by concerns about the effects of new technologies. The aspects and moments of the past disclosed in the American town house often relate to fissures in the marital relationship and the secrets of an absent wife or husband, which manifest themselves in the small drawing-rooms and libraries of this newly modernised space. According to Henri Lefebvre, “the production of space … acts retroactively upon the past, disclosing aspects and moments of it hitherto uncomprehended. The past appears in a different light, and hence the process whereby that

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past becomes the present also takes on another aspect.”87 In her autobiography A Backward Glance (1937), Wharton writes of the New York of her childhood in terms of the absence of an architectural inheritance: “Out of doors, in the mean monotonous streets, without architecture, without great churches or palaces, or any visible memorials of an historic past, what could New York offer a child whose eyes had been filled with shapes of immortal beauty and immemorial significance?”88 Defined in opposition to the European “historic past,” the American city might seem antithetical to the typical setting of the ghost story, yet, as Bowen suggests, it is the “near past,” of the previous generation or even the last few years, which provides a different kind of haunting memorial. “A town without towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives,” its absences separating it from visions of Gothic Italy and its layers of history, New York’s modernity can still induce domestic terrors for women.89 If old New York housing is unattractive, conventional and claustrophobic, “the narrow houses so lacking in external dignity, so crammed with smug and suffocating upholstery” in A Backward Glance,90 the houses which feature in Wharton’s ghost stories retain some of this suffocating atmosphere, despite the rearrangement of furniture to create more space. The veneration for the old and old-fashioned was an important aspect of the “suburban blend of tradition and modernity.”91 The suburban town house in “Pomegranate Seed,” with its “old-fashioned, marbleflagged vestibule,” a hall hung with old prints and its “worn armchairs” in its “shabby” library (195), flaunts its oldness in opposition to the “congested traffic, congested houses” of “soulless” New York. In this story, Charlotte Ashby is haunted by the absent presence of her husband’s dead first wife, Elsie, who, it is implied, is responsible for the husband’s unexplained disappearance at the end of the narrative. In the suburban realm, the woman could exercise her limited power through decoration and management of servants.92 Yet, as a second wife, Charlotte is supposedly bound by the domestic rules and existing design: her friends warn her “he’ll never let you move an armchair or change the place of a lamp; and whatever you venture to do, he’ll mentally compare with what Elsie would have done in your place” (198). Criticisms of Charlotte’s choice of nursery staff and her “domestic administration” (197) suggest the husband’s desire to control the household. The nervous apprehension she feels is significantly attributed either to tiredness or the “trouble” of finding a new cook, as the maintenance of the position of mistress is difficult without the right domestic staff. The arrival of a ghostly letter from

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the dead wife exposes the flaws in the suburban ideal of homeliness; the husband’s indifference to his second wife, seen as “worse than his faultfinding,” is a distancing from domesticity, as if he had been “so far away from ordinary events that when he returns to familiar things they seem strange” (198). On the return from their honeymoon, he had regretted that he couldn’t afford to “do the place over for her, but that he knew every woman had her own views about furniture and all sorts of household arrangements a man would never notice, and had begged her to make any changes she saw fit without bothering to consult him” (199). These “household arrangements” unnoticed by men constitute the feud between the dead and the new mistress. Charlotte confesses to feeling “more at home in her house, more at ease and in confidence with her husband” (199) since the transferral of the dead wife’s portrait from the library to the nursery, though feeling at home in a space marked as another woman’s territory is a difficult enterprise. The home as haven is initially set against the technological advancement of illuminated twentieth-century New York: Latchkey in hand, she looked back down the silent street to the whirl and illumination of the great thoroughfare beyond, and up at the sky already aflare with the city’s nocturnal life. “Outside there,” she thought, “skyscrapers, advertisements, telephones, wireless, airplanes, movies, motors, and all the rest of the twentieth century; and on the other side of the door something I can’t explain, can’t relate to them. Something as old as the world, as mysterious as life…” (199)93

Here the unfathomability of the strange hand-delivered letters on the halltable, bearing the almost illegible hand-writing of the first Mrs. Ashby, is not simply set in opposition to the brave new “whirl” of skyscrapers and movies. Offering no protection against the supernatural infiltration of the “silent street,” technology works to intensify the haunting via the breakdown of communication systems both within the home, and between the home and outside. The supernatural letters were seen as disturbing to the first magazine readers of Wharton’s story, who wanted to be told “how a ghost could write a letter, or put it into a letterbox” (2, italics in original). The device of the hand-delivered letter from a dead loved one also signals the invasion of the everyday by the supernatural in Elizabeth Bowen’s war story,

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“The Demon Lover” (1941), in which the wife, returning to her “shutup” bomb-damaged house to collect some forgotten belongings, is terrified by this reminder of her promise to meet her soldier fiancé who died twenty-five years ago. Like the doors and chests she unlocks in the dusty house, with its “unfamiliar queerness,” the letter unlocks the memory of her strained liaison with the unnamed, faceless soldier, threatening her existence as Mrs. Drover, “a woman whose utter dependability was the keystone of her family life.”94 The hand-delivered letters which omit an address and a stamp, therefore circumventing the postal system, symbolically threaten the women’s occupation rights and their status as wives. Doors and entrances acquire a new significance in architectural readings of the modern haunted house. According to Bachelard, doors function as markers of the “inside/outside dialectic.”95 In The Decoration of Houses , doors both admit and exclude, with the outer door functioning as “an effectual barrier” from the outside world.96 But thresholds are in-between spaces, which can let evil in, so that entrances prove ineffectual in shutting out the past. In “Pomegranate Seed,” Wharton’s second wife is often positioned on the threshold, fearing that she cannot make the connections between what lies either side of her front door. The story opens on her door-step, as she relishes the moment of turning her back on the “grinding rasping street life of the city” for the pleasures of the old-fashioned vestibule leading to the apartment with its shabby library and cosy drawing-room, “this veiled sanctuary she called home” (194). The door should shut out the roar and glare, but the uncanny letters on the hall-table spoil the sanctuary. The drawing-room which acts as a retreat from the outside world is also a shrine to the first wife, Elsie, doubling with the nursery where her portrait taken from the library now hangs so that she can “look down on” the children at her husband’s request. As Wharton warned in The Decoration of Houses , the “unsatisfactory relations” of some people with their rooms are traced back to the fact that “everyone is unconsciously tyrannized over by… the wants of dead and gone predecessors who have an inconvenient way of thrusting their different habits and tastes across the current of later existences” (note the electrical metaphor here).97 Later in the story, the terrified mother-in-law looks up at “the blank wall behind her son’s writing table” (222) at the empty space where the portrait used to hang. When the narrator notes “the icy chill emanating from the little

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personal effects of someone newly dead” (220), this acts as a reminder of the absent presence of the newly dead first wife whose habits, taste and furniture still dominate the rooms. The illegibility of the letter which the two Mrs. Ashbys scrutinise in vain evokes the difficulties of breaking free from the past: “If even you can see her face on that blank wall, why shouldn’t he read her writing on this blank paper? Don’t you see that she’s everywhere in this house, and the closer to him because to everyone else she’s become invisible?” (222). The blankness and invisibility of the first wife, both everywhere and nowhere, threaten the position of the new wife and her domestic security, resulting in the husband being replaced by an uncanny stillness, his library echoing with a “deep silence” (220). The disappearing husband narrative is developed in “Afterward” (1910) where the distraught wife’s dread of the empty library appears to be a punishment for the corrupt acquisition of wealth. Ned Boyne vanishes on the same day that his former business associate, Robert Elwell, cheated of his investment in the Blue Star Mine which made Ned’s fortune, committed suicide. Described as “two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks… associated, in their tradition, with unusual architectural felicities” (48), Ned and Mary Boyne rapturously occupy Lyng, a remote Tudor house in the English countryside, with an unspecified “unearthly visitant” (49). Their delight in “owning” a ghost is akin to their fetishistic lingering on such features as mullioned panes, black oak rafters, the old lime walk and the lions on the gates. The “lack of electric light” and repeated references to the servants bringing in the lamps reinforce the house’s association with the past. Typically opening with “banter” about the supernatural, the story then satirises Mary’s supposed knowledge of “the code of the spectral world” (52) by leaving her husbandless and unable to fathom the secrets of the house. Elwell’s ghost is significantly glimpsed approaching the house via the admired lime walk before on another occasion being shown into the library and spiriting away the master. The new owners’ relish of the “protracted past” of their charmingly old house, and “the strange acuities of emotion and … mysterious stir of intenser memories” it inspires (50) cannot blot out what has been left behind in their previous American home. As Bachelard suggests, “The house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story… [but is] animated by memories of other dwelling-places.”98 It is significant that the ghost/guest, ominously referred to as their “invisible housemate” (52), is mistaken by the short-sighted wife for both a tourist

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with a camera and an engineer, the expected “authority on hothouse boilers” (61) who will help with installing heating in the house. As Dorothy Scarborough noted in 1917, the story is particularly disturbing as the spectre appears in broad daylight.99 The ghostly figures the return of the murky American past, highlighting the vulgarity of modernisation. The key spectral encounter takes place in the masculine library, the “pivotal ‘feature’” (50) of the house, where a wife cannot “trespass” during her husband’s morning working hours. Always described at the twilight hour, the old library seems “full of secrets” which multiply as the light fades, “like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth” (51). The traditional fireplace where the couple sit together for “the ultimate indulgence” in the “sensations” of ownership (50) becomes shadowed by the uncanny. In The Decoration of Houses, the dangers of central heating are articulated in the form of a lament for the loss of the fireplace and its symbolic position within the family: “The empty fireplace shows that the room is not really lived in and that its appearance of luxury and comfort is but a costly sham prepared for the edification of visitors.”100 The emptiness of the fireplace, seen as an “abnormal … contrast between the cold hearth and the incandescent temperature,” figures the American house as “costly sham,” unlived-in, giving only an appearance of comfort rather than the lost reassurances of the Victorian notions of hearth and home.101 Ted Billy has drawn attention to this traditionally male-oriented sphere as a key feature of Lyng, “a monument to secrecy,” though this is linked rather predictably to Wharton’s use of architectural metaphors to portray the traditional predicament of women.102 Certainly, Mary’s final moment of desperation stems from the fact that she had directed the unknown visitor to the forbidden space of the library, “I sent him to this room.” At the end of the story, the intimate space turns against her: “The house knew; the library in which she spent her long lonely evenings knew” (70). Mimicking the servants’ power of surveillance, Lyng refuses to betray its secrets, becoming “the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian, of the mysteries it had surprised” (71). The disturbing emptiness of the library after the husband’s mysterious disappearance is described in terms of a threatening breakdown of ritual and routine. Wharton’s own library in The Mount, the house she designed for herself in Massachusetts, was more of a “dual-gendered space,” or “gender-neutral” space where she would have written and entertained literary figures.103 Unable to create

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an accommodating gender-neutral space, the mistress in “Afterward” looks for reassurance from her authority over the servants: Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone in the long, silent, shadowy room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound, to be there audibly breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her shortsighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recall from that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and gave it a desperate pull. The long quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of the usual. (65–6)

Transformed into a place of dread and shadows, the library houses an intangible presence, which can only be banished by summoning the servant with her symbolic light, “the sobering reappearance of the usual.” The servants’ inability to provide the name and purpose of the “unknown visitor,” however, cannot atone for the emptiness, and even Trimmle seems to be uncannily growing “less round and rosy,” less reassuring, as though also “eclipsed by the same creeping shade of apprehension” (66). Their roles eclipsed by the ghost, who crosses the threshold to the library and lures away the master, servants in this story seem to conspire against their mistress in their inefficiency. The flouting of household rules by allowing the spectral visitor to gain entrance to a room kept out of bounds until midday is also important. It later transpires that the nervous kitchen-maid, rather than a figure higher in the servant hierarchy, has carried the visitor’s name on a scrap of paper to the library, suggesting a further breach of decorum and confusion about who has let the stranger in. Mary’s hesitation outside the closed library door and the servant hovering on the “threshold” to the drawing-room reinforce the sense of boundaries within the home, as well as Bachelard’s notions of inside/outside (the Gothic possibilities of closed and half-open doors are clearly evoked in this scene). The husband’s liking for “punctuality and monotony” and “the recurrence of habit” (65), coupled with this highly ordered sense of the household’s occupation of particular rooms and spaces, is challenged by the ghostly visitor, who makes Ned miss lunch—Mary is horrified that he has taken a walk “at this hour?” (63). The servants’ failure to provide the identity of the

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visitor or the reason for the two men leaving the house suggests a breakdown of communication and a “chaos” out of kilter with the desired smooth running of the household. The wife trapped in the domestic space, moving around as if “mechanically impelled,” feels herself haunted by the house’s knowledge, “domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life,” as the everyday routines and her movements acquire a mechanical inevitability: “she had come to regard herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and tables” (70). This language of mechanisation, more usually associated with servants than mistresses, again reinforces the subversion of household hierarchies, as the domestication of “the Horror” signals the dangers of routine. By the conclusion of the story, the house asserts a crushing dominance over the mistress, who cannot explain its mysteries but is left stranded “sitting face to face with its silence” (70). After Mary’s desperate realisation that she has allowed the ghost access to her husband’s library, “she felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward falling ruins” (67). Rather than the coveted “Lyng ghost” (47) being a figure to be “enjoyed” for its marking of their ownership of the “uncomfortable” old house they had yearned for, its spiriting away of the master leaves the mistress “numb” and threatened, her dream house in ruins. In the American women’s ghost story, according to Downey, domestic objects can “function as agents of control and sanity” but “at the same time, light, warmth and soft cushions [can be] depicted as utterly ineffectual as agents of beneficence against the memories of evil deeds and notions that domestic space can contain.”104 Their dreams of escaping the “ugliness” of the Mid-West for a haunted retreat, “no existence could be too sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge deep enough into the past” (50) are exposed as precarious, as the secrets between them seem to emanate from the uncanny “architectural felicities” (48) of the library, the coveted “pivotal feature.” As in “Pomegranate Seed,” the ghost’s actions generate panic surrounding the lost husband and the lost status this entails, gesturing towards the uncertain status of the divorced or abandoned woman in American society.105

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Ghostly Machinery: Telephones and Servants’ Bells Modernism is haunted by technology, caught up in an anxious admiration for the possibilities of a mechanised future. David Trotter has referred to the 1920s as the beginning of “the first media age,” when the development of communication systems such as radio, cinema and telephony precipitated new understandings of time, space, home and privacy.106 Interwar domestic life was modernised by the machine, as documented by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge in The Long Weekend: A Social History of Britain, 1918–1939 (1940), due to spending on “major household purchases,” such as sewing-machines, vacuum-cleaners, gas-ovens and wireless sets.107 The ghost story, with its reliance on architectural uncanniness, could not fail to respond to this transformation of the domestic space. As commentators on the development of the ghost story in this period recognised, not only could technology become a channel for spectrality, but haunting might operate as the inevitable outcome of the electric age. Comparing Victorian and modern ghosts, Elizabeth Bowen remarked that, by 1950 ghosts “know how to curdle electric light, chill off heating, or decondition air. Long ago, they captured railway trains and installed themselves in liners’ luxury cabins; now telephones, motors, planes and radio wavelengths offer them self-expression.”108 Modern ghostliness expresses itself through technology. In the interwar ghost story, the telephone functions as a machine which holds out the promise of communication and connection whilst reinforcing the isolation and disconnectedness of the haunted protagonist. Domestic telephones were more prevalent in the States than in Britain at this time, though by the 1930s designers had ensured that in the British household, “nearly all now on automatic exchanges,” they “were no longer upright and awkward, but compact and tolerably graceful.”109 Trotter has pointed out that telephony introduced into the experience of the increasingly confident middle-classes “an idea of connective sociability,” which should be understood as “somehow subsuming the social as constituted by face-to-face encounters in a public or semi-public space, rather than merely bypassing it.”110 His survey of the “rules” of exchange in interwar realist fiction indicates that telephone conversations often “enabled [writers] coolly to propose destinies – for independent young women in particular – that they might otherwise have struggled to imagine.”111 His analysis does not take account of Gothic narratives

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which tended to show women’s independence compromised by machines which hinder their escape, malfunction or intensify claustrophobia. In Elizabeth Bowen’s war Gothic stories, telephones are often dusty, out of use or malevolent; in “The Demon Lover” Mrs. Drover’s mantra-like thought processes, “I shall ring up the taxi now; the taxi cannot come too soon; I shall hear the taxi out there running its engine… I’ll ring up – But no: the telephone is cut off” signify her reliance on the connections between different forms of technology as a barrier against what might be waiting in the shadows.112 In Wharton’s ghost stories, the telephone acquires Gothic characteristics precisely because it cannot adequately atone for the figure of the absent husband, or fails to summon the servant, therefore marking the wife and mistress’s insecurity and instability within her own home. American women at this time, argues Downey, were encouraged to be “trivial and decorative so that men need not be,” displaying consumer goods both in their households and on their bodies in order to guarantee uppermiddle-class status.113 Typically, Wharton’s wives try to protect their roles as domestic ornaments by dialling for help: the final line of “Pomegranate Seed” shows Charlotte resolutely unhooking the receiver in order to phone the police to report her husband missing, despite her recognition of the futility of this action. The story sets such futile phone-calls to her husband’s office alongside the mystified reactions of the domestic staff, as neither secretaries nor servants are able to shed light on the whereabouts of the missing man; when she “hung up the receiver and sat blankly gazing into new darkness,” the blankness partly stems from the lack of information provided by a technology advertised as the answer to all of a woman’s needs.114 Discussing the radical thinking on the modern machine’s reformulation of the human, Armstrong has stressed the utopian possibilities of technology, and the “energization” and evolutionary impetus offered by the mechanical powering of mass society.115 Gerald Stanley Lee, in The Voice of the Machine (1906), captures the darker underside to these possibilities: “Either the machine is the door of the future, or it stands and mocks at us where the door ought to be… the average machine not only fails to express the idea that it stands for, but it generally expresses something else.”116 The mocking nature of the telephone in the ghost story ridicules the propensity of American middleclass women to embrace technological communication as a guarantor of their femininity, whilst mirroring their superficiality.

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Other methods of communication within the household which acquired sinister characteristics were internal telephones and the electric bells used to summon servants to different rooms of the house. These bell systems helped to protect the privacy of the owners by keeping servants invisible yet constantly available, as well as broadcasting the servant hierarchy as the positions of domestic staff appeared on the bell board. A tale of the limits of servant availability and “class panic,”117 Wharton’s “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” opens with the lady’s maid narrator’s reflections on the difficulties of finding work and her new position in a country house on the Hudson. The old house is twice described in terms of a family vault. Its remoteness, quiet and surrounding dark woods make it into a Gothic location, “not a gloomy house exactly, yet I never entered it but a feeling of gloom came over me” (13) confides the servant narrator. Alice Hartley replaces a newly deceased and “beloved” lady’s maid, Emma Saxon, mourned for by her vapourish mistress, Mrs. Brympton. The mistress assumes an “odd” expression when questioned about the bell system, replying that the housemaid will fetch her when needed, a “strange” subversion of the servant hierarchy. The household organisation is questioned, “I wondered if there were no bells in the house; but the next day satisfied myself that there was one in every room, and a special one ringing from my mistress’s room to mine” (9). The other servants deny the appearance of the dead lady’s maid, despite her visibility to Hartley in the servants’ corridor outside the locked room she used to occupy. Yet Emma’s ghost, still occupying her old room in the servants’ wing, continues to traverse the corridor towards her mistress’s rooms. This well-worn passageway which connects the lady’s maids’ rooms with their mistress’s bedroom and dressing-room, combined with the bell which echoes through the story, suggests the strong connections between women and female servants in the old house. Mistress-servant intimacy, seen as out of place and threatening to the master, generates supernatural encounters in the story. In her revealing reading of Gothic interiority in the narrative, Ann Mattis writes that maid/mistress relationality, including the maid’s access to the mistress’s body, is cast as “a refuge from patriarchal marriage.”118 Bachelard has pondered the relations of inhabited space to both memory and daydreams, arguing that “Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another.”119 Although at first the dead maid seems to interfere with the new maid, her memories of her mistress and desire

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to communicate mean that these different dynamisms are potentially combined. Hartley’s “compassion for my mistress” (20) is clearly shared by the ghost, who, like the Duchess’s female entourage, seeks to protect her employer from both neglect and male violence. Coit reads the story in relation to the servant’s closeness to the “isolated wife, shut away in a remote house,” arguing that although the servants in Wharton’s stories might be spectral, “the really scary figures are the husbands.”120 The uncanny multiplicity of maids within the home—“How many of you are there, in God’s name?” (16) demands Mr. Brympton—suggests the possibility of the mistress-servant bonds overpowering the violent husband, as their combined affection for their “kind mistress” propels them down the servants’ corridor towards her threshold. Crossing the barrier between servant space and family space is potentially empowering, yet also a violation of privacy, as the servants conspire to hide their mistress’s adultery from an absent husband, a recurring trope in Wharton’s ghost fiction. In an uncanny doubling, both lady’s maids, alive and dead, new and old, are summoned by nocturnal ringing and the “special” bell of the mistress. Identified as a “decidedly homosocial symbol of upper servants’ eroticized servility and state of being possessed by their samesex employers,”121 the bell, according to Mattis, is also outdated and “decidedly un-American,” a relic of the feudal system of servitude. Yet, in The Home: Its Work and Influence, Gilman argued that, even with the defence against interruption offered by the telephone, for the modern American mistress, “the stillness and peace of the home … are at the mercy of jarring electric bell or piercing whistle.”122 She is vulnerable to the open portals of the house, as well as the demands of her staff: “the front door opens, the back door yawns, the maid pursues her with the calls of tradesmen.”123 In this story, bells are jarring, jangling and traumatic for both mistress and servant: Suddenly a loud noise awakened me. My bell had rung. I sat up, terrified by the unusual sound, which seemed to go on jangling through the darkness. My hands shook so that I couldn’t find the matches… I began to think I must have been dreaming; but I looked at the bell against the wall, and there was the little hammer still quivering. I was just beginning to huddle on my clothes when I heard another sound. This time it was the door of the locked room opposite mine softly opening and closing… Then I heard a footstep hurrying down the passage towards the main house … I was quite sure it was a woman’s step …

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“Alice Hartley,” says I to myself… “your mistress has rung for you, and to answer her bell you’ve got to go the way that other woman has gone.” (15)

Unable to ignore the demands of the bell, and the quivering hammer which confirms her identity as servant, Hartley is forced to walk down the same corridor as her ghostly double, whose room lies across the corridor in the servants’ wing. Typically, the bell opens a door usually kept closed and produces terror at the “unusual” sound, unusual because her mistress has already explained that she no longer uses the system. The second time the bell rings in the night, Hartley witnesses her mistress’s angered attempts to cover up her liaison and her denial of ringing the bell. A noise from the dressing-room door reveals Emma “on the threshold” of the bedroom, unable to protect her mistress from an early death. The ghostly summons is a means to co-opt her new servant into covering up her adultery, as well as a reminder of “the other woman” with her “dumb prayer” (21) whose story is hushed up in the house, “she has left me all alone to carry the weight of the secret I couldn’t guess” (23). The unguessable secret of the illicit liaisons in the house, between master and maid, mistress and lover, or perhaps mistress and maid, is never specified. Significantly, the final line of the narrative after the departure of the widowed husband is “we servants went back alone to the house,” suggesting their authority in a narrative which leaves the wife dead, “my poor mistress’s body underground” (25). The ghostly encounters between female servants produce a subversion of the household hierarchy, though broader questions about the silencing and manipulation of the domestic staff remain unresolved. Wharton’s last ghost story, “All Souls’” (1937), which has been read in relation to an ageing writer’s retreat from modernity,124 as well as “servant rebellion,”125 renders the failures of technology disturbing. It eerily evokes the lost house of the past in Bachelard’s nostalgic vision. The opening metafictionally delights in the conventions of the modernist ghost story, as the narrator attributes the necessary “chill down the spine” not to “turreted castles patrolled by headless victims” but to “the comfortable suburban house with a refrigerator and central heating where you feel, as soon as you’re in it, that there’s something wrong ” (246, italics in original). Wharton’s repeated refutation of Sitwell’s remark that “ghosts went out when electric light came in” (246) also used in her Preface underlines her dismantling of the opposition between the

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ghostly and modernisation which underpins her aesthetics of the supernatural. The wrongness of suburbia is encapsulated in the modernised home with its ghostly electric light. Writing about the domestication of technology up to 1914, Graeme Gooday has highlighted contradictory attitudes to the introduction of electric lighting and power into the home, arguing that “many female home-makers resisted [the] progressive-romantic iconography of electricity, preferring gas as the transformative agent of modernity.”126 Whitegates, the old Connecticut house in “All Souls,’” is “high-ceilinged, with electricity, central heating and all the modern appliances: and its mistress was – well, very much like her house” (246). The ageing widowed Sara Clayburn prefers to stay in her old spacious home rather than move to an alarmingly vulgar “bird-cage flat in one of those new skyscrapers on Lexington Avenue” (247). Its remoteness making it unattractive to “modern servants,” it is staffed by “two or three old stand-bys” inherited from her mother-in-law, described in architectural terms as “as much a part of the family tradition as the roof they lived under” (247). The beginning of the story chronicles the adding of two wings and other changes brought about by the new figure of the architect in the late Victorian period, transforming the house into a “roomy dwelling, in which the last three generations of Clayburns had exercised a large hospitality” (247). But modern roominess has its own perils. The newly wired households and their mod cons generated a disruption of the everyday which questioned notions of forward-looking “labour-saving” and its effects on owners and servants. The uncanniness rather than the promised “improvement” and “comforts” of the “servantless house”127 is generated by the unexplained absence of servants on All Souls’ Eve, an absence coinciding with the failure of technology and a disturbing and threatening silence. This evokes the “panic and loss” of servantlessness, representing for established families what Lucy Delap identifies as “the progressive unmaking of home.”128 The plainly dressed spectral servant glimpsed by Sara outside her house, an “intruder” or “stranger” (252) visiting one of her staff, signifies by her indifference the breakdown of servant-mistress relations. Identified by the narrator as a possible “fetch” or a witch inhabiting a living woman, this sinister figure also links domestic service to the threat of a hidden malevolence. Karen Jacobsen has read the servants’ ambivalence towards their mistress in this story in terms of “class upheaval,” with Sara “unable to remain in her comfortable life.”129 But the failures of technology significantly make her navigate the house differently, taking

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her into the servants’ bedroom and the empty kitchen. The “helpless” mistress with her injured ankle is terrified by cutting off of the electric current and the telephone system, so that she is unable to communicate with the absent servants either through the bells next to her bed or by the internal telephone to the pantry. Internal telephones were added to British country houses in the first two decades of the twentieth century.130 The difficulties of connecting induce a sense of panic, “When she unhooked the receiver she noticed that her hand trembled… She rang up the pantry – no answer. She rang again. Silence… Her heart began to hammer” (253). The technology being “cut off” is likened to being “cut off” from the outside world, with “her sense of loneliness gr[owing] more acute” (253). As an ageing widow dependent on mistress-servant intimacy, Sara is haunted by the loss of routine, so that the realisation that the servants have “not yet begun their round” signals the fear of emptiness and silence. Janet Beer reads this traumatic realisation in terms of the shifting of “the centre of power in the house,” signified by the mistress’s refusal to use the back stairs, “so powerfully do the staircases of the big house denote the status of their users.”131 The “mystery” of the servants’ failure to appear is inseparable from the stone-cold radiators, even though “in that well-ordered house in winter the central heating… was never allowed to go out, and by eight in the morning a mellow warmth pervaded the rooms” (254). The mistress’s “horror of being left alone in this empty house” (260) is compounded by her descent into the “cold, orderly – and empty” (256) drawing-room and kitchen, “those dumb spaces” which echo with “the cold continuity” (256) of a silence which envelops like the falling snow. The only uncanny breaking of the silence is the disembodied male voice coming from the wireless in the kitchen, replacing the bustle of servants which guaranteed domestic harmony and class privilege. In Wharton’s story, the supernatural failure of technology is representative of a crisis “below stairs,” a phrase repeated nostalgically in the narrative, as the servants can bring chaos to the “well-ordered house” by absenting themselves from their duties and rituals. This potentially apocalyptic change and the haunting figure of the absent servant was to be explored in more detail in the 1940s stories of Elizabeth Bowen. The disruption of the domestic space via the spectralisation of means of communication from letters and servants bells to telephones in Edith Wharton’s ghost stories is not only representative of the channelling of the supernatural into the everyday but needs to be seen in relation to

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the architectural uncanny, what Vidler calls “the nostalgic shadows of all the ‘houses’ now condemned to history.”132 Paying attention to the ways in which the past intrudes into the modernist haunted house, a space of confrontation between old and new, allows us to extend arguments about intimate space to take account of new domesticities. For the modernist woman writer, the ghost story became a forum for meditating on the implications of mechanisation for domestic space, and the strangeness of the new technologies which both replaced and reiterated the labour of servants. The relationship between servants and technology remains unresolved in the ghost narrative which both imagines and retreats from the possibilities of the servantless house. In Edith Wharton’s stories, the substitution of mistresses for servants in the domestic interior, and the servants’ tendency to “cover up” for the ghosts who are able to penetrate supposedly protected spaces, anticipate the imminent collapse of the upstairs/below stairs hierarchy.

Notes 1. Martha Banta, “The Ghostly Gothic of Wharton’s Everyday World,” American Literary Realism 27, no. 1 (1994): 1. 2. See Janet Beer, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 119. 3. Judith Fryer, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), xiii. 4. Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2005), 13. 5. Luke Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (London: Routledge, 2012), 127, 128. 6. David Punter, “Hungry Ghosts and Foreign Bodies,” in Gothic Modernisms eds. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 26. 7. Edith Wharton and Ogden Colman Jr., The Decoration of Houses (1898; New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 17, 19. 8. Lucy Delap, Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 73, 97. 9. Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), xiii. 10. All quotations are taken from The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (London: Virago, 1996), which includes Wharton’s Preface, 1–4. 11. Emily Coit, “‘A Roaring and Discontinuous Universe’: Edith Wharton’s Modern Hauntings” in The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story eds.

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston (London: Routledge, 2018), 166. She points out that lots of Wharton’s hauntings happen when it is snowing, which contributes to the ghostly stillness. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21. Flora Klickmann, The Mistress in the Little House (London: Office of the Girls’ Own Paper, n.d. [1915]), 36. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927; New York: Dover, 1973), 12. Ibid., 15. Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York and London: Knickerbocker Press, 1917), 105, 10, 7. For a fuller discussion of this, see Emma Liggins, “Beyond the Haunted House? Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories and the Troubling of Modernity,” in British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now eds. Emma Young and James Bailey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 33–7. Elizabeth Bowen, “Introduction,” to The Second Ghost Book ed. Lady Cynthia Asquith (1952; James Barrie; London: Pan Books, 1956), ix. Ibid., viii. Ibid., vii. Rosner, Modernism, 13. Vanessa Chase, “Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, and Gender in Turn-of-the-Century America,” in Architecture and Feminism eds. Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze and Carol Henderson (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 133. Penny Sparke, “The domestic interior and the construction of self: The New York homes of Elsie de Wolfe,” in Interior design and identity eds. Susie McKellar and Penny Sparke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 72. Elsie de Wolfe, The House in Good Taste (New York: Century, 1913), 5. Quoted in Sparke, “The domestic interior,” 75. Deborah Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism, 1918–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 131, 127–8. In 1930 Phyllis Lee, a Croydon housewife, won the competition to design “The House that Jill Built” organised by the Daily Mail. The house was then built and displayed at the Ideal Homes Exhibition in 1930. Wharton, Decoration of Houses, 11. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 17.

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30. Chase, “Edith Wharton,” 132, 134. See also Fryer, Felicitous Space, 11–13, for her reading of Wharton’s vision of privacy for “leisure-class consumption.” 31. Wharton, Decoration of Houses, 23. 32. Ibid., 19. 33. Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (1881; New York: Dover, 1995), 198. 34. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903; Poland: Freeriver Community Project, n.d.), 20. 35. Ibid., 23. 36. See R. Randal Phillips, The Servantless House (London: Offices of Country Life, 1920), 149, 152, 10. 37. Lethbridge, Servants, 7. 38. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Britain, 1918–1939 (1940; London: Cardinal 1985), 177. 39. Lethbridge, Servants, 7–8. She goes on to link this to nostalgic visions of the English country house, arguing that “the inimitable patina of age became central to the national idea of Englishness, and to this idea, new technology was often considered positively threatening” (8). 40. Ibid., 126. 41. Cook, House Beautiful, 219. 42. Ibid., 305. 43. Wharton, Decoration of Houses, 22. 44. Gilman, The Home, 25. 45. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 25, 20. 46. Ibid., 41. 47. Ibid., 27–8. 48. Ibid., 19. He claims, “hostile space is hardly mentioned in these pages. The space of hatred and combat can only be studied in the context of impassioned subject matter and apocalyptic images” (19–20). 49. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 12. 50. Bowen, “Introduction,” vii–viii. 51. Dara Downey, American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 4. 52. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 27. 53. Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 9. 54. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York and London: Curtis Publishing Company, 1937), 62. 55. Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Vintage, 2008), 97. The phrase is Wharton’s, used in reference to Vernon Lee’s early publication, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880). For more on Vernon Lee as

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56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

mentor and inspiration for Wharton’s writing on Italy, see Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, 97–101. Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and their Gardens (New York: De Vinne Press, 1904), 141. The book was commissioned by the editor of Century Magazine. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 8. Wharton, A Backward Glance, 134. Ibid., 136. Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 131. Wharton, Italian Villas, 205. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 185. Trigg, Aesthetics of Decay, 131. Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, 114, 115. Wharton, Italian Villas, 225, 243, 245. Ibid., 245. Michael Pantazzi, “A Face of one’s Own: Edith Wharton and the Portrait in her Short Fiction,” Journal of the Short Story in English 58 (2012): 202. Wharton, Italian Villas, 245. All quotations from this story are taken from Edith Wharton, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton ed. David Stuart Davies (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2009). James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 197. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 35. Delap, Knowing their Place, 238. Wharton, Italian Villas, 6. Ibid., 7. Fryer, Felicitous Space, 169. Wharton, Italian Villas, 11. Darcie D. Rives, “Haunted by Violence: Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses and her Gothic fiction,” Edith Wharton Review 22, no. 1 (2006): 13. Chase, “Edith Wharton,” 147. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel,” Arizona Quarterly 36 (1980): 330. Chase, “Edith Wharton,” 145. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 93, 101. Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 132.

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85. Delap, Knowing Their Place, 73. 86. Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life, 138. 87. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 65. 88. Wharton, A Backward Glance, 54. 89. Ibid., 55. 90. Ibid. 91. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 59. 92. Ibid., 58. 93. All quotations are taken from The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (London: Virago, 1996). 94. Elizabeth Bowen, “The Demon Lover,” in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen ed. Angus Wilson (London: Vintage, 1999), 661, 665. 95. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 237. 96. Wharton, Decoration of Houses, 103. 97. Ibid., 18. 98. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 41. 99. Scarborough, The Supernatural, 101. 100. Wharton, Decoration of Houses, 88. 101. Ibid. 102. Ted Billy, “‘Domesticated with the Horror’: Matrimonial Mansions in Edith Wharton’s Psychological Ghost Stories,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 25, no. 3–4 (2003): 436. 103. Chase, “Edith Wharton,” 152. 104. Downey, American Women’s Ghost Stories, 171. 105. For more on the stigma of divorce in this period, see Emma Sterry, The Single Woman, Modernity and Literary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), 35–6. 106. David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1. 107. Graves and Hodge, Long Weekend, 177. 108. Bowen, “Introduction,” vii. 109. Graves and Hodges, Long Weekend, 349. 110. Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age, 38, 47. 111. Ibid., 73. 112. Bowen, “The Demon Lover,” 665. 113. Downey, American Women’s Ghost Stories, 22, 23. 114. See Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age, 52–6, for his discussion of telephone advertising targeting women as the ideal users, such as the image from the early 1930s showing “The Happy Eyes of the TelephoneWife.” 115. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body, 82–3.

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116. Gerard Stanley Lee, The Voice of the Machines (Massachusetts: Mount Tom Press, 1906), 35. 117. See Ann Mattis, “Gothic Interiority and Servants in Wharton’s A Backward Glance and ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,’” Twentieth-Century Literature 58, no. 2 (2012): 231. 118. Ibid., 230. 119. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 28. 120. Coit, “A Roaring and Discontinuous Universe,” 163. See also Rives, “Haunted by Violence,” 12–13. 121. Mattis, “Gothic Interiority,” 229, 230. 122. Gilman, The Home, 23. 123. Ibid. 124. Beer, Kate Chopin, 140. 125. Karen J. Jacobsen, “Economic Hauntings: Wealth and Class in Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories,” College Literature 35 no. 1 (2008): 112. 126. Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914 (London: Routledge, 2008), 5. 127. Randal Phillips, Servantless House, 10. 128. Delap, Knowing their Place, 103, 101. 129. Jacobsen, “Economic Hauntings,” 118, 119. 130. Marilyn Palmer and Ian West, “Nineteenth-century technical innovations in British country houses and their estates,” Engineering History and Heritage 166, no. 1 (2013): 40. 131. Beer, Kate Chopin, 141. 132. Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 64.

Bibliography Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas. 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014. Banta, Martha. “The Ghostly Gothic of Wharton’s Everyday World.” American Literary Realism 27, no. 1 (1994): 1–10. Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. Billy, Ted. ““Domesticated with the Horror”: Matrimonial Mansions in Edith Wharton’s Psychological Ghost Stories.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 25, no. 3–4 (2003): 433–37. Bowen, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” In The Second Ghost Book ed. Lady Cynthia Asquith, vii–x. 1952; London: Pan Books, 1956.

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Brewster, Scott and Luke Thurston, eds. The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story. London: Routledge, 2018. Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Chase, Vanessa. “Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, and Gender in Turnof-the-Century America.” In Architecture and Feminism edited by Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze and Carol Henderson, 130–160. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. Coit, Emily. “‘A Roaring and Discontinuous Universe’: Edith Wharton’s Modern Hauntings.” In The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story edited by Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston, 159–67. London: Routledge, 2018. Cook, Clarence. The House Beautiful. 1881; New York: Dover, 1995. Delap, Lucy. Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Downey, Dara. American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014. Edmundson Makala, Melissa. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” (1919) In The Uncanny trans. David McClintock, 121–62. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Giles, Judy. Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Home: Its Work and Influence. 1903; Poland: Freeriver Community Project, n.d. Graves, Robert and Alan Hodge. The Long Weekend: A Social History of Britain, 1918–1939. 1940; London: Cardinal, 1985. Hamlett, Jane. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel.” Arizona Quarterly 36 (1980): 330–58. Jacobsen, Karen J. “Economic Hauntings: Wealth and Class in Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.” College Literature 35, no. 1 (2008): 100–127. Klickmann, Flora. The Mistress in the Little House. London: Offices of the Girl’s Own Paper, 1915. Lee, Gerald Stanley. The Voice of the Machines. Massachusetts: Mount Tom Press, 1906. Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Vintage, 2008. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

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Lethbridge, Lucy. Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Liggins, Emma. “Beyond the Haunted House? Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories and the Troubling of Modernity.” In British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now edited by Emma Young and James Bailey, 32–49. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Lovecraft, H. P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. 1926–1927; New York: Dover, 1973. Marriott Watson, Rosamund. The Art of the House. London: George Bell & Sons, 1897. Mattis, Ann. “Gothic Interiority and Servants in Edith Wharton’s A Backward Glance and ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.’” Twentieth-Century Literature 58, no. 2 (2012): 213–37. Palmer, Marilyn and Ian West. “Nineteenth-century technical innovations in British country houses and their estates.” Engineering History and Heritage 166, no. 1 (2013): 36–44. Pantazzi, Michael. “A Face of One’s Own: Edith Wharton and the Portrait in her Short Fiction.” Journal of the Short Story in English 58 (2012): 201–14. Punter, David. “Hungry Ghosts and Foreign Bodies.” In Gothic Modernisms edited by Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, 11–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Randal Phillips, R. The Servantless House. London: Offices of Country Life, 1920. Rives, Darcie D.. “Haunted by Violence: Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses and her Gothic Fiction.” Edith Wharton Review 22, no. 1 (2006): 8–15. Rosner, Victoria. Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007. Scarborough, Dorothy. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York and London: Knickerbocker Press, 1917. Smith, Andrew. The Ghost Story, 1850–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Smith, Andrew and Jeff Wallace eds. Gothic Modernisms. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Sparke, Penny. “The domestic interior and the construction of self: The New York homes of Elsie de Wolfe.” In Interior design and identity edited by Susie McKellar and Penny Sparke, 72–91. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Sterry, Emma. The Single Woman, Modernity and Literary Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017. Sugg Ryan, Deborah. Ideal Homes: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism, 1918–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.

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T. B. M. ed. In Praise of Old Gardens. Portland Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1912. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton ed. David Stuart Davies. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2009. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, with an introduction by the author. London: Virago, 1996. Thurston, Luke. Literary Ghosts, from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval. London: Routledge, 2014. Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Trotter, David. Literature in the First Media Age. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2013. Urry, John and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. 1990; London: Sage, 2011. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992. Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York and London: Curtis Publishing Company, 1937. Wharton, Edith. Italian Villas and their Gardens. New York: De Vinne Press, 1904. Wharton, Edith and Ogden Codman, Jr. The Decoration of Houses. 1898; New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Wilson, Angus ed. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.

CHAPTER 6

Finding Her Place: Claustrophobia, Mourning and Female Revenants in the ghost stories of May Sinclair

The female revenants in the ghost stories of May Sinclair are determined to stake their claims to domestic space. Their spectral occupation of bedrooms and libraries is an assertion of ownership, an act of appropriation which challenges outdated Victorian gender hierarchies and reactivates memories of the dead. In a letter of 1910, Sinclair wrote to a friend that she was “writing short stories—stories of all queer lengths and all queer subjects; ‘spooky’ ones, some of them. I like doing them!”1 It is significant that these spooky subjects—the ghostly reappearance of lost daughters, overpowering mothers and wives who have died young—mobilise psychoanalytical concerns about unresolved mourning and repressed desire for the lost maternal which are experienced in uncanny terms. Paul March-Russell has noted Sinclair’s interest in the unconscious, spiritualism and mysticism, relating her joining of the Medico-Psychological Clinic in 1913 and the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1914 to the psychoanalytical dimensions of her writing about the supernatural.2 The flourishing of spiritualism well into the twentieth century, argues Helen Sword, was importantly “not in spite of the modernist Zeitgeist but because of it.”3 Sinclair’s collections Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor and Other Tales (1931) reveal her coupling of the uncanny with the horrors of sexual intimacy or maternal dominance which haunt the home. One reviewer of 1923 complained that Sinclair’s stories were less uncanny then “curiosities of pathology, queer

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instances of mental obsession … [with] scarcely a twinge or thrill or luxurious fear in any of them.”4 Yet this is to downplay the recurring dread of communication with the dead, and spectral women’s navigation of male rooms in her writing, which can certainly be read in terms of a thrilling terror. Sinclair’s haunting female predecessors draw attention to the claustrophobic experiences of inhabiting the small modern home, its lack of privacy, cramped conditions and diminished number of rooms producing uncanny effects. If, as Anthony Vidler argues, the uncanniness of the haunted house is “the more disquieting for the absolute normality of the setting,”5 then the normality of the suburban home invites the spatial fear which lurks in the everyday. In her important discussion of the contradictions of interwar suburbia, Deborah Sugg Ryan identifies the “compact space” of the semi-detached house as a meeting point for oppositions between “modernity and nostalgia; urban and rural; past and future; masculine and feminine … public and private.”6 Yet its very compactness, “where every inch had to be used as effectively as possible,” can be seen as disturbing as well as desirable for new suburban residents.7 This chapter examines women’s ambiguous, anxious spatial identities in the light of their changing positions within the modern home, at a time when the Victorian ideal of the mistress of the house was in decline. Place is a keyword in Sinclair’s fiction, often modified to “his place” or “her place” to reflect not only the continuing gendering of space but the contest for power within specific rooms. Feminist philosophers such as Elizabeth Grosz have noted the difficulties for women of fashioning spaces of their own in architecture which is always already patriarchal, threatening the “effacement” of the female.8 Luce Irigaray, as Grosz notes, is one of the few theorists to consider conceptualisations of maternal space and the claustrophobia of male-ordered territory, “Whoever imposes a roof over my head, wears me out. Let me go where I have not yet arrived.”9 The female revenants who seek out their “place” within the home try to go to these enabling spaces of movement, reoccupying and re-appropriating space in order to protest against the uncanniness of dwelling. Debates about modern ghosts increasingly recognised the attractions of the uncanny in a climate attuned to both scepticism and spiritualism. In a 1923 symposium on “Dreams, Ghosts and Fairies” in the Bookman, modernist authors were asked to assess whether the current interest in ghost stories was a sign of morbidity or of an increased belief in spiritual phenomena.10 Sinclair’s contribution not only emphasised the

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“special thrill” to be legitimately enjoyed “independent of any belief in the supernatural” but also the importance of place: Ghosts have their own atmosphere and their own reality, they have also their setting in the everyday reality we know; the story-teller is handling two realities at the same time; he is working on two planes, in two atmospheres, and must fail if he lets one do violence to the other.11

This indication that ghosts occupy the two realities of everyday spaces and the spiritual plane is revealing. Interweaving spectral visits with domestic rituals, Sinclair’s stories suggest that communication with the dead is less unusual than part of everyday life. In her 1926 introduction to a collection of supernatural “scripts” From Four who are Dead, she reiterated the possibilities of a “world beyond death” potentially accessible through the “submerged region,” “sunk below the threshold of consciousness.”12 Sword’s point that modernists were “intrigued and attracted by spiritualism’s ontological shiftiness” accords with Sinclair’s uses of the unexplained supernatural.13 The influence of spiritualism on the contemporary supernatural is also acknowledged in Dorothy Scarborough’s genealogy of The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917). Modern writers, with their “expertness in psychology and psychiatry,” she observes, are able to evoke psychologically complex “subjective ghosts” in “modern uncanny stories.”14 Ghost stories seemingly oppose Sigmund Freud’s assertions in “The Uncanny” (1919) (published in the same decade as Sinclair’s first stories), that the middle classes have “officially ceased to believe that the dead can become visible as spirits,” and that their “emotional attitude to the dead” has lost its ambiguity.15 Scarborough playfully notes the disadvantaging of ghosts now that “houses are so much less permanent … than formerly,”16 but this lack of permanence during the modern housing boom was unsettling; as Andrew Thacker argues, moving house emphasised “how modernity disrupts a stable sense of place.”17 Unresolved mourning and disruptions of the stabilities of place and domesticity need to be reconsidered in relation to the return of the dead in the modernist ghost story. Sinclair’s stories focus on the claustrophobic, outdated domestic interiors which figure confinement and the difficulties of embracing the modern. Her haunted houses are smaller than the traditional ancestral home, with a limited number of rooms, and are usually empty of servants and children, meaning that gendered divisions and reconfigurations are

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given more attention than fear of cross-class contact. Henri Lefebvre argues that appropriation of space, although an attempt to escape “spaces of fear,” is defined by “radically opposite and therefore incompatible components.”18 Female revenants typically (re)appropriate space in a bid for power. In a 1915 article on women’s war work, Sinclair pondered the “very serious problem and … danger” of “women’s ability to fill men’s places.” Envisaging a post-war transformation of gender roles, she astutely pointed out, “what women can never give up is the realisation that they can fill and have filled those places hitherto reserved exclusively for men.”19 Women filling men’s places within the domestic economy is also seen as dangerous in the ghost story, in which the possibilities of gender transformation haunt Victorian notions of spatial segregation. The appearance of ghosts in bedrooms and libraries acts as a challenge to the gendered functions of rooms and the navigation of the home, what Lefebvre calls the “repurposing” of space, a “giving way to a new use.”20 Unusually among modernist women writers, Sinclair seems fascinated by the haunted bedroom. In his discussion of the geography of the spectral, Owen Davies singles out the bedroom as the most obvious “centre of hauntings,” most frequently “the focus of ghostly visitations, whether they were hoaxes, hallucinations or perceived realities.”21 This is variously attributed to the bedroom being a room for the dying, deep emotions, dreaming, sex, intimacy and “solitary anguish,” as well as a place of psychological exposure.22 When they did write about ghosts in the bedroom, women writers often wrote from the male perspective: an earlier story of E. Nesbit’s, “From the Dead” (1893), ends with the husband both terrified and aroused by the vision of his beloved dead wife in her grave-clothes approaching his bed. In Lady Barker’s The Bedroom and Boudoir (1878), the bedroom is a meeting place of the modern and the old-fashioned, a homely feminine space affording “the deep delight of the sense of ownership” for a young girl in “a room of her very own.”23 Yet even this well-decorated, “ideal” space can admit intimations of the Gothic, as “our minds revolt from anything like a return to the old nightmare-haunted huge Beds of Ware,” the dominating and disturbing furniture of the past.24 The potential transformation of the bedroom into the sick-room is also revealing of the discomforts which lurk beneath the surface; “many smart and pretty-looking bedrooms,” observes Barker, “are discovered by their sick owner to be very different abodes” once sickness strikes, troubled by “awkwardly-placed doors and windows” or “the too close proximity of an ill-arranged staircase or housemaid’s closet.”25

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This chapter begins with an exploration of Sinclair’s representation of the claustrophobic interiors of the ghostly Brontë Parsonage an abode of disease and death, before examining mourning and maternal space in “The Intercessor” and “If the Dead Knew.” In the former, the male visitor tries to repress “a disagreeable feeling he had about his bedroom” (191), an emotion shared by many of Sinclair’s characters who experience the bedroom as a site of horror. The haunted library becomes a potentially shared space in “The Token” and “The Nature of the Evidence,” partly as an escape from the sepulchral bedrooms which terrify and enclose women in “The Villa Desirée” and “Where their Fire is not Quenched,” where the female ghost is trapped in an uncanny hotel bedroom. Haunted things, particularly chairs and beds, acquire spectrality through association, often symbolising the mourned-for absence of a dead woman or girl (or the difficulties of mourning). Fatal rooms, witnesses to death and trauma, threaten the living with the secrets of the past, as the returning dead seek to repurpose domestic space.

Claustrophobia and the Haunted Brontë Parsonage Sinclair’s fascination with the Brontë Parsonage had both a spatial and a spectral dimension, drawing on Elizabeth Gaskell’s popular evocation of the authors’ ghostliness, as well as its over-determined proximity to the overcrowded churchyard. As Sinclair’s biographer Suzanne Raitt has argued, “[the Brontës’] tragic stories appealed to the side of her that was increasingly preoccupied with the elegiac and the supernatural,” so that her non-fictional study The Three Brontës (1912) can be read “partly as a ghost story.”26 In the introduction, Sinclair records, “It may be said that I have been calling up ghosts for the mere fun of laying them; and there might be something in it, but that really these ghosts still walk.”27 The opening sequence is a poetic evocation of the Gothic credentials of the house of death: It is impossible to write of the three Brontës and forget the place they lived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on the clean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked and grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush with the wall, staring at the graveyard where the tombstones, grey and naked, are set so close that the grass hardly grows between. The church itself is a burying

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ground; its walls are tombstones, and its floor roofs the forgotten and the unforgotten dead. A low wall and a few feet of barren garden divide the Parsonage from the graveyard, a few feet between the door of the house and the door in the wall where its dead were carried through.28

These references to burial, tombstones and the “unforgotten dead” are suggestive of the ghost story’s preoccupation with Victorian death rituals and memorialisation. Sinclair emphasises the closeness of the “naked and grey” domestic space to the sacred space of burial, also “grey and naked.” Only a few feet from the churchyard, the house is “hemmed in” by the gravestones and the walls and floor of the church memorialise and contain the dead. The mother’s necessary isolation within the house because of cancer also provides an opportunity for Sinclair to map out the architectural uncanniness of the Parsonage, with its two front rooms, narrow passage and third bedroom, “squeezed into the small spare space above the passage … no bigger than a closet and without a fireplace.”29 The five little girls, “packed” into “this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den,” are described as looking down on the graves.30 This “fatal room” becomes a symbolic contradictory space, both a space of retreat from the mother’s illness but also a space of contagion, where “the seeds of tuberculosis were sown in [the] fragile bodies.”31 The Brontë Parsonage was not officially opened to the public until 1928. In the tradition of country house visiting, fans were shown round the house from the late 1850s onwards, after the popularity of Gaskell’s 1857 biography activated the sisters’ celebrity status.32 The opening of a small museum of Brontë relics on the main street in 1895 marked the beginning of mass tourism in Haworth, attracting 10,000 visitors that summer.33 Sinclair seems not to have visited until the late 1930s, when she shattered the glass on Emily’s piano by mistake, so perhaps her investment in the Parsonage as haunted space was largely mediated through her reading of Gaskell.34 The “intense pleasures” of the tourist gazer, whose performance “orders, shapes and classifies, rather than reflects the world,”35 partly stemmed from the shaping of the Parsonage as both a house of death and a cramped environment where women in particular did not have enough space. Craig Young and Duncan Light have noted the correlation between “an increased societal obsession with remembering the dead” and “the emergence of new types of ‘death spaces’,” such as cemeteries and sites of dark tourism.36 Their arguments about

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the possibilities of “express[ing] grief and mourning in new ways in public space … encountering the dead in different spaces” are relevant to ways of thinking about fatal space. Reading the Parsonage and Haworth museum as sites of dark tourism emphasises the tourist experience as an encounter with the dead. When Virginia Woolf visited Haworth in 1904, she looked at the relics in the museum, as well as taking a tour of the “little sparse parsonage” at the owner’s discretion. Perhaps finding the viewing of Charlotte’s dress and shoes rather morbid, she appears disappointed by the museum, “a pallid and inanimate collection of objects,” remarking “an effort ought to be made to keep things out of these mausoleums.”37 Deborah Wynne has noted, however, that this dismissive tone does not accurately reflect Woolf’s experience, as she later “succumbs to the allure of the objects on display,” offering a more predictable “recognition of the power of relics.”38 Woolf, like many visitors, was struck by the tombstones which seemed to start out of the ground, noting the irreverence of “the economy of space.”39 The early twentieth-century tourist gaze tries to reconcile the Gothic proximity of the graveyard with the relics on display, with the effect of classifying the house as a mausoleum. The successors of the Brontës “wishing a little space between life and death” planted a hedge and tall trees to separate the garden from the churchyard.40 This desire for distance between life and death manifests itself in modernist ghost stories in which the home’s repression of the dead mobilises the spectral claiming of space to breakdown this life/death division. Claustrophobia, a term coined in 1879 and explored by psychoanalysts in relation to repression and morbid abnormality, has not been fully explored in relation to Female Gothic. Bernice M. Murphy has examined its relevance to American suburban Gothic, in which the ideal home becomes “a claustrophobic breeding-ground for dysfunctionality and abuse,” as in the fiction of Shirley Jackson in the 1940s and 1950s.41 In Vidler’s taxonomy of the new pathologies, he includes “oicophobia,” the aversion to returning home, surely a relational term to claustrophobia.42 Claustrophobia is also linked to the fear of the closed door, which blocks the escape route but also symbolises the preservation of secrets and lack of communication between women: in Gothic texts such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), women are often placed either side of locked doors. But there is more to say about women’s feelings of suffocation, panic and entrapment within the home and how these might generate, or be symptomatic of, ghostly disturbance. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard shies away from the concept

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of claustrophobia, perhaps because it interferes with his notion of the desirability of intimate space. Yet his discussion of the shell-like qualities of a tranquil solitary dwelling, possibly subterranean, cannot cancel out “the nightmare dread of being crushed,” an image which borrows from psychoanalytic speculations about spatial fear.43 Bachelard’s reverence for immensity and vastness in relation to architecture also implies a concomitant fear of the dangers of too little space: “the space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed.”44 In one of the isolated references to spatial fear in his text, Bachelard imagines the disorientating meeting point of dreading both open and confined space: writing of French poets who juxtapose claustrophobia and agoraphobia, he remarks, “the two spaces of inside and outside exchange their dizziness.”45 This disorientating dizziness of space is a motif of Gothic fiction even before spatial phobia had been classified. In her framing of Joseph Sheridan le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864) as a Gothic novel, Elizabeth Bowen refers specifically to claustrophobia, “the sense of the tightening circle, the shrinking and darkening room” as “the last of the horror-constants.”46 “Spatial fear” needs to be further explored in relation to women’s changing reactions to the domestic interior and the pretence of security in the haunted house.47 Whilst Freud identified repression, hysteria and menstruation, rather than specific spaces, as causes of agoraphobia for women patients, female psychoanalysts such as Helene Deutsch were not so dismissive of the links between gender, space and the domestic, arguing that the home did not always function as a “protective shelter.”48 Vidler’s denial that the uncanny can be “provoked by any particular spatial conformation” or “special effects of design” seems contradictory,49 as particular rooms and design features of the house seemed to trigger spatial phobias. Suburban space and the ideal home, both key concerns of the 1910s and 1920s, were linked not only to conformity and dysfunctionality, but to the clash between old-fashioned furniture and ideals for modern living. Old-fashioned architectural plans, argues Victoria Rosner, are characterised as “unsatisfying” in modernist texts, though “they can be hard to think beyond and hard to leave behind.”50 In her advice text The Mistress of the Little House (1915), Flora Klickmann offered guidance on adjustments to the role of mistress running a smaller household with fewer domestic staff. She singles out the increased nervousness of women, arguing that the “over-furnishing” of the modern house, as well as “the all-round increase of noise” from neighbours in close proximity, made women anxious. “Massive” furniture might convey “upto-dateness,” though actually the effect is to “dwarf everything else in

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its neighbourhood, including the room itself … giv[ing] an impression of over-crowdedness and a lack of breathing space.”51 The Home: Its Work and Influence (1904) by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose uncanny story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1894) highlighted women’s sense of confinement in domestic space, also explored the fears of the “home-bound” woman. In her view, the home, less a “cherished ideal” than “this dark place,” produces unrest and dissatisfaction, particularly for women, “a degree of unhappiness to which the divorce and criminal courts, as well as insane asylums and graveyards, bear crushing testimony.”52 In the urge to be up-to-date in their decoration and embrace new ideals, modern women felt overcrowded and unable to breathe, classic symptoms of panic and claustrophobia. Descriptions of claustrophobic space, the “small stifling room” with its threatening fatality,53 echo across Sinclair’s uncanny fiction. Both men and women are unable to find refuge within the haunted modern house, where family members struggle to escape from each other or find their own space. Spatial anxiety, as Ilse Bussing has argued, is a product of an excessive concern for privacy and concealment.54 Images of claustrophobia, particularly in relation to sleeping, recur in The Three Brontës , where Sinclair writes of Branwell, “He had never been packed, like his sisters, first one of five, than one of three, into a closet not big enough for one.”55 The italics on the masculine pronoun link the “packing” into a tight space to restrictive and fatal femininity. The adjective “cramped” recurs in Sinclair’s ghost stories, which often dwell on family members crammed together (as in the Brontë Parsonage). In a 1917 article in the medical journal The Lancet, the psychoanalyst W. W. Rivers defined claustrophobia as “a dread of being in an enclosed space, and especially of being under conditions which would interfere with [a] speedy escape into the open.” In this medical case, the condition is traced back to having slept in a box-bed as a child in which the patient would lie “in a state of terror, wondering if he would be able to get out if the need arose.”56 Such terrors are related to the fear of live burial, confinement in a narrow cell and travelling on tubes and through railway tunnels. Rivers concludes that “The infantile experience accounts for the special feature of the claustrophobia that it is not so much a closed space itself which the patient dreads, but it is the fear that he may not be able to escape which especially haunts his mind.”57 This dread of enclosure becomes terrifying in the modernist haunted house, typically cramped and stifling with its escape routes barred.

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Mourning and Maternal Space in “The Intercessor” and “If the Dead Knew” The appearance of female ghosts helps to unlock the secrets of maternal space in a number of Sinclair’s stories. The Brontësque house which resonates absence, emptiness and “the immortality of the unforgotten dead”58 can only be transformed by confronting traumatic memories. With its echoes of Wuthering Heights, Sinclair’s disturbing story “The Intercessor” (1910) centres around a ghostly female child who returns to rematernalise an “intolerably secret, intolerably remote” (209) northern farmhouse.59 Standing in an orchard of dead trees, the unnamed “blackgrey” house, “dark and repellent in its nakedness” with its deep-set five windows (179) is described in the same language as the Parsonage. As if half-alive, the house “wore the look of calamity, of terrible and unforgetting and unforgotten age” (178). Filtered through the consciousness of the historian Garvin, the story displays the typical reverence for the old and derelict found in the modern ghost story, ticking off the conventions of the awed approach to the crumbling haunted residence: “as he approached the place, he had the distinct thrill of fascination that seized him always in the presence of old things” (177). The tourist gaze is however framed by his stipulation that the houses he rented must be free from children, his insistence of having “a place to himself” (178) aligning him with other Sinclair characters. Whether he is allowed to take rooms is dependent on whether the “missus” could “put oop” with Garvin (180), ostensibly referring to her pregnancy but also suggesting her control over the household, the sense that Falshaw was “afraid of his wife.” Luke Thurston has drawn attention to the uncanniness of Sarah Falshaw’s melancholic behaviour, as she “emanates a ‘forbidding’ power that disrupts the patriarchal regime of authority,” which, like the ghost, “annihilates the ordinary topography of intersubjective relations.”60 Described as both sinister and “a deterrent to tourists” (178), the pregnancy is aligned with the derelict house, a sign that child-bearing will be a key aspect of its buried secret. Garvin’s sleeping in the servant’s bedroom calls up the forgotten history not only of the dead child Effy but of the banished servant, Rhoda, whose affair with the master, and partial replacement of the first wife, contributes to the horror of the house. A haunting claustrophobia, exacerbated by mourning for the lost daughter, generates “the trouble in the house.” Falshaw’s is an uncannily cramped space, its interior “diminished” by two wooden partitions

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and its inhabitants uncomfortably close to each other. Mrs Falshaw, with her “hunted look,” her “painful life in deadness,” is imprisoned within the walls, “fixed in her fear, with no possibility of escape” (198). The ghostly child is significantly visible in the garden, where “out of doors, it had a happy look” (193), freed from the restrictions of the domestic interior. From his observation of “a child’s garden ruined beyond remembrance” (193) and the “fragments” of its broken cup, Garvin is able to piece together her hidden history. Feeling at home arranging his books in the stone-flagged parlour, despite it being “cold and strange,” Garvin’s “expert eye” for the architectural identifies the back bedroom as “the worst bedroom in the house,” a space only fit for servants. With “the musty smell of long disuse” (183), it inspires him with “a profound discomfort and distrust” and isolates him from the family, who do not call him down for tea nor offer him home-baked food. The haunted space is typically cramped; whilst Falshaw sleeps in a “commodious” room next door to a chamber shared by the two women, the roof “dwarfed” the lodger’s room “to the proportion of a garret” (184), with further space taken up by the landing. The air in the garret “oppressed him to suffocation” (200). The frequent crossing of the inhabitants in doorways and passages (which contravenes the rules of domestic organisation and spatial divisions) also suggests the lack of space. Maternal space, according to Luce Irigaray, is contradictory, associated with the “icy maternal enclosure,” the “cold, dark womb,” but also the fluidity and mobility of the maternal boundary-transcending habitat.61 In her thinking, it is the male presence which impose limits, “you close me up in house and family. Final, fixed walls.”62 In “The Intercessor,” the violation of spatial divisions between mother and child and between family and servant is figured through the spectral re-enactment of traumatic neglect, as the desired locations of Effy’s spirit demonstrate. The lost daughter voices the suffering of being inside the fixed walls, trapped on the landing after dark. The ghostly child appears to be locked in a hidden box-room, suggesting a narrative of neglect or shame, the cry is “stifled,” “muffled by closed doors” (185). The ghost beats and pushes against the half-open door of “the women’s room” “as against a door closed and locked” (189), reinforcing the invisible division between an icy maternal space and an unacknowledged children’s space. Denied access to the mother’s body, the ghost seeks solace in the garret, a servant’s space in which “it climbed up the bedside and crept in beside [the male lodger],” “its body pressed to his body” (189), like the Brontë sisters

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in their narrow bed. Scarborough claims that “having [a ghost] touch you is the climax of horror,” yet in ghost fiction there are also “tender and loving touches … and a longing to communicate with the living.”63 The garret’s confined space is also a space of safety, away from the hostile maternal bed: The room had, clearly, some profound significance for the child, since it was always compelled to come there … It was strange that, while he knew no terror of the perfect apparition, the bedfellow, his fear of the borderland was growing on him. His feeling was that if the things that were there became visible they would be more than he could endure. (191–92)

Garvin begins to see the ghost in the daytime, passing him in the passage and on the stairs, “It lay in wait for him at his door or at its own” (192). As Bachelard argues, “there is no need to return to a distant past, a past that is no longer our own, to find sacred properties attributed to the threshold.”64 Crossing the sacred threshold into the servants’ bedroom partly atones for the denied access to maternal space. For Sinclair, beds are menacing pieces of furniture, housing dark secrets and horror, as the haunted bedroom becomes a zone of confrontation, evil or illicit sexuality. Symbolic furniture or art objects, which generate memory traces for dead wives or mothers, are vital components of her ghost fiction, anticipating the malevolent, half-alive furniture in stories by Elizabeth Bowen. If, as Scarborough claims, the present-day spirit is “less limited, for he has gained the new without loss of the old,”65 then Sinclair’s spirits are bolder in their materiality, in their resolute occupation of chairs and beds which they had favoured before death, even as they retain their old capacity to protest against mistreatment and forgotten trauma. In her examination of Victorian haunted things, Aviva Briefel identifies perceptions of the animation of fabricated furniture or household objects as one of the more unsettling aspects of spiritualism. This “gothicization of domestic objects,” where tables, chairs and ornaments seem to have a life of their own, was linked to the “table-rapping” and strange occurrences in the Victorian séance, in which “the presence of ghosts was registered primarily through animated objects.”66 The almost unspeakable horror of the haunted bedroom is that the child’s witnessing of her father and a servant’s sexual act has transformed the bed into a disturbing haunted object. When Garvin is also haunted by a vision of what is seen as an unnatural coupling, he feels the unendurable terror

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of this “borderland of fear.” Rather than being afraid of the ghost, he is “afraid of his room, and of his bed … of the whole twilight bulk of it, waiting for him in the corner by the window wall” (199). The “bulk” of the bed also takes on patriarchal characteristics, evoking the “huge bulk” (196) of Falshaw’s body. Garvin thinks, “some iniquitous thing had had its place in this house and in this room” (199), only to be greeted with the excesses of the supernatural sexual act taking place in his bed, an act described as “evil,” “monstrous,” “unspeakable,” “beastly” (200, 203), his own horror and fear shared by the watching child. The doctor reveals the story of Falshaw’s assignation with a servant girl, Rhoda Webster, who he “kept on having … about the house” (205) whilst his wife was recovering from childbirth, “there they were all three, shut up in that house, Falshaw carrying on with Rhoda behind his wife’s back, and his wife stalking them” (206). Sarah had locked Rhoda out of the house and turned the child out of her bed, and then her room, blaming Effy for her husband’s loss of affection. Taking pity on the child when she found her beating on the mother’s door, (Effy would “creep into [Rhoda’s] bed and cuddle up to her for warmth” (208)), the servant is symbolically sent away after Effy’s death. The beastliness and evil of the room remain ambiguous, partly the otherness of adult sexuality, partly the exposing of the dark secrets of master-servant and servant-child intimacy. The “unclean, carnal miseries” (209) of the haunted bedroom cannot be exorcised with the locking out of the servant. Maternal rebuildings and a desire for space are also evoked in psychoanalytic interpretations of the deaths of children. In “Mourning and its relation to Manic-Depressive states” (1940), the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein explored women’s reactions to the “shattering loss” of a child.67 Mourning is linked to the reactivation of “early psychotic anxieties” but also to the necessary “rebuild[ing]” of an inner world “felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing.”68 In the case study of a mourning mother, Mrs A is first described sorting out letters written by her dead son, to “keep him safe inside herself.”69 Klein adds, “some people in mourning tidy the house and re-arrange furniture,” a sign of increased “obsessional mechanisms” but also an indication of the relationship between the trauma of loss and a desired control over, or wish to transform, the new domestic economy.70 Mrs A’s feelings on the “satisfaction about remaining alive” are significantly linked to the “solace she found in looking at houses” and her “rebuilding her inner world.”71 This satisfaction seems in reach by looking at “nicely situated houses in

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the country, and in wishing to have such a house of her own” (140), though the comforts of architecture are interrupted by bouts of despair. Women’s potential solace in housing and in spaces of their own, according to psychoanalytic thinking, then partly atones for the “shattering loss” of a child, and the ghost story clearly draws on this need to rebuild both inner and external worlds as part of the mourning process. What Grosz refers to as “feminist reoccupations of space,” acknowledging “the debt to the maternal,” is particularly pertinent to negotiating the loss of children.72 Maternal neglect and the presence of children in the home are explored through the movement of ghosts and dead children between the maternal bedroom and the disused nursery. The nursery, according to Hamlett, is a “transient space,” often converted into another room once the children grow up, as “few families had the space to create a shrine to their children.”73 It could mark distancing between parents and children, as well as instilling gender difference through toys appropriate to boys and girls. Debates about whether to preserve empty nurseries as shrines, and the psychological benefits of giving away or retaining the toys of the dead, illustrate cultural ambivalence about motherhood and mourning, and the home’s re-organisation around a lost child. Empty nurseries were haunted spaces because of their liminal position at the top of the house, their disused toys and their function as repositories for repressed memories of the traumatic early deaths of children. The locked child’s room is “bound to contain some sign or trace of the child” (194), in Garvin’s thinking, so that gaining access by pretending he wants to use the space as a “box-room” for storing his cases allow for the unlocking of memory traces of the lost daughter. The mourning father’s desire that nothing be disarranged suggests the room’s status as burial chamber, its chair and cot covered with a white sheet, “shrouded like the dead,” (194), with the imprint of the child visible in the mattress and pillow. Garvin touches the haunted objects, which “bring the thing horribly near to him” (194). Although the word “nursery” is not used in the story, this is another example of the modernist transformation of a disused nursery into a shrine or uncanny memory-site. Maternal neglect is shown to be the product of an over-investment in maternity within the home, as Sarah Falshaw comments contemptuously, “E thinks child-bearing’s the only cure for all a woman’s suffering … E says if there’s a child about the plaace there’ll be an end of the trooble” (212), a sentiment seconded by the male doctor. But having children about the place is shown to exacerbate rather than cure domestic troubles. The ghost child’s occupation

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of an “open space” by the hearth-stone, where she advances and strokes her mother’s face, results in terror and the delivery of a dead child. Raitt claims that “Effy is implicated in the death of her infant sibling: her continued half-presence in the house is ruthless and destructive.”74 But perhaps this is not the appropriate space to heal family conflict; the trouble can only be resolved when a shrine is created in the maternal bedroom. Leslie de Bont argues that in the story, “haunting is represented as a form of longing for maternal proximity,” with the ghostly child revisiting key places within the home, such as the bed, the staircase and the garden tank where she drowned.75 Unresolved mourning is a recurring motif, as “mourning work often induces a radical change in Sinclair’s characters, … represented as a supernatural event or ability, especially in her shorter fiction.”76 In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Sigmund Freud described “the work of mourning” in terms of the “severing” of attachment to “the lost object.”77 Due to unresolved mourning, the attachment is repressed, rather than severed, so that within the haunted house the ghost remains lost, trapped in spaces of trauma. “The loss of a love-object,” according to Freud, “is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love-relationships to make itself effective and come into the open” (my italics).78 The mother’s holding of her dead baby is not seen to be a “disturbing symptom” by the doctor, but her refusal to give up the baby to be buried shows the desire to reinvent the women’s room as a maternal space, “she’d got the child in the bed with her and she wouldn’t let it go” (214). The nurse’s attempts to lie the child on the cot in the back room in preparation for burial are contravened, as in the “uncovered space” of the mother’s bed, the men look on the mourning mother trying to breastfeed the dead child, “press[ing] the nipple to its shut mouth” (215). In the final scene, Effy approaches the bed like “some wonderful, shining thing” (215) to claim her mother’s love. As Garvin takes the dead child from the bed, with an “irresistible urgency,” Effy slides through Garvin’s hands “into its place” (216), so that her mother’s arms can press the “impalpable creature, as it were flesh to flesh” (216). This is an example of what Dorothy Scarborough refers to as “the ghost touch,”79 an aspect of the modern ghost story used to signal affection or attachment from beyond the grave. In the epilogue to the story, the doctor reports that Mrs Falshaw’s cure has been achieved by her accommodating into her room a photograph of the dead Effy and a shelf with “her things,” including a doll, some toys and a cup, suggesting

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“votive offerings on an altar of the dead” (216). Terri Mullholland has written about Sinclair’s “theatres of domesticity” in which women typically display their wares through “careful curating” of their homes.80 The sacred aspects of the nursery are here accommodated in maternal space, suggesting a curated union of mother and child. The haunted objects here are used to facilitate, rather than deny, the mourning process, and the bedroom door remains figuratively open to the unforgotten dead. In “If the Dead Knew,” the dead mother and the new fiancé vie for the attention of the “molly-coddled” only son, who remains suspended in the process of mourning by the mother’s ghostly occupation of the drawing-room and the maternal bedroom. Conflicting views of the overly feminised, oppressive drawing-room are apparent in this transitional period between the Victorian and the modern house, as the name was gradually going out of use, to be replaced by “living room” or “parlour”; after 1900, according to Jane Hamlett, “in smaller, newer middle-class homes, the drawing-room was on its way out.”81 The death of the mother affects male navigation of the house, with the son’s struggle to assert ownership and control exacerbated by the restriction of his movements and the use of chairs, beds and the piano by her demanding spiritual presence. Wilfrid’s escape from “humiliating dependence” (134) on his overpowering mother through her death is only a partial escape, as her presence haunts the small, ivy-covered house with its “cramped” green drawing-room. In the story, this feminised space contains Wilfrid’s piano, where Mrs Hollyer nurtured his musical abilities whilst preventing him from pursuing musical training outside the house. By mid-century, argues John Tosh, “hardly a bourgeois drawing-room was without a piano,” a marker of a coveted social status.82 Whilst she is alive, Wilfrid is unable to “slink past” the drawing-room without his mother’s notice, she rules the house from her chair by the drawing-room fire. During the mother’s illness, Effie appropriates her role and her space by sitting in “his mother’s chair” and pouring his tea, whilst he dreams of becoming “his own master in his house” (129). This appropriation of maternal space after his mother’s death, “Effie sitting in his mother’s place. Effie sleeping beside him in the big bed” (132), even “in his mother’s chair,” is dangerous but does not over-ride the memory trace of Wilfrid’s confinement to the house as a sickly child, “sacrificed to his mother’s selfishness” (134). Although the sound of sighing at his piano-playing seems to come from the empty room, the door shut by the new wife is opened again by the phantom mother whilst he can hear his wife’s footsteps upstairs. The repeated word

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“Mother” comes to him “with a sense of appalling, supernatural horror. Horror that was there with him in the room like a presence” (136). The vision of his dead mother stands between him and “the chair,” dressed in the clothes she had died in, an apparition which “maintained itself with difficulty,” “less a form than a visible emotion, an anguish” (137). The return of the lost mother, a familiar trope of Female Gothic, is a traumatising reoccupation of space which restricts his navigation of the home and blocks the path to the marital bedroom. The study functions in the story as a non-sexual place of retreat from the feminine, but also from the “fatal room,” the room of death which is a constant reminder of how wishing someone dead alters the domestic economy. After the trauma of this encounter, Wilfrid shuts himself in his upstairs study and has his single bed made up there, “afraid to sleep in the room that had been his mother’s” (137). Rosner describes the study as “typically a space for one person alone … the perfected space of privacy,”83 which fits here with the nervous husband’s shutting himself away from his mother’s death, though sleeping in a space for work and writing also subverts the domestic economy. Tosh writes about notions of “seclusion, refuge and repose” as being “desired characteristics of the middle-class home,” particularly for men battling with the alienation of city life.84 Ghost stories often explored specific spaces of seclusion and refuge within the home, places where men could try to be themselves. Freud links the unheimlich not only to “what arouses dread and creeping horror,” feeling “uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy,” but to its opposite, what is “friendly, intimate, homelike … arousing a sense of peaceful pleasure and security as in one within the four walls of his house.”85 The creeping horror of the Hollyers’ house is that its pleasure and security cannot be enjoyed because of the restless ghost of the dead mother, who dominates spaces of marital intimacy. Effie “must wonder why he had taken that sudden dislike to the drawing-room; why he insisted on sleeping in his study” (139). Her advice to him to go back into the room and resume his music backfires when his playing releases a surge of desire for the mother: “He heard nothing; he saw nothing; but with every nerve he felt the vibration of her approach, of her presence” (139). Lefebvre contends that, “appropriation moves forward,”86 but this spectral reappropriation of maternal space is an uncanny return to the traumatic past. The final moments of the story suggest the reassertion of maternal possession and spatial control, “she knew she had him again; she knew she would never lose him. He was her son” (140). Bringing domestic secrets

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into the open and exposing the ambivalence of mother-child relations in “The Intercessor” provide a means to reconceptualise the uncanny home environment, but in this chilling story the return of the lost mother suggests a continuing uncanniness, an ongoing maternal control.

In the Haunted Library In the nineteenth century, the library was often considered to be “a sacred male preserve, undisturbed by the rest of the family and only to be dusted by the mistress of the house.”87 With its bookcases, desk and comfortable chairs, it was often adjacent to other male spaces such as the billiard room and was sometimes directly accessible from the outside. It could be a space to welcome visitors or business associates. In 1867, Charles Eastlake differentiated the solid oak furniture of the library with “the silly knickknacks which too frequently crowd a drawing-room table,” reinforcing the gendered divisions which established the library as a “dull” space, with furniture of “intense respectability.”88 Historians have noted the differences between libraries, which were more accessible, and studies, which tended to be private and male, but it is likely that by the modernist period in the smaller house there would only be one room which could be labelled in either way. Rosner remarks that “even as the identity of this space as the seat of authorship and authority in the home was being consolidated in the nineteenth century, the exclusivity of the male claim to this space came under attack.”89 Jane Hamlett argues that, unlike the study, “the library was not necessarily used as a quiet space for male work,” as the inclusion of pianos and a large number of seats in some household records suggests that it was more of a family space.90 If the library functions as “the perfected space of privacy,” a space of secrets and dangerous knowledge,91 then its Gothic potential in the ghost story is unlocked when its privacy is invaded by women. In “The Token,” Helen Dunbar, with her “uncanny gift” (51) tells the story of her beloved sister-in-law Cecily haunting her husband’s library, a room he had ordered her out of during her terminal illness as it had hindered him in his work. His devotion to his writing is shown to create unnatural divisions within the home, as even during the first year of marriage they occupy separate bedrooms and her presence in the library is viewed as an interruption: “I can’t work with you in the room” (49). The story suggests that she has less value than a precious inscribed paperweight, nicknamed the Token, given to Donald by George Meredith, which she

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is ordered to put down. The token associated with the famous male author, its fragility emblematic of women’s threat to a shared masculine authority, is another example of a haunted object. In her discussion of Victorian material culture, Deborah Lutz has written about the hidden stories of inanimate things, as if “an object’s meaning – its slumbering life – comes from our own desires and passions, the shadows we let play over it.”92 According to Eastlake, the library can function as a repository for “a little museum” of art objects, which can be a “picturesque feature” of the room.93 Cecily’s dropping of the paperweight, after Donald has told her “not to touch my things” (48) appears to be a symbolic violation of protected masculine space (as if she is a servant), yet the library is also a space of female rivalry and same-sex desire which admits the devoted sister but not the devoted wife. According to Victoria Rosner, modernist fiction tended to “dramatize how individuals were constrained by hierarchical and compartmentalized Victorian spaces.”94 Constraint and limitation by spatial hierarchies are figured in Sinclair’s stories through the shutting out of women and children. Before the wife is “shut out” of the library, she had always had “her chair by the fireplace” where she sat docilely with her book or embroidery (48), whereas Helen, who it is implied provides assistance in his research, has a permanent position aligning her with her brother: “Cicely had come into us in the library” (48). After his wife’s death, Donald spends an unnatural amount of time “shut up in the library” trapped in the “deadly groove” of writing (50), in the room “from which she had been so cruelly shut out” (50–51). The transformation of the room into a haunted space, where both imagine the dead wife’s presence, is achieved even as unspecified feminine objects are buried from sight: But he liked to have me with him; and all the time that I could spare from my housekeeping and gardening I spent in the library. I think he didn’t like to be left alone there in the place where they had the quarrel that killed her; and I noticed that the cause of it, the Token, had disappeared from his table. And all her things, everything that could remind him of her, had been put away. It was the dead burying its dead. Only the chair she loved remained in its place by the side of the hearth – her chair, if you could call it hers when she wasn’t allowed to sit in it. It was always empty, for by tacit consent we both avoided it. (50)

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Both a space of imprisonment and forbidden territory, the library is always described in terms of longing and inaccessibility, a place where women have to negotiate their positions, as the italicised personal pronoun indicates. Her movement between garden and library aligns Helen with the modern, as gardens were a new feature of Edwardian suburban housing95 ; moving between inside and outside is also a way to challenge restrictive notions of Victorian space (like Cecily doomed to her quintessentially feminine embroidery). The objects of the dead were sometimes hidden away from sight, not displayed, argues Hamlett, so that they “lived a strange kind of half-life,” rather than inspiring memory,96 functioning as important aspects of the haunted house with its buried secrets. The haunted objects, the empty chair and the hidden paperweight are used to stage the conflict between different understandings of gendered space and domestic authority. The husband’s immersion in his work means that he has to be haunted by a phantasm ostensibly seeking the “certainty” of his love, but also as a reminder of the dangers of repressing erotic desire or privileging work over marriage. Sinclair’s decision to align the moment of haunting with the husband’s enjoyment of his pipe in the twilight, “always it chose this room and this hour before the lights came, when he sat doing nothing” (52) is indicative of the female interruption of masculine rituals. Although Donald is shown to be “absorbed in his smoking” (51), like a typical paterfamilias, the presence of the ghost generates “his uneasy sighing and stretching” (52), reflecting the uncertainty of their gendered positions: “it was as uncertain of him now as she had been in her lifetime” (52). The haunting allows the spectral woman to occupy a space from which she was excluded, not as a form of vengeance but more to correct his refusal to remember and his degeneration into a morose “creature of habit and routine” (50). A “perfect and vivid” phantasm, appearing like “flesh and blood” (51), occupies “her chair,” accessing the fireside circle where Helen also has “my place.” Only through death can the shutout wife achieve her longed-for position: “I would see it coming across the room from the doorway, making straight for its desired place, and settling in a little curled-up posture of satisfaction, appeased, as if it had expected opposition that it no longer found” (52). The desirability of women accessing the library, to curl up at ease and defy male opposition, is explored though spiritual communication. Rosner has argued that when modern women transgressively enter the study, “so strong is the shaping power of this space that they find they can only do so as men.”97

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Yet Sinclair’s stories suggest that these acts of reoccupation by both live and dead women keep their gender identity intact, despite the phantasm being referred to as “it.” The number of chairs by the fire underline the room’s potential for admitting both men and women, “we were all there in our places” (53) with the phantasm’s claiming of a place, “seated in its attitude of wonder and of waiting” (53), signifying the achievement of shared space. Having the modern capacity to go out “like a light you switch off,” like a supernatural form of electricity, the phantasm is dependent on Donald’s presence within the room, but the female narrator has to act as the intercessor in order to satisfy the ghost’s wishes. Although Donald might try to “shake off the oppression of the memory” (53) of his dead wife, Helen is required to intercede for her. The spirit’s “desperate searching” (55) for the lost paperweight, and Helen’s unlocking of the drawer where it was hidden and putting it in her brother’s hand are their demands for a token of his unexpressed love. Andrew Smith reads Donald’s smashing of the token as the breaking of a male “attachment to material realities” in the “evidence” offered of a “benign spiritual domain.”98 However, Helen’s vision of the “distressed” ghost is testimony to her own repressed desire for her “darling,” a desire which can only be expressed on the borderland between life and death. The ghost could be interpreted as “subjective,” a projection of Helen’s repressed desire, dismissed by her brother as her “hysterical fancy” (51)—in the final scene, she thinks, “I couldn’t see the phantasm now, but I could feel it, close, close, vibrating, palpitating, as I drove him” (56). The presence of the good housekeeper Helen in the library, sewing whilst her brother works, may highlight the inadequate domesticity of her sister-in-law, implying that the hidden desire is an incestuous one: the spinster sister, relishing “her place” (51), happily replaces the exorcised dead wife in her brother’s affections. The coda to the story shows the brother and sister “sitting together in that room” (56) sharing their knowledge of the dead wife’s invisibility, as after the smashing of the token, “she found what she came for” (57). This shared occupation of a supposedly male space suggests a re-ordering of gender relations effected by the closeness of the female members of the household even after death. Another variation on the dead wife ghost story,99 “The Nature of the Evidence” contrasts the library and the bedroom as haunted spaces. It is pieced together by an unknown probably male narrator from the confused narrative of Edward Marston about the supernatural interference within his London townhouse. Like Sarah Falshaw, Marston’s mourning process

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is shown to be inadequate; he can only justify to himself taking a second wife by believing that “when your body’s dead, you’re dead,” so that Rosamund “survived for him only in his memory” (114). The spatial undertones of remarrying are reiterated in his phrase, “I won’t put another woman in Rosamund’s place” (114). Forgoing the honeymoon, he takes his new bride “straight to his own house in Curzon Street,” where clashes over territory make him wish he had sold it and moved on. Homeownership in the early twentieth century had risen to 21% of the British population by 1932, after a fall in house prices from the early 1920s. This meant that families tended to occupy fewer rooms in smaller residences, with gendered spatial divisions sometimes more relaxed.100 Male spaces such as libraries and studies were still included in architectural plans, particularly in suburban residences, though new houses often had only a single living room or no study at all.101 Grosz’s vision of feminist reoccupation of space includes the negotiation of shared spaces between men and women.102 The female sharing of male space, “her place” within “his room,” is explored in the following passage: The Curzon Street house was associated with Rosamund; especially their bedroom – Rosamund’s bedroom – and his library. The library was the room Rosamund liked best, because it was his room. She had her place in the corner by the hearth, and they were always alone there together in the evenings when his work was done; and when it wasn’t done she would still sit with him, keeping quiet in her corner with a book. Luckily for Marston, at the first sight of the library Pauline took a dislike to it. I can hear her. “Br – rr- rh! There’s something beastly about this room, Edward. I can’t think how you can sit in it.” And Edward, a little caustic: “You needn’t, if you don’t like it.” “I certainly shan’t.” She stood there – I can see her – on the hearthrug by Rosamond’s chair, looking uncommonly handsome and lascivious. He was going to take her in his arms and kiss her vermilion mouth, when, he said, something stopped him. Stopped him clean, as if it had risen up and stopped between them. He supposed it was the memory of Rosamund, vivid in the place that had been hers. (115)

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In the patriarchal library, unlike Cecily in “The Token,” Rosamund retains “her place,” perhaps because she was able to keep quiet. The modern wife’s categorisation of this room as “beastly” and cold is revealing of her antagonism to his work. The “vivid” memory of the dead wife’s place confirms the room’s status as a place of male celibacy, “that place, of silent, intimate communion” where he would be left alone (115). Typically for Sinclair, the other rooms in the haunted house are “cramped,” “small” and lacking in light, limiting the choices available for modern living: the drawing-room covers the whole of the first floor, the landing is narrow, and there are only “tight boxes” (116) on the top floor, seen as unsuitable or inappropriate spaces for the middle classes to sleep. In her advice text The Ideal Home and Its Problems (1911), Mrs Eustace Mills worried that the new flats might create “a cramped and restricted feeling” and urged, “Do not let your belongings own you! [Ornaments and furniture can] fill and at last absolutely paralyse and dominate the room.”103 The diminished number of rooms in the modernist ghost story emphasises the spatial segregation of husband and wife who each require their own bedroom; the positioning of her door at right angles to his, shows them as divided but also joined. Beastliness is used to link the library and the bedroom which are both to be avoided: “two rooms in the house were haunted; their bedroom and the library … she had made up her mind … that it was nothing but a case of an ordinary haunted house; the sort of thing you’re always hearing about and never believe in till it happens to yourself” (120). Marston’s observation that the haunting dates from her arrival in the house again recalls the exploration of the replacing of the first wife as a trigger for the uncanny. The fourth night Pauline sleeps in one of the spare rooms, next to the servants (one of the “tight boxes” referred to earlier) though coming down to Marston’s room after midnight she is mistaken for the phantasm of Rosamund. The vision of his new wife’s disturbing nakedness beneath a transparent nightgown strikes her husband as “the uncanny and unnatural thing” (120); his second wife writhes on the floor, “like a worm, like a beast” (121). This is another example of the shocking nature of Sinclair’s stories, which uncompromisingly confront the erotic. Perhaps what is uncanny and unnatural is Pauline’s approaching her husband’s room after midnight, though in the contest between the undead and live wives, the phantasm’s provocative look over her shoulder, “signalling to him to come” (121) before she floats downstairs is another sign of female sexual invitation. The lady’s descent of the stairs into a hallway was often a

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key moment at parties, so that her “evening finery” could be admired104 ; by summoning her husband downstairs, the dead wife evokes this ritual. Marston’s disgust that Pauline is taking “advantage of her embodied state to beat down the heavenly, discarnate thing” (121), before he follows the phantasm to the library for some bodiless communion, is superseded by his “passion” for the supernatural. The “evidence” about phantasms and hallucinations is inconclusive, leaving the ending unresolved. The banishing of the lascivious Pauline, who moves onto a string of other love-affairs, recalls the banishing of Rhoda from Falshaw’s house in order to appease a ghost horrified by sexuality. Women’s struggle to establish their places in the male domain of the library, where their sexuality seems more acceptable than in the Gothic bedroom, shows that clashes over territory can counter the effacement of women in male domestic space.

Haunted Bedrooms and the Horror of Sexual Intimacy The doubling of the bedroom as a room of death/mourning and of an often disturbing sexual intimacy is a recurring trope in Sinclair’s stories, which typically associate this space with a terrifying beastliness. The haunted bedroom with its “nightmare-haunted” beds becomes a space of conflict and terror often set against the patriarchal library, transformed from a place of male refuge to a shared space. Reports of bedroom hauntings, according to Owen Davies, were often violent, and “there is an undoubted sexual component, with the gender difference between haunter and haunted being more explicit than in manifestations occurring elsewhere.”105 The second wife’s appropriation of the first wife’s bedroom in “The Nature of the Evidence,” “looking at everything … opening the wardrobe where Rosamund’s dresses used to hang … covering [Rosamund’s scent] with her own thick trail” (116) can be seen as a clear invitation to haunting. Her enchantment with having the “wide, three-windowed piece,” two rooms knocked into one, aligns her with the modern, though the suggestiveness of the “trail” she leaves, like a snail or slug, makes her lasciviousness seem ominous. When Pauline waits for her new husband, the ghost of the dead wife bars the door to the bedroom, so that Marston recounts to the narrator, “she wouldn’t let me in.” Occupying the threshold, the ghost comes in and out of his vision, so that he leaves his door open, unable to bear “to shut it on her” (116). Accessibility and the navigation of the house are evoked

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here; if, for Lefebvre “space commands bodies, prescribing or proscribing gestures, routes and distances,”106 the ghost’s blocking of the route suggests female spatial control. In the “exquisitely furnished” Gothic bedroom, with its “seventeenth-century walnut wood” and purple counterpane (116), Marston is unable to consummate the marriage, despite his lies about which side of the bed he had previously occupied, because “he didn’t want to see Pauline’s body where Rosamund’s had been” (116). He recalls the approach to “Pauline’s bed, which had been Rosamund’s bed” (117) barred by the appearance of the ghost visible only to himself. In order to alleviate what they believe to be hallucinations, they try to “break the spell” by him getting into bed first, when he encounters the almost fleshly presence of Rosamund in “her own place,” sleeping. Banishing the ghost is also attempted by suggesting they swap bedrooms, though Pauline refuses to be “frightened out of her own room” (119), meaning that he sleeps on a chair, aware that she is “guarding his place, which was her place” (119). Further interfering with notions of gendered space, the phantasm occupies “his place” in the bed, smacking Pauline’s face with her long rope of hair. Both women’s bodies become conduits for the uncanny; Pauline puts her hands on “a woman’s body, soft and horrible; her fingers had sunk into the shallow breasts” (119). The beastliness of the room is compounded by the horrific inhabitation of the bed by the dead wife with her “horrible” body. Perhaps Sinclair’s most terrifying story, “Where their Fire is not Quenched” (1922) imagines the return from the dead of both male and female lovers to a claustrophobic hotel bedroom. Its disconcerting temporal disruptions frame the nightmarish scenario of Harriott Leigh, unable to escape from an affair grown stale, who must repeat her tawdry and “repugnant” assignations after death. Structured around its heroine’s relationships with men including her dominant father, the lost fiancé, her lover Oscar Wade and a priest, the story is sequenced around moments in time, punctuated by phrases such as “ten years passed.” It is also sequenced around increasingly restrictive spaces: the freedom of the orchard of her family home, the park, the cramped suburban drawingroom with its ominously ticking clock, the over-lit restaurant, the cheap hotel bedroom, before the peace of the church and her death-bed. The sweet scent of green space contrasts harshly with the garishly modern Schnebler’s Restaurant in Soho, brightly lit, colourful, hot, noisy and crowded, the diners with “distorted” faces under “the convoluted electric bulbs pointing, pointing down at them” (31). Although in her small

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house in Maida Vale Harriott presides over her own space, “her drawing room,” after her father’s death, female behaviour is still governed by social conventions, as it is “dangerous” (31) to entertain her lover there unless her maid is out. Agreeing to spend a few days closeted with her lover in the Parisian Hotel Saint Pierre is however even more alarming. Crying in the hotel is attributed to its bad design, the room “too hideously ugly … getting on her nerves” (32) but her boredom in Paris is partly to do with being trapped in that room, “at close quarters, day in and day out” (32–33). Marriage is envisaged with alarm as “the Hotel Saint Pierre all over again, without any possibility of escape” (33), a terrifying closeness. Spaces of intimacy necessitate “furtive” behaviour but become repellent, as if women have no safe or “satisfactory” space in which to act out their sexual urges. This apprehension of the ugliness and vulgarity of public spaces such as the restaurant and the hotel symbolises what Mullholland has called “the struggle between commercial and domestic environments” in Sinclair’s writing and its ambivalence towards modernity.107 The sordid bedroom, repressed from memory like the “depraved” corridor which leads to it, returns unbidden throughout the story, like the horrifying ghostly lover who pursues her through time, blocking the escape routes: “It’s no use getting away … Every path brings you back to me. You’ll find me at every turn … I am in all your memories” (43). After the end of the affair, his longed-for death is also figured as an unsettling nearness, “Oscar dead would be nearer to her than ever” (35). After the lapse of twenty years and her becoming a Deaconess with a “holy smile,” Harriott tries to cancel out the terrors of these spaces, which “ceased to figure among prominent images of the past. Her memories, if she had allowed herself to remember, would have clashed disagreeably with the reputation for sanctity which she had now acquired” (35). The priest who “stooped close” (36) over her death-bed, makes the bedroom sacred rather than sordid, with its altar and candles, yet even the sacredness of the death-bed is questioned in the story when the dead body of her father struggles convulsively under the sheet and transforms into the dead body of her lover. Running “out of the room, out of the house” (40) is an attempt to run away from both the enclosed space and the terrors of the bedroom which reactivate the horrifying knowledge of her sexual passion. Death-beds and beds as terrifying sites of death, infection, disgust or a repellent nearness coalesce in Sinclair’s thinking. The hotel corridor as a terrifying and uncanny passageway to the inevitable entrapment of the bedroom is filtered through the female

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ghostly consciousness. Roger Luckhurst has described the “strange emotional tenor” of corridors, non-places to be hurried through, eerie, liminal and sinister. The dread of the “anonymous modernity of hotel vistas” appearing in twentieth-century horror films is clearly anticipated here.108 As Harriott approaches the hotel room along the corridor, “it was there that the horror of the place came on her … all space and time were here” (39). The horror of the place, or spatial fear, is very much to do with the threatened enclosure of the hotel room, where she feels cornered like “a hunted beast” (39). The form of the short story with its inability to allow her to reach “the place where it hadn’t happened” becomes claustrophobic, like walls closing in. The word “close” is repeated five times in a few lines to emphasise her supernatural attempts to achieve intimacy with the priest who does not recognise her presence. As she comes “close, close” to him, his transformation into the hated Oscar Wade means that the man gains control, becoming “horribly still, and close, barring her passage” (38). Despite her attempts to go back in time to the maternal orchard, Harriott is horrifyingly returned to the grey hotel bedroom in Paris where her love affair ended to re-enact sexual relations now envisaged as “darkness and terror” (43), her lover invading “all remembered space.”109 The overemphasis on doors and gates seems to offer the illusion of women’s access to space, yet whichever doors her ghost opens lead into the uncanniness of the “ash-grey” hotel corridor, “dark and secret and depraved” with its “soiled walls and the warped door at the end” (39). As a female spectre Harriott, like Margaret Oliphant’s Old Lady Mary, is unable to control her occupation of time and space after death. The uncanny return to the spaces of her life renders them “familiar and yet unfamiliar” (37), with her desired access to an untarnished past an unattainable fantasy: “she thought, If I could only go back and get to the place where it hadn’t happened” (39). The longed-for orchard, a safe maternal space, is denied within the terms of the story. Walking through the familiar iron gate in the wall of her home “frightened her” because of its chilling transformation into an “ash-grey door” leading to “the last corridor of the Hotel Saint Pierre” (45). One of Freud’s examples of an uncanny moment is the feeling of helplessness in the face of an “involuntary return” to the same spot or landmark: “one may be groping around in the dark in an unfamiliar room, searching for the door or the lightswitch, and repeatedly colliding with the same piece of furniture.”110 For the doomed spectral woman, searching for the door is futile. The closing

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line of the story stages the inevitability of the “involuntary return” to the bedroom of depravity, an inescapable nearness. Reading the story in terms of its exposure of the “negative ramifications” of liminality, Claire Drewery notes that Harriott is “tormented by guilt in a purgatorial borderland, a suffocating and deadly state from which escape is impossible.”111 Her reading of the “surreal after-death space” depends upon a vision of the heroine’s death as a “grotesque consummation” of the dreaded marriage (80). But this does not take account of the suffocating nature of space explored throughout the story, even before death, nor the spatial dimensions of this undesirable borderland. The impossibility of escape is also tethered to a tarnished and horrifying modernity. Gillian Rose argues that women’s occupation of a modern “paradoxical geography” which challenges male power may not remain emancipatory but is likely to also be “insecure, precarious and fluctuating,” suggesting a darker underside to modernist ideals of women’s greater freedoms.112 The attempt to access the maternal space of the past fails, projecting Harriott though the swinging glass doors of the dingy London restaurant, where she is “driven forward by some irresistible compulsion,” “dragged without power to resist” (41) to Oscar’s table, among the glittering tables where diners are “moving mechanically.” Trying to slip away from him, she is unable to “swerve” from the red-carpeted staircase, as “he turned her back” (41). Being dead emphasises the automaton-like behaviour of women “driven forward” by a desire governed by men, “she could almost feel the vibration of its power” (41). Jean de Bosschère’s unnerving illustration of Harriott’s failure to recognise her own spectrality in the 1923 edition shows the woman surrounded by whirling pieces of broken furniture, with the caption, “Then suddenly the room began to come apart.”113 Symbolising the surreal dismantling of the rooms by which she had lived her life, this gestures to the uncanniness of a post-death space, a spatial impossibility. The later line, “The darkness came down swamping, it blotted out the room” (45), also suggests the erasure of domestic organisation in the afterlife. Her inability to control her own movements and to choose which space she occupies, no matter how far she runs or how many doors and gates she goes through, suggests the limitations of spectrality for women. In “The Villa Désirée,” which opened Cynthia Asquith’s anthology The First Ghost Book (1926), the Gothic bedroom is still envisaged as male territory, yet the story allows for a female challenge to male brutality. Rather than the dead wife, a grotesque phantasm of the new husband stakes a claim to a ghastly honeymoon suite. The dashingly romantic

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fiancé Louis who showers Mildred with roses and plans for her to wait for him in his Mediterranean villa embodies the terrifying “beastliness” which made his first wife die of fright on their honeymoon. The villa on its topmost terrace above the olive trees, “Louis’s house” (19), seems like a dream of modern Continental luxury, but inside the dusty salon is “fragile and worn, all faded gray and old greenish gilt” with a “faint powdery smell from the old floor,” “a little queer and – unlived in” (78). The unlivability of the house is partly to do with patriarchal control; “Monsieur’s orders” are to direct the new wife to “the best room in the house,” with Armandine, the caretaker, issuing the challenge, “Nobody would dislike to sleep in Madame’s room” (15). If Madame’s room is subject to male orders, it is not the “adorable” or “charming” space Mildred imagines, but a place of terror. The queerness of the sepulchral bedroom, with its “enormous,” “rather frightening” bed, weighed down with “piled mattresses,” is partly explained in terms of its being also a fatal room: “she died here” (16). The fatal, “beastly” room with its bed of death is described as a “sacred” place, “like a great white tank filled with blond water.” The “high, rather frightening” bed and white furniture seem to be “quivering in the stillness, with the hot throb, throb of the light” (77). As a haunted object, the bed’s threatening power, which requires “defiance” as it is approached, is reiterated throughout the story, “Martha was right. The bed is awful” (19). Climbing into “that high funeral bed Madame had died in” (19) is an exposure to something unnamed, and once inside Mildred has to fight to suppress, “the sad image of Madame” and “the memory of poor little Madame” (19). The sacredness of this opposition between dead bride and bride-to-be is revealing of the difficulties of appropriating a shrine to the dead wife’s memory: “Perhaps he didn’t think about her as dead at all; he didn’t want her to be driven away. The room she had died in was not awful to him” (19). Satirical articles about spiritualism in the Victorian press, which ridiculed ladies being frightened of sofas because of lack of knowledge about where they came from, also raised important questions about “the origins of the things we own.”114 The “funeral bed” is suggestive of a spectral history of a household object; the first wife’s dying of fright on her honeymoon on these piled mattresses makes the room a sinister subversion of the honeymoon suite. Mildred’s airy dismissal of the supernatural, “her poor little ghost won’t hurt me” (81) rings hollow when she is “dragged violently up out of her sleep” (19) by a “supernatural thing.” In the frightful greyness she is “afraid to

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look into the room” (20), as if the room itself has become a “malignant” and “unearthly” presence like the phantasm. Yet the threatening ghost in the fatal room is not the dead wife but a monstrous Louis with its “loathsome shapelessness” (84), its breasts and phallic brutality. This phantasm of the living, which gets to the bedroom before the eager fiancé, is “flesh and yet not flesh,” a frightful blind thing, which is shown as “bending over her, peering at her,” “look[ing] for her” (20, 21), as she hides behind “the barrier of the piled-up mattresses.” Even within the bed itself, women have to put up barriers to male encroachment on feminine space; her fear is that “the moment she lost consciousness the appalling presence there would have its way with her” (21). The only way to defy the danger of spectral/sexual violence is to question the male presence in her room: her cry “Louis! What are you doing there?” banishes the frightful thing, which is “sucked back into the greyness” (21). Diana Wallace has linked this troubling gender ambiguity to the uncanniness of the male genitals, which “deny/erase female selfhood.”115 Yet the “something that gave up the secret of the room and made it frightful and obscene” (84) can also be read as the complacency of the male belief that Madame’s bedroom is his domain, ruled by Monsieur’s orders and the erasure of women in male space. By challenging the appalling presence of the husband, it is implied, women can counter the beastliness of the bedroom. Sinclair’s uncanny stories explore the links between sudden illness or death, and women’s (re)appropriation of domestic space, as well as restless spirits dissatisfied with new domestic arrangements. Locating women’s psychic terrors in male-dominated rooms such as the library and the bedroom, her female revenants assert their presence in male territory. The cramped suburban dwellings, Brontësque farmhouses and hotel rooms which admit the supernatural also house a disturbing claustrophobia, where women cannot find the room to breathe. Many of Sinclair’s characters manifest both a dread of enclosed space and the inability to escape, feeling trapped not only in the domestic interior but in rooms so full of the presence of one person that it is difficult to get out into the open. Whereas spectrality sometimes enables women to find their place, or comforting maternal bonds to be reaffirmed, “Where their Fire is not Quenched” suggests the uncanniness of the involuntary return to the haunted bedroom. The fatal room which calls up buried memories can facilitate Grosz’s plea for women to break out of constriction and “reconceiv[e] space and place.”116 The representation of maternal space

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as both suffocating yet necessary within the modern home is a key focus of Sinclair’s supernatural vision.

Notes 1. Letter to Annie Fields, 9 December 1910. Quoted in Suzanne Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 115. 2. Paul March-Russell, “Introduction,” to May Sinclair, Uncanny Stories (1923; Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006), 10. All quotations from the stories are from this edition. 3. Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 8, x. 4. Review of May Sinclair, Uncanny Stories, Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 1923, 586. 5. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 18. 6. Deborah Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 60, 75. 7. Ibid., 75. 8. Elizabeth Grosz, “Women, Chora, Dwelling,” in Space, Time and Perversion (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 120–21. 9. Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (London: Athlone Press, 1992), 25. 10. May Sinclair, “Dreams, Ghosts and Fairies,” Bookman 65 (1923): 145, 147. 11. Ibid., 144. 12. May Sinclair, “Introduction,” to From Four Who Are Dead: Messages to C.A. Dawson Scott (London: Arrowsmith, 1926), 6. 13. Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, xi. 14. Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York and London: Knickerbocker Press, 1917), 118. 15. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” (1919) in The Uncanny trans. David McLintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 149. For an extended discussion of the oscillations between spiritualism and scepticism in relation to the ghost story between 1890 and 1918, see also Emma Liggins, “Visualizing the Unseen: Supernatural Stories and Illustration in The Strand,” Victorian Periodicals Review 52 no. 2 (2019): 365–87. 16. Scarborough, The Supernatural, 106. 17. Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 55.

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18. Henri Lefebvre, Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment trans. Robert Bonanno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 95. 19. May Sinclair, “Women’s Sacrifices for the War,” Woman at Home 67 (1915): 10. 20. Lefebvre, Towards an Architecture, 97. 21. Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2007), 47. 22. Ibid., 48. 23. Lady Barker, The Bedroom and Boudoir (London: Macmillan, 1878), 29, 31. 24. Ibid., 29. 25. Ibid., 95. 26. Raitt, May Sinclair, 115, 129. 27. May Sinclair, The Three Brontës (1912; Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010), 4. 28. Ibid., 5. 29. Ibid., 7. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 8. 32. Deborah Wynne, “The ‘Charlotte’ Cult: Writing the Literary Pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf,” in Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives eds. Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 50, 52. 33. Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2002), 101. 34. See Theophilus E. M. Boll, Miss May Sinclair, Novelist: A Critical and Literary Introduction (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1973), 153. Boll claims that Sinclair was driven there in old age. She tried to play the piano and leaned too heavily on the glass casing. 35. John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (1990; London: Sage, 2011), 2, 4. 36. Craig Young and Duncan Light, “Interrogating Spaces of and for the Dead as ‘Alternative Space’: Cemeteries, Corpses and Sites of Dark Tourism,” International Review of Social Research 6, no. 2 (2016): 62. 37. Virginia Woolf, “Haworth, November 1904,” The Guardian, 21 December 1904. 38. Wynne, “The ‘Charlotte’ Cult,” 54, 55. 39. Woolf, “Haworth.” 40. Ibid. 41. Bernice M. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 4. 42. Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 65.

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43. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jollas (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 150. 44. Ibid., 74. 45. Ibid., 236. 46. Elizabeth Bowen, Preface to Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, Uncle Silas (1947), in The Mulberry Tree: Selected Writings of Elizabeth Bowen (London: Virago, 1986), 113. 47. Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 6, 11. 48. Helene Deutsch, “The Genesis of Agoraphobia,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 69. Freud interpreted the anxieties of the street, the site of agoraphobia, in relation to “the loss of the protective shelter of the house,” but Deutsch questioned what might happen if the protective shelter itself was seen as the cause of anxiety. See Vidler, Warped Space, 67. 49. Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 11. 50. Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2008), 2. 51. Flora Klickmann, The Mistress of the Little House: What She Should Know and What She Should Do When She Has an Untrained Servant (London: Office of the Girl’s Own Paper and Women’s Magazine, 1915), 68, 34. 52. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Influence (1904; Poland: Freeriver Community Project, n.d.), 39. 53. Sinclair, The Three Brontës , 8. 54. Ilse Bussing, “Sequestered Spaces and Defective Doors in Tales by Collins and Riddell,” Ilha do Desterro/Florianopolis 62 (2012): 100. 55. Sinclair, The Three Brontës , 81. 56. W. H. R. Rivers, “A Case of Claustrophobia,” The Lancet, 18 August 1917, 237. 57. Ibid. 58. Sinclair, The Three Brontës , 47. 59. See Claire Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 73; Raitt, Modern Victorian, 132; Luke Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (London: Routledge, 2012), 115– 16. They consider the story in relation to the connections between motherhood, possession and trauma. 60. Thurston, Literary Ghosts, 117, 118. 61. Irigaray, Elemental Passions , 23, 25. 62. Ibid., 25. 63. Scarborough, The Supernatural, 101. 64. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 238. 65. Scarborough, The Supernatural, 112.

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66. Aviva Briefel, “‘Freaks of Furniture’: The Useless Energy of Haunted Things,” Victorian Studies 59, no. 2 (2017): 210, 211. 67. Melanie Klein, “Mourning and its relation to Manic-Depressive States,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 21 (1940): 135. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 137. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 140. 72. Grosz, “Women, Chora, Dwelling,” 120, 121. 73. Hamlett, Material Relations, 128. 74. Raitt, May Sinclair, 133. 75. Leslie de Bont, “‘Effy’s Passion for the Mother Who Had Not Loved Her Was the Supernatural Thing’: Haunting as an Expression of Attachment in May Sinclair’s ‘The Intercessor’,” Journal of the Short Story in English 70 (2019): 68. 76. Ibid., 63. 77. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” (1917) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957), 256. 78. Ibid., 249–50. 79. Scarborough, The Supernatural, 103. 80. Terri Mullholland, “Architecture, Environment and ‘Scenic Effect’ in May Sinclair’s The Divine Fire,” in May Sinclair: Re-thinking Bodies and Minds eds. Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 102. 81. Hamlett, Material Relations, 216. 82. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 24. 83. Rosner, Modernism, 93. 84. Tosh, A Man’s Place, 32. 85. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 128, 130. 86. Lefebvre, Towards an Architecture, 97. 87. Hamlett, Material Relations, 50. 88. Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (1867; Farnborough: Gregg, 1971), 128, 129. 89. Rosner, Modernism, 92. 90. Hamlett, Material Relations, 51. 91. Rosner, Modernism, 93. 92. Deborah Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2015), xxiii. 93. Eastlake, Hints, 137–38.

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94. Rosner, Modernism, 8. 95. Richard Russell Lawrence, The Book of the Edwardian and Inter-War House (London: Aurum Press, 2009), 5. Gardens could be feminine spaces of freedom and creativity, as shown by famous modernist gardeners such as Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West. 96. Hamlett, Material Relations, 187. 97. Rosner, Modernism, 93–94. 98. Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story, 1850–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 88. 99. For more on the dead wife narrative in modernist women’s ghost stories, see Emma Liggins, “Beyond the Haunted House? Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories and the Troubling of Modernity,” in British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now eds. Emma Young and James Bailey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 45–47. 100. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 43–44. 101. Lawrence, Edwardian and Inter-War House, 61, 67, 73, 84. One plan for an Edwardian semi-detached suburban house from 1910 includes a drawing-room, dining room and study on the ground floor. Homewood, Hertfordshire, built in 1901, included the same three rooms. See 85. 102. Grosz, “Women, Chora, Dwelling,” 124. 103. Mrs Eustace Miles (Hallie Killick), The Ideal Home and Its Problems (London: Methuen, 1911), 13, 19. 104. Lawrence, Edwardian and Interwar House, 95. 105. Davies, The Haunted, 48. 106. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 143. 107. Mullholland, “Architecture,” 99. 108. Roger Luckhurst, Corridors: Passages of Modernity (London: Reaktion Press, 2019), 12, 14. 109. See David Seed, “Psychical Cases: Woolf and Sinclair,” in Gothic Modernisms eds. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 58. 110. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 144. 111. Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction, 78, 84. 112. Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 160. 113. See May Sinclair, Uncanny Stories , 2nd edition, illustrated by Jean de Bosschère (London: Hutchinson, 1923), 18. 114. Briefel, “The Useless Energy of Haunted Things,” 217, 218. 115. Diana Wallace, “The Ghost Story as Female Gothic,” Gothic Studies 6, no. 1 (2004): 63. 116. Grosz, “Women, Chora, Dwelling,” 124.

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Bibliography Asquith, Cynthia, ed. The Ghost Book: Sixteen New Stories of the Uncanny. London: Hutchinson, 1926. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas. 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014. Barker, Lady. The Bedroom and Boudoir. London: Macmillan, 1878. Bleiler, Richard. “May Sinclair’s Supernatural Fiction.” In May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern edited by Andrew Kunka and Michele K. Troy, 123–38. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair, Novelist: A Critical and Literary Introduction. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1973. Briefel, Aviva. “‘Freaks of Furniture’: The Useless Energy of Haunted Things.” Victorian Studies 59, no. 2 (2017): 209–34. Bussing, Ilse M. “Sequestered Spaces and Defective Doors in Tales by Collins and Riddell.” Ilha do Desterro/Florianopolis 62 (2012): 99–125. Davies, Owen. The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. De Bont, Leslie. “‘Effy’s Passion for the Mother Who Had Not Loved Her Was the Supernatural Thing’: Haunting as an Expression of Attachment in May Sinclair’s ‘The Intercessor.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 70 (2019): 57–72. Deutsch, Helene. “The Genesis of Agoraphobia.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 51–69. Dickerson, Vanessa D. Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Downey, Dara. American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014. Drewery, Claire. Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” (1917) In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey, 243–58. London: The Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” (1919) In The Uncanny trans. David McClintock, 121–62. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Georgieva, Marganita. The Gothic Child. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Home: Its Work and Influence. 1903; Poland: Freeriver Community Project, n.d. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Women, Chora, Dwelling.” In Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

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Hamlett, Jane. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Irigaray, Luce. Elemental Passions trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still. London: Athlone Press, 1992. Klein, Melanie. “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 21 (1940): 125–53. Klickmann, Flora. The Mistress in the Little House. London: Offices of the Girl’s Own Paper, 1915. Lawrence, Richard Russell. The Book of the Edwardian and Inter-War House. London: Aurum Press, 2009. Lee, Hermione, ed. The Mulberry Tree: Selected Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. London: Virago, 1986. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lefebvre, Henri. Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment trans. Robert Bonanno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Liggins, Emma. “Beyond the Haunted House? Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories and the Troubling of Modernity.” In British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now edited by Emma Young and James Bailey, 32–49. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Liggins, Emma. “Visualizing the Unseen: Supernatural Stories and Illustration in The Strand.” Victorian Periodicals Review 52, no. 2 (2019): 365–87. Luckhurst, Roger. Corridors: Passages of Modernity. London: Reaktion Press, 2019. Lutz, Deborah. The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2015. Miles, Mrs Eustace (Hallie Killick). The Ideal Home and Its Problems. London: Methuen, 1911. Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. London: Vintage, 2001. Mullholland, Terri. “Architecture, Environment and ‘Scenic Effect’ in May Sinclair’s The Divine Fire.” In May Sinclair: Re-thinking Bodies and Minds edited by Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery, 98–115. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Murphy, Bernice M. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rivers, W. H. R. “A Case of Claustrophobia.” The Lancet, 18 August 1917, 237. Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993.

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Rosner, Victoria. Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007. Scarborough, Dorothy. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York and London: Knickerbocker Press, 1917. Seed, David. “‘Psychical Cases’: Transformations of the Supernatural in Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair.” In Gothic Modernisms edited by Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, 44–61. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Sinclair, May. “Dreams, Ghosts and Fairies.” Bookman 65 (1923): 142–49. Sinclair, May. “Introduction.” In From Four Who Are Dead: Messages to C.A. Dawson Scott. London: Arrowsmith, 1926. Sinclair, May. Uncanny Stories ed. Paul March-Russell. 1922; Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006. Sinclair, May. Uncanny Stories, 2nd edition, illustrated by Jean de Bosschère. London: Hutchinson, 1923. Smith, Andrew. The Ghost Story, 1850–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Sugg Ryan, Deborah. Ideal Homes: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism, 1918–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Thacker, Andrew. Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Thurston, Luke. Literary Ghosts, from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval. London: Routledge, 2014. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. Urry, John and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. 1990; London: Sage, 2011. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Wallace, Diana. “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic.” Gothic Studies 6, no. 1 (2004): 57–68. Watson, Nicola. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. “Haworth, November 1904.” The Guardian, 21 December 1904. Wynne, Deborah. “The ‘Charlotte’ Cult: Writing the Literary Pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf.” In Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives edited by Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne, 43–58. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.

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Young, Craig and Duncan Light. “Interrogating Spaces of and for the Dead as ‘Alternative Space’”: Cemeteries, Corpses and Sites of Dark Tourism.” International Review of Social Research 6, no. 2 (2016): 61–72. Young, Emma and James Bailey eds. British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

CHAPTER 7

Ideal Homes? Emptiness, Dereliction and the Ruins of Domesticity in the Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

In her 1929 lecture, “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf addressed her female audience: “You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men … but this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared.”1 Furnishing, decorating and sharing rooms are key concerns of Elizabeth Bowen’s ghost stories, with their emphasis on oppressive furniture, gendered territories and disagreements over the modernisation of the home. Her stories of the 1920s and 1940s locate the uncanny in the drive towards modernisation. Neil Corcoran has characterised Elizabeth Bowen as “a deeply haunted writer … one profoundly death-inflected,” whose writing “manifests the entrapment of obsessive return, the inability to shake off a distressing, or distressed, past in a way which virtually demands to be read under the rubric of a Freudian return of the repressed.”2 Her haunted houses and the distressing pasts they enclose have been read primarily in relation to her Anglo-Irish heritage and the trauma of war.3 An alternative examination of the occupation of specific haunted spaces and rooms in her writing, in the light of transformations in the domestic economy, advances understandings of haunted spatiality in late modernism. The wartime home is explicitly contrasted in Bowen’s non-fictional writing with the Irish “Big House,” the country house in a divided Ireland often encased in nostalgic reverence. Bowen’s Court (1942), the compelling house biography of the soon-to-be-demolished Irish house © The Author(s) 2020 E. Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_7

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Bowen inherited, can be read in tandem with some of her lesser-known essays on big houses, architecture and servants to illuminate architectural representations and returns in her ghost stories. Bowen claimed to be inspired by the emotional resonances of space and architecture, including “the emptiness of an empty house,”4 a spatial and philosophical emptiness which also haunts the decline of the big Irish mansion. In Bowen’s Court , the symbolic country house, “the focus of generations of intense living” is a “magnetic idea” (403) challenged in the early twentieth century.5 A re-examination of both the magnetism and collapse of architecture yields new understandings of women’s perceptions of the domestic interior and what can be salvaged from the ruins of the family home. The second section of this chapter considers haunting and homemaking in “The New House” and “The Shadowy Third” included in Elizabeth Bowen’s first short story collection, Encounters (1923). Elizabeth Grosz has posed the question, “Can architecture inhabit us as much as we see ourselves inhabiting it?”6 Drawing on discussions about space, dwelling and “the privilege of interiority” by philosophers including Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre and Elizabeth Grosz,7 I reexamine Bowen’s spectralisation of new yet unearthly suburban housing, particularly feminised intimate spaces. Her developments of the haunted house narrative can be read in relation to anxieties about the ideal home in the interwar period, in order to link the uncanny to the “house-proud” woman’s new fears about architectural transformation. The haunted nursery, with its threatening emptiness, becomes a particular focus for the uncertain maternity of the modern housewife. Unhomely and overcrowded drawing-rooms draw attention to transformations in the feminine ideal, prompting a reconsideration of the modernity of the domestic. War Gothic, with its emphasis on the strangeness of representation in wartime, is a useful framework for re-examining women’s ghost stories of the 1940s. The bombed-out, ruined houses of the London Blitz offer a chilling rendition of the architectural uncanny, threatening in their potential to destroy memories and conceptualisations of home. The uncanniness of the ruin, as Dylan Trigg has contended, stems from its location in “the in between,” its affinities with dereliction, decline and disuse: “unconcealed in the ruin is the absence of a fixed and rational home.”8 Shuttling between rural Ireland and an increasingly transformed but also war-damaged England, Bowen’s acute observations of places and interiors were often structured around emptiness, dereliction and the loss

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of inhabitability. Stories such as “In the Square” and “The Happy Autumn Fields” from the collection The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945) can be reinterpreted in relation to the uncanniness, the in-betweenness of the ruin and the loss of domestic objects of value. The traumatised servant narrator of the lesser-known story “Oh, Madam …,” mourning the collapse of servant-mistress intimacy, registers the hauntedness of the servantless house figured by the bomb-damaged London home.

Demolishing the Big House: Bowen ’s Court and Lost Architecture In Vernon Lee’s “In Praise of Old Houses” (1896), Lee conjured up a fairy-tale vision of the old house, endlessly charming in its unreality, as opposed to the emptiness of a technologically advanced future, “filled only with the cast shadows of ourselves and our various machineries.”9 As an Anglo-Irish daughter, whose childhood and summers were spent at Bowen’s Court, an eighteenth-century Italianate house in County Cork, Bowen shared in Lee’s reverence for the old. But as a writer of the next generation of modernists, heir to the disillusionment of two world wars, Bowen was paradoxically more invested in modernity and modernisation and more anxious to retreat from what they signified. The loss of history equated with the modern is at odds with the lure of the past. In the autobiographical Pictures and Conversations Bowen’s self-confessed “infatuation” with the new English villas, “unhistorical gimcrack little bubbles of illusion” is set up as difficult to reconcile with her “history-fed passion for the mighty, immortal and grandiose.”10 What she calls the “concurren[ce]” of these two passions is evident in her approach to the grandiosity of the Irish Big House,11 which recognises the hauntedness of a style of architecture rooted in the past. Reflections on the country house written during the war often implicitly contrasted the beauty and sociability of historic rural buildings with the ruined shells of London town houses, their interiors uncannily visible after walls and roofs collapsed during the Blitz. Bowen’s important essay, “The Big House” (1940), a precursor to Bowen’s Court (1942), reflects on the declining tradition of Irish country houses. The isolation of the big house, despite the encroaching modernity of wirelesses, telephones and motor-cars, is something to be less feared than cherished. Its mysteriousness to visitors and compelling silence make it like a building in a fairy tale: “each house seems to live under its own spell” and has

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a “faded, dark-windowed and somehow hypnotic stare” (25, 26). The Irish Big House was “planned for spacious living – for hospitality” (26), with the adjective “spacious” repeated later in the essay to connote the “wide, private spaces” (26) necessary for entertainment and the maintenance of class ascendancy. Bowen imagines telling responses to the house’s distancing from the metropolitan centre and its amenities: “What do you do all day? … Do servants stay with you? Isn’t it very ghostly? How do you do your shopping?” (28). Whilst Bowen’s closing plea for more politeness and grace in returning to the always-open big house door grates on the modern reader as much as her class assumptions, the limits of her nostalgia are revealing about the spell of the big house and the connections between spaciousness and Irish hospitality. The “bigseeming” rooms, now transformed to “big, half-empty rooms” wishing to “scrap the past” (29), seem to mourn the loss of sociability in an age of greater austerity. In the “changed world” of the 1940s, the inheritors of the big house must reinvent traditions in order to survive, so that “the good in the new can add to, not destroy, the good in the old” (30). Yet, the continuing existence of ghosts and servants, both dismissed as outdated relics of a traditional way of life, poses a problem for modernity. Sold in 1959 and demolished in 1961, Bowen’s Court met the typical fate of the country house in the mid-twentieth century, its demise casting a shadow over its owner’s wistful account of a vanishing way of life. As Peter Mandler points out, country house demolition in Britain peaked in the 1950s; houses not demolished were often substantially altered, converted into institutional buildings, bequeathed to the National Trust or sometimes left empty.12 The process of adapting country houses to modern life might involve redecoration and restoration, but could also entail discarding entire wings, or letting out historic rooms to the public, as tourism revived after the war.13 The nostalgic impulses of the war years involved a mourning for lost architecture. Bowen’s Court records the shadow forming around the house in 1941, as the broadcasts from the wireless in the library shattered the deceptive calm: “wave upon wave of war news broke upon the quiet air of the room” (457). The quiet air of the library was itself under threat; as a bastion of male privilege and power, this room was gradually being phased out of the modern house. As Anthony Vidler has argued in The Architectural Uncanny, modernism’s consigning of the “cluttered interiors and insalubrious living conditions of centuries to oblivion” could be read as an attempt to rid houses of memory-crammed cellars, attics and bric-à-brac, yet what was lost continued to manifest

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itself in the cultural imaginary. “Inevitably,” continues Vidler, “this housecleaning operation produced its own ghosts, the nostalgic shadows of all the ‘houses’ now condemned to history or the demolition site.”14 The clutter and traditions of the “never-experienced space” of the country house, “the weight of tradition,” seemed more valuable in the face of uninhabitable or (partially) demolished homes.15 The enticing comforts of nostalgia are also evident in Vita Sackville-West’s short illustrated book, The English Country House (1941), which boasts of the country house’s “knack of fitting in” and “the value of beauty in an increasingly ugly world.”16 As a woman Sackville-West was unable to inherit Knole, the stately home in which she grew up, but with her husband she renovated and lived in Sissinghurst Castle, becoming famous for her design of the garden. She speculates about the everyday life of the inhabitants of the grand houses, built “to suit their desire for a home,”17 but, she implies, ultimately unhomely. Echoing Bowen’s sentiments about ruins, the book balances its admiration for enormous but “incongruous” palaces with the uninhabited houses also visible in the English landscape. The once grand but now derelict Seaton Delaval, designed by the architect John Vanbrugh, is “a sad place,” with abandoned rooms marked by “leprous plaster” and broken statues, “where nothing echoes but one’s own footsteps.”18 In her conclusion, Sackville-West laments the “unpromising” future and the effects of war taxation and rising death duties impacting on inheritance, the “expense” and “the beloved burden of unreasonably spacious halls.”19 Spaciousness is here cause for concern rather than desirable. The sense of the house as “beloved burden” also encompasses the worry that converting English houses into institutional buildings would detract from “national heritage,” whereas to transform them into museums might make the house “a dead thing.”20 The deathly qualities of the museum, full of old or obsolete objects which inspire awe and reverence, are encapsulated in the spacious yet abandoned country house by the 1940s. The opening chapter of Bowen’s Court offers a virtual tour of the building, inviting the tourist reader to admire the south façade, to notice the rooms which catch the sun, and dating the 1860s mantelpieces, before stepping across the threshold through the always-open front door. Drawing on the language of the guidebook with its direct address to the tourist—“As you enter the hall from the front steps” (24), “as you come up into [the Long Room] from the last bare flight of the back stairs” (25)—this “room-by-room description” (459) links the house to

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previous generations, mentioning a wing of offices and front porch both built by Bowen’s grandfather. Significantly, this self-conscious use of the present tense is an attempt to preserve a lost past with its topographical certainties. The “Afterword” written in 1963, after the house had been demolished, reveals that Bowen had chosen not to revise this early chapter written in 1939, at a time when “there were as yet few ruins in England other than those preserved in fences and lawns” (453). Recognising that the challenges of the home front transformed the relationship between past and present because of the threat of ruination, she admits, “I was writing (as though it were everlasting) about a home during a time when all homes were threatened and hundreds of thousands of them were being wiped out” (454). Her decision to preserve the use of the present tense leaves the demolished family home out of sight until the final afterword, even as it haunts the narrative and discolours notions of modern inheritance. Her relief that her family home “never lived to be a ruin” (459), one of many examples of her anthropomorphic rendering of property and furniture, shows the attempt to preserve the unruined past and resist emptiness and loss, so that the last sentence of the memoir paradoxically leaves Bowen’s Court, “very much alive” (459). The gendering of space is particularly apparent in reflections on the Victorian drawing-room and dining-room designed by Bowen’s grandfather Robert. Initially presented as one of the abandoned rooms, “now quite empty, but for a grand piano,” the drawing-room boasts Victorian mirrors and decorative wallpaper “put up when my grandmother was a bride” (26). Bowen writes that her grandfather “despised space (as a form of vacuity),” seeing the function of furniture as displaying wealth and “fill[ing] up rooms” (320). The cluttered interior of massive tables, china, objects and mirrors created in this bridal space of 1860 is “such a drawingroom as only the starved voluptuary could conceive … like one of the drawing-rooms in a Brontë novel” (321), Gothic and claustrophobic. Regretting not spending more time in this room, Bowen notes that its door often “swings open in a commanding way” (27), as if to beckon in the visitor wanting to look back in time. To reinforce this uncanniness, the dining-room boasts “tomb-like” (345) furniture. The exact spot in the anteroom behind the library where the grandmother died can be identified by relatives years later. The sunny Hall with its red wallpaper is preferred for dining to the crowded dining-room with its massive dark furniture, another menacing Victorian space with its grandfather clock, family portraits and custom-made Sheraton fittings. The smooth running

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of the Victorian household is dependent on the women, specifically linked to the “ideal harmony” created by the cherished housekeeper, Sarah Barry, and the “well-mannered” grandmother, “always at the disposal of visitors” at a time when “the guest-rooms were seldom empty” (344). Repeated references to the grandparents and Victorian architecture and decoration suggest that the ghosts in the house are very much present, in tune with the unsettling exterior. Gothic references accumulate around the birds on the estate: there is a “surrounding, disturbing light” (31), the sheeny corpses of crows lie on the wood paths and “After dark, herons utter cries like lost souls” (30). In the grounds a tennis and croquet lawn has disappeared, and the lengthy walk to the walled garden “has provided, for generations, something to do. To go to the garden, talk to the gardener, cruise round the paths slowly, select flowers, pick them, carry them back, arrange them in many vases fills a Bowen Court lady’s morning or afternoon” (29). Although Elizabeth as only daughter and inheritor of the house might have had more power than most, women’s lives are shown to be circumscribed by ennui, hemmed in by visitors and dark, threatening furniture. Emptiness, one of Bowen’s watchwords, is annexed to seclusion, loss and ruin in Bowen’s Court . Lamenting the loss of place, argues Dylan Trigg, is similar to mourning the death of a person: “We continue to exist where the place was, while the place continues to exist where we are … in the remains of place, we discover a halfway house, situated between place and non-place.”21 This emergence of a past time in a present time “reinforces the notion of the ruin as haunted. Central to this haunted spatiality is the delayed recognition of the ruin’s past.”22 Ireland itself, with its disintegrating castles, churches, barracks and farms, is “a country of ruins” which give stretches of the landscape “a pre-inhabited air”: Ivy grapples them; trees grow inside their doors; enduring ruins, where they emerge from ivy, are the limestone white-grey and look like rocks … Only major or recent ruins keep their human stories; from others the story quickly evaporates. Some ruins show gashes of violence, others simply the dull slant of decline. (15)

Abandonment is a key aspect of Irish ruins, which look different to modern, disillusioned eyes. The insertion of the “melancholy impressions” of Arthur Young, an eighteenth-century traveller, of the decaying Muckross Abbey functions to direct the reader towards a different way

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of viewing: “now, we no longer seek the ‘picturesque circumstance’ – in a crepuscular world our nerves have enough to bear” (16). The wartime twilight world renders the picturesque obsolete, requiring a different form of appreciation of decay and decline. Emptiness, more prominent in the 1963 Afterword, also invites ancestral ghosts half-visible on the darkened staircases, hall portraits and even “mirrors framing perspectives of empty room” in the “deserted drawing-room, which in my grandmother’s day used to be the focus of Christmas” (451). Victoria Glendinning has argued that Bowen was writing about a vanishing way of life at a time when “all homes and all lives were threatened,” whilst trying to preserve the house as “the very image of continuity.”23 Such an act of preservation was fractured by this threatening emptiness. This notion of “empty room,” of “the empty parts of the house, piled up in the winter darkness” (451), makes what is missing palpable and invites communication with the dead: With the end of each generation, the lives that submerged here were absorbed again. With each death, the air of the place had thickened: it had been added to. The dead do not need to visit Bowen’s Court rooms – as I said, we had no ghosts in that house – because they already permeated them. Their extinct senses were present in lights and forms. (451)

The permeation of the house by the dead makes Bowen’s denial of ghosts here rather contradictory. Rather than visiting the rooms, previous generations are “absorbed” into the space, kept alive in memory and in the furniture they left behind, meaning that extinction is challenged. In “The Big House” the “spell” of the building cannot be detached from “the indefinite ghosts of the past, of the dead who lived here and pursued this same routine of life in these walls” (28) who added “order” and “tradition” to country living. If, as Trigg suggests, “the coming-to-light of a spectral past/present is possible in the ruin,”24 then the haunted spatiality of the lost house with its lost generations makes it into a halfway house, indefinite but certainly not extinct. The tensions between old and new, the “evaporating stories” of the past, are explored at greater length in Bowen’s ghost stories, which suggest the difficulties of reinventing tradition and the chilling emptiness of big house routines and rituals.

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In the Shadows of the New House: Bowen’s Stories of the 1920s The inhabitability of the new house and the fear of the new haunt an emerging generation of first-time buyers in early twentieth-century ghost stories. In his reflection on dwelling and the housing shortage in the “precarious age” of late modernism, Martin Heidegger suggests, “the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses … the real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling.”25 The “homelessness” of the twentieth century, akin to Freudian notions of the uncanny/unhomely, partly stems from this continuous searching for a home, threatened by the instabilities of inhabitation. If architecture, as Grosz imagines, might be thought of as “a set of and site for becomings of all kinds,” a kind of “assemblage,” the new house is a site for becoming modern, an enterprise fraught with difficulty. Tracking the differences between Gothic and modern ghosts in The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917), Dorothy Scarborough observes that: ghosts in modern fiction are not dependent upon a setting of sullen scenery as in Gothicism, but may choose any surroundings they like. Since modern household arrangements do not include family vaults … and since cemeteries are inconveniently located, there is a tendency on the part of haunters to desert such quarters.26

Yet compact modern households, more sparkly than sullen, did still include “family vaults” in the form of undisclosed secrets and haunting memories. What is invisible or missing in new architecture suggests the past which has come to dwell there, the sense of decay and loss behind the shiny façade. The strangely unhistorical nature of the new house, often contrasted with the grandiosity of the ancestral mansion, underpins the ways in which Bowen’s ghost stories of the 1920s mediate questions of territory, memory and alienation. In “The Bend Back” (1950), Bowen writes of the “disturbing appeal” of the “‘near’ past,” “just over the frontier of living memory.”27 The modernist writer has to negotiate the temptations of nostalgia in an age of mechanical reproduction, “the aching, bald uniformity of our urban surroundings.”28 The haunted house is included alongside the attic and the “grandmother’s treasure box” in the list of

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what we might wish to revisit in the “semi-mystical topography of childhood,” as a cherished repository of a golden age. As in Scarborough’s account, the modern haunted house is exposed as something of a contradiction in terms because of its supposed detachment from the past. The “uneasiness” of the “soulless” present is partly attributed to the isolation and insecurity of modern housing which does not invite ghosts: No associations, no memories have had time to gather around the new soaring blocks of flats, the mushroom housing-estates … Nothing rustles, nothing casts a feathery shadow: there is something frightening about the very unhauntedness of “functional” rooms.29

The supposed “unhauntedness” of modernity, as Edith Wharton’s writings also indicate, is something of a myth. Matt Foley has noted that “modernism can be said to be fascinated by the departed and deadness from almost its inception,” that “the proliferation of the ghostly in interwar modernism is unsurprising given the challenges of mourning presented by the many devastations of World War one.”30 Deadness and the ghostly take different forms in modern housing, no longer the feathery shadows of the ancestral mansion, but a frightening loss of ancestry, a mourning of the conceptualisation of the family home. The new is rapidly invaded by memories and unseen presences. Shadows are still cast in modern houses, in which displaced memories are accessed through diaries, shut-up rooms and the exposed shells of bombed or derelict buildings. In an often forgotten early article on “Modern Lighting” (1927), Bowen noted the evocative qualities of artificial light and the effects it could create in the domestic interior: But past twilight, we can create circumstance. In the smaller visible world we enlarge personally. Living is less that affair of function we were forced to suspect, more an affair of aesthetics. Coming in, going out, sitting still, looking—all our little tentative touches upon the actual gain in deliberation. We can arrange our lighting. We work like sculptors upon these blocks of pregnant darkness rooms have become. We can control shadow, place, check, and tone light. The response from a light-switch, the bringing in of a candle is acute, personal as a perception.31

The chiaroscuro controlling of shadows and space through lighting is a recurrent motif of Bowen’s ghost stories, punctuated by the “coming in, going out, sitting still, looking” of her alienated characters. “Past

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twilight,” the estranging effects of the domestic are evident in the transformation of rooms into “blocks of pregnant darkness” where the invisible has as much presence as the visible. The uncanniness of new suburban houses suggests alternative iterations of haunted space at a time when women were encouraged to occupy “homes fit for heroes,” homes fit for traditional gender roles. Contemporary notions of the “ideal home,” a catchphrase current in the early twentieth century, are a significant context for conceptualisations of the domestic in modernist women’s ghost stories. According to Deborah Sugg Ryan, “in media discourses on homemaking in the interwar years, there was much emphasis on modernising the home.”32 The growth in new housing estates after the war, and changes in domestic organisation following the widespread use of vacuum cleaners, washing machines, gas fires, Aga cookers and other labour-saving devices, transformed experiences of the British home. The Ideal Homes exhibition in London in 1923, showcasing new trends in interior decoration, architectural design and domestic machines, attracted 300,000 visitors.33 The first issue of new magazine Good Housekeeping in 1922 privileged the “house-proud woman in these days of servant shortage,” whose taste for interior decoration and desire for vacuums, cookers and gas appliances is evident in the adverts and editorials. The good housekeeper is “the keystone of the arch” and “the pillar of the house.”34 The magazine pondered the servant shortage in relation to changes in architecture: if servants no longer lived in, “valuable space” could be freed up for other uses.35 One 1928 article on suburban housing by an architect complained about the mismatch between “the badly planned house full of dirt-traps, badly lighted and overloaded with commonplace detail” and the desire for the “modern” or “well-designed” house with all its mod cons.36 However, the editor also recognised women’s right to work and the potential problem with no name of over-investment in the domestic: a male doctor advocated women’s clubs for both professional and middleaged women because “constant preoccupation with one narrow round of home duties and interests not only dulls and atrophies the mental faculties, but also affects the nerves.”37 The nervous woman struggling with the complexities of the new post-war world and the transformation of the ideal home into a haunted space became key elements of the 1920s ghost story.

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The contradictions of the suburban semi-detached house, both haven and Gothic in-between space, are apparent in the tensions it accommodated. Alternative iterations of the architectural uncanny are called up by newness and the pursuit of the “ideal home.” The growth of suburban housing in this period encouraged reflection on a new kind of dwelling and on women’s responsibilities for maintaining domestic ideals. Writing on suburban anxieties, Lara Baker Whelan notes “the unsettling physical space of suburban neighbourhoods” and their borderline status, an instability which admits the ghostly, signifying the compromise of the home as safe haven.38 It “displayed a series of polarities, yet negotiated a space between them,” argues Sugg Ryan, mediating oppositions between “modernity and nostalgia; urban and rural; past and future; masculine and feminine; culture and nature; public and private.”39 In The Ideal Home and Its Problems (1911), Mrs. Eustace Miles celebrated home as an expression of femininity but exposed the dangers within, the “discords” which could foster “deceit and treachery.” The expectations on women to cultivate domestic harmony, manage servants and embrace the new could lead to nervousness and “anxieties”: “It is the monotony of home life that has done so much harm to the ideals of home life.”40 The unhomeliness of modernity surfaces when the ideal home produces a soulless alienation rather than the promised security, satisfaction and what the Ideal Home Exhibition posters termed “sparkle.” The servantless house, identified as a “problem” of modern times in 1920, was both ideal and troubling, a direct source for the uncanny.41 In The Servantless House, R. Randal Phillips recommended having “sensible rooms that look as though we really used them and enjoyed living in them,” rather than “the cheerless domestic mausoleums” of pre-war housing.42 Yet the notion of house as mausoleum persisted. Although it was suggested that domestic comfort could be improved, that “home is far more really ‘home’” without servants, conceptualisations of “home” were also challenged by badly designed modern villas, with “very confined space[s]” and poor light.43 Several sources hinted that small rooms in the ideal house might not offer enough “breathing space.”44 Countering notions of a smooth transition to this new ideal, Lucy Delap maintains, “many British homes continued to be organised around the haunting absence of servants well into the second half of the twentieth century.”45 “New methods of housework using labour-saving appliances emerged alongside new spatial configurations for the kitchen and the scullery,” according to Sugg Ryan,46 but other spaces were also being

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reconfigured at this time. The modern labour-saving home became a source of anxiety for new housewives uncertain about their class positions and their new roles. “As smaller ‘servantless’ houses were built for an aspiring lower middle class,” argues Judy Giles, “new forms of relationship, played out in different spaces, emerged. Such spaces were no longer simply the large households of a previous era with the spatial markers and rituals that mitigated the intrusive aspects of living with what were virtual strangers.”47 Space-saving devices and the replacement or reinvention of traditional furniture impacted on the identities of housewives, whose routes around the house and acquisition of spaces of their own were altered by new trends in decoration and design. Modernist ghost stories by women seem fixated on furniture, colour schemes and spaciousness, in response to a growing preoccupation with home decoration and the threat of claustrophobia in the “little house.” In Bowen’s first short story collection Encounters (1923), attractive modern homes display gadgetry, bric-à-brac and stylish furniture, but are also often mouldy, damp and visually unsettling.48 The “other life” offered by the haunted house “with its mnemic archive,” according to Luke Thurston, can compensate for the alienation, restless dissatisfaction and triviality endured by the modernist protagonist.49 The alienation experienced by modern women however renders the experience of haunting traumatic rather than consolatory, exposing their investment in home as flimsy and insubstantial. In Bowen’s stories houses “seem to offer refuge from nothingness,” argues Maud Ellmann, but “often turn out to be mausoleums.”50 “The New House” typically opens with the approach to a lit-up building at dusk, describing the “naked” uncurtained windows which expose the firelight: “there was something unearthly in those squares of pulsing light that fretted the shadowy façade, and lent to the whole an air of pasteboard unreality” (53).51 Haunted by the unearthliness of space to move around in, middle-aged parvenues Herbert and his sister Cicely have triumphantly moved into an old, country house, where “every echo from the tiles and naked boards derided and denied the memory of that small brick villa … where their mother’s wedded life had begun and ended; that villa now empty and denuded, whose furniture looked so meagre in this spaciousness and height” (55). The dead mother operates as a spectral presence in the new house, as both siblings refer to “poor mother” in their conversations about furniture, shattering “what should have been a little silence sacred to the memory of the dead” (55). The eerie feeling that his sister is “deferring to the opinion of some

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unseen presence below them in the darkness” (56) disturbs Herbert. The association of the dead with their furniture, and the transportation of household objects into alien spaces where they appear incongruous, is an echo from Bowen’s life-writing, where chairs, clocks and ornaments are often described in terms of their dead owners. The drawing-room of the new house is both the most spacious and the most contested room, a site of conflict about who is in possession and how its organisation will transform the gendered dynamics of the phantom maternal villa. “The suburban Modernism of the interwar home,” argues Sugg Ryan, “included traditional and modern styles without contradiction,”52 yet the mixture of traditional and modern furniture in this unearthly space does appear contradictory and unsettling. Cicely’s appropriation of her mother’s furniture, a work-table, bookshelf and escritoire, signifying both duty and the freedom of reading, is resisted by her brother. Her announcement of her impending marriage, which prompts Herbert’s fears of being left “alone with this great house on my hands, this great barn of a house” (57), shatters his fantasies about a grand piano in the drawing-room. For women, drawing-room furniture signifies the oppression of the past and the stultifying life of the homebound daughter (the re-naming of the drawing-room as sitting-room here only reinforcing the curtailed movement it enforces). Cecily confesses, all my life I seem to have been tied up, fastened on to things and people. Why, even the way the furniture was arranged at No. 17 held me so that I couldn’t get away. The way the chairs went in the sitting-room. And mother. Then, when I stayed behind to see the vans off; when I saw them taking down the overmantels, and your books went out, and the round table and the sofa, I felt quite suddenly “I’m free.” … I said, “If [Richard] only asks me again I can get away before this new house fastens on to me”. (57)

The dismantling of this symbolic room, where women are “fastened on to” and hemmed in by things, may suggest freedom but the brother’s books stacked up against the wall in the new house, their mustiness contrasting with the clean smell of the scrubbed boards, indicates the lack of a library, the tensions between tradition and modernity. Looking nostalgically over the threshold into a cherished past betrayed an uneasiness that urbanisation, technological advances and new houses had not diminished women’s feelings of alienation and marginality. However, as

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Matt Foley has argued in his discussion of haunting modernisms, “a deep investment in nostalgia prohibits or restricts the subject’s desire in the present. Bowen’s narrators seem always to beckon the reader towards secrets unspoken that threaten nostalgic investment.”53 The movement from a new house to an old, candlelit one (the gas not yet turned on) is “disordered” and disorientating. If modern lighting is very much to do with “staging lives,”54 the flickering candle flames give Herbert “the creeps, this groping through an echoing, deserted house with a ghost-ridden, lackadaisical woman,” with a “suspicion that the house was sneering at him” (56). The troubling emptiness of the present is here attributed to the ghostly female who guards the unspoken secrets of the family. The ending leaves it ambiguous whose fantasy of a new house is more damaging. In Bowen’s Court , ancestral figures, often subject to “fantasy and infatuation” are understood in terms of “conflicting wishes for domination” within the “family sphere” (455). This vying for domestic authority seems pertinent to the unrealised fantasies of brother and sister in “The New House.” Although not a servantless space, the dwelling fits into the radically altered notion of “new houses embodying the servantless idea,” which, it was implied in 1918, were not always “homelike” enough for women.55 Perhaps the sneering is to do with the barren brother–sister pairing in the absence of a wife, or the hollow delusions that they will have “a happy little home together all these years” (57). For Bowen’s childless couples and spinsters, the happy home is often haunted by lost children. The drawing-room is characterised as lacking because “it needs children; it’s a room for children” (56). This prompts Herbert’s final fantasy of a newly decorated family space, “suffused with rosy light,” complete with piano, a pretty wife, a soft carpet and a smartly dressed little girl and boy. Although his sister becomes momentarily “superior, radiant and aloof” (58) in her orders that he marry, her superiority will be short-lived, as the following clause qualifies: “his no longer, another man’s possession” (58). The ambiguous final line, “They could do very well without Cicely’s escritoire” may be a denial of the dead mother’s inheritance, or perhaps another failed attempt by men to accommodate themselves to a disorientating newness. Both readings imply that the new house is more a place of hollow emptiness than happy home, ghost-ridden by the inappropriately nostalgic desire for domestic harmony. In “The Shadowy Third” (1923), the ghost lurking in the darker shadows of suburbia similarly forbids fantasies of the ideal home. Rather

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than signifying the “undomesticated woman in suburban space” identified as a key Gothic figure by Baker Whelan,56 the ghost who doubles with the new wife is a frightening figure of the hyper-domesticated woman over-invested in her home. The new suburban house is haunted by the unnamed dead wife, referred to as Anybody or Her, whose unexplained death and spectral presence unnerve her successor. The husband’s scoffing at his wife’s preference for the garden, “One would think that you were afraid of the house!” (77), indicates the uncanniness of the interior. The four-year-old house on the new estate occupied by Martin and Pussy “still smelt a little of plaster, and was coldly distempered” (75), where distemper refers to both decorative paint and a brooding malevolence. Ominously, the narrator remarks, “they said it was not yet safe to paper the walls” (75), as if decoration is a potentially dangerous enterprise. As a new wife Pussy is keen to make the house her own, to choose chintzes, install a fitment cupboard in the corner of the landing and buy a new sundial at the Gardening Exhibition in London. Sugg Ryan has drawn attention to new designs of furniture for “modern” living, for example to contain telephones, or space-saving, multifunctional “metamorphic” furniture, such as a grandfather clock with a cocktail bar inside it, a device which was both “olde-worlde” and modern.57 The replacement of the grandfather clock, symbol of Victorian patriarchal control, by more modern designs similarly straddles old and new, the old continuing to assert itself in the “silence half-way across the hall” (78) in Pussy’s new house. The husband is unnerved both by the changing decorations and the attempts to assert control: “she had filled the house with draperies, and Pussy had taken them down” (78). Yet the old decorations still seem to predominate, “The house as it had been was always in his mind, more present than the house as it was ” (78); the missing grandfather clock and replaced portière are ghostly signs of the old house. As David Punter has persuasively argued in relation to the modernist haunted house, “there will never be a moment when the ‘robust frame’ of the new house, the house of the new, will be free from the impress of the ghosts of the past.”58 Both wives have to satisfy the husband’s expectations that they “keep house for him decently” (81); the first wife is criticised for failing in this role after the death of her child. As Céline Magot contends, the house “actively and wilfully cooperates in the haunting as it becomes endowed with a life of its own: a haunting house.”59 To be haunting rather than haunted suggests that new perceptions of ghostliness are in operation which extend into the future; it is “suffused by memories of what once

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was, and what could, but never will, be.”60 Anybody’s ghost does not adequately account for the disturbances of the domestic. The struggle to “keep house decently” is a potent source of fear; although a maid is mentioned once ushering the couple into the dining-room, upholding the servantless house is an unspoken cause of the wives’ distress. The differences between male and female perceptions of the domestic space are indicative of the impossibility of reconciling attitudes to architecture. The wife’s desire to both modernise and reorder the space clashes with the husband’s memories of the newly built house as damp and mouldy. Pussy’s remark, “All sorts of women’s discoveries that I’ve made about the house were nothing new to you at all” (76), suggests that women perceive space differently but also highlights her status as visitor in her own home. Her attempts to create an ideal home ominously prefigure a potential breakdown: she is unnerved by the quietness of being alone, reluctant to step inside from the garden. Pondering the question of habitation just after the Second World War, Martin Heidegger pinpointed the potential unhomeliness of modern housing, “today’s houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light and sun, but – do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?”61 Even attractive modern homes do not guarantee the satisfaction that comes from shelter, from the sense of being “at home” in a constructed space. Her unease in the drawing-room makes it less a place of dwelling than an impersonal location. If the haunting is “not to be attributed to an invading force from beyond, but to a tendency towards idealisation,” as Foley suggests,62 then it is women’s struggle to make new houses into dwelling-places that calls up the ghosts. The overcrowded drawing-room, a place traditionally dominated by women, is once again a key scene of haunting, an uneasy space. The couple’s initial conversation about the space as crowded with “a great many curtains and things” but “always a pretty room, even with nothing in it at all” (77) prefigures its uses as a shared space, where the wife sits with her work basket and the husband reads. However, the sofa, like the chairs taken by the dead in May Sinclair’s haunted libraries, still seems occupied by “Anybody” straining to see her sewing, even though “she had never looked comfortable on it” (79). As modern houses did not always accommodate studies or libraries,63 Martin’s reading is impeded by the new arrangement of the furniture: a table of bric-à-brac is now pushed up against the doors of the bookcase, concealing the books, “musty things” (81) and he is obliged to work at the dining-room table.

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Looking round the drawing-room “a little fearfully” (82), the new wife is impelled into “morbid” thoughts about future illnesses and the loss of male desire, fearing that her happiness is not deserved: “I am so frightened, I am so frightened.” “Hush!” “We’re not safe and I don’t believe we’re even good […] Suppose we had taken somebody else’s happiness, somebody else’s life …” “Pussy, hush, be quiet, I forbid you. You’ve been dreaming. You’ve been silly, imagining these horrors. My darling, there’s no sin in happiness. You shouldn’t play with dreadful thoughts. Nothing can touch us!” “I sometimes feel the very room hates us!” “Nothing can touch us,” he reiterated, looking defiantly into the corners of the room. (82)

The horrors of a home without male desire, in which the dead wife is both a hard act to follow and an ominous reminder of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, produce these drawing-room fears. Magot’s reading of this ending in terms of possession, with Pussy acquiring “the dead wife’s voice” in a form of “reassertion for both dominated women,”64 does not account for these ongoing anxieties. The final lines dramatise the conflict between the woman’s “silly” yet “dreadful” imaginings and the husband’s defiance, where the buried hatred emanating from the room itself further threatens their shaky performance of marital harmony. The ending leaves them suspended in a dangerous proximity in the overcrowded drawingroom, with its ghostly traces mocking them from its dark corners. The nursery is also a significant haunted space for the 1920s woman unnerved by her impending maternity. Originating in Robert Browning’s poem “By the Fireside” (1855) about an aging married couple, the phrase “the shadowy third” is suggestive of the unresolved tensions, or the unborn child, which fracture the dangers and distancing of domestic intimacy: If two lives join, there is oft a scar, They are one and one, with a shadowy third; One near one is too far.

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This scarring of marital union was picked up on by women writers in their supernatural narratives. Bowen may have borrowed the title from either Browning’s poem or a ghost story by the American writer Ellen Glasgow, “The Shadowy Third,” first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1916 and then used as the title of her only story collection, The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923). In Glasgow’s story, the shadowy third, visible only to her mourning mother and the new nurse, is the dead seven-yearold daughter, who chases her toys across the library, embraces her mother in her sickbed and skips across the formal garden. After the mother’s early death in an asylum, the “invisible judgement” (459) of the child’s skipping rope on the bend of the stairs causes the doctor husband to fall to his death, unable to inherit his dead wife’s money or to demolish her childhood home as he had planned. The nurse’s questions about whether there is a child in the house, followed by “Is the child’s nursery kept as it used to be?” (448), reinforce the lack of children as endemic to the modern home. Unlike other ghostly children, the ethereal Dorothea Maradick is not confined to the nursery but moves freely through the house and garden. Contrary to his wife’s wishes, the doctor has ordered that her toys be sent to the children’s hospital and her nursery dismantled, a possible explanation for the “great grief” (448) of the bereft mother, and the unresolved trauma within the home. The references to the empty nursery as a space of memorial, needed to come to terms with the traumatic loss of a child,65 fit with the triangular relationships between mother, nurse and daughter. The visibility of the ghost to the nurse and some of the other servants rather than to her stepfather shows the validation of the domestic space as a realm for missing children over the medicalising of loss. Whilst the nurse narrator of Glasgow’s tale shares in the blame of the neglectful husband and criticises his treatment of his wife’s supposed hallucinations, the male viewpoint of Bowen’s tale and the concealment of the cause of his first wife’s death render the story more ambiguous. The pregnant Pussy mimics the behaviour of her dead predecessor, both of whom find an outlet for their restlessness and repressed anxieties in the unused room half-ready for children. Nurseries may have replaced servants’ quarters in new houses, positioned at the top of the house away from the more masculine spaces on the ground floor. Uncovering the

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nursery pictures and bringing them down from upstairs, where the babyclothes had been “locked away,” Pussy’s questions about curtains and cretonnes become a protest about the dismantling of the nursery, Had Anybody chosen the curtains too? … And did you take it all to pieces again? Did you alone, or did Anybody help you? I wonder you didn’t leave it, Martin; you didn’t want the room for anything else. (79)

Her occupation of the cold east room with its locked white chest of drawers is linked to her restlessness and to his memory of Her, the unnamed first wife, “opening and shutting the drawers,” part of her “aimless bustle” before the child came: Something was making her restless, she was out in the garden too much. And when she was not in the garden she was always walking about the house… He had heard her on the stairs and up and down the passages; up and down, up and down. He knew that women in her state of health were abnormal, had strange fancies. Still – (77)

Her restless movement around the house, and opening and shutting drawers, not only disturb the husband into anger, hinting at unspoken domestic violence in the text,66 but underline her proximity to the overworked servant and to unquiet ghosts. Writing on the “vacuity of the domestic ideal” in Bowen’s fiction, Elke d’Hoker suggests that her isolated houses sometimes threaten to “efface” their residents, as “women’s attempts to gain identity and self-expression through home-making are undermined by the emptiness at the heart of the house.”67 This emptiness is linked to the dead child and the empty nursery here; the shadowy third is both the first wife and the lost baby who threatens her pride in her home: “Afterwards she did nothing, nothing at all, not even keep house for him decently. That was probably what had made her ill – that and the disappointment” (81). The dead child and the memory of “Her watching his face; always on the verge of saying something” (81) suggest women’s restless occupation of the suburban home whilst the husband leaves for work and the uncanniness of moving through rooms where the furniture and decorations have been previously chosen by another. The new house struggles to be “homelike” enough for the anxious housewife, who remains trapped in the suburban shadows.

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The Ruins of the Wartime Home: Bowen’s Stories of the 1940s Exposing the uncanniness of the bombed-out house in its desuetude and state of imminent collapse, women writers were particularly concerned with the loss of a sense of home. Trigg’s gender-blind notions of the ruin as the absence of “a fixed and rational home” need to be reconsidered in relation to the absent presence of mistress-servant intimacy, valued objects or furniture and everyday rituals. The wartime home in its ruined state is haunted not only by the ghost of the house in its pre-war days but by the loss of a cherished but stifling domesticity in Bowen’s stories of the 1940s. In her preface to the American edition of The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945), Bowen categorises her oeuvre as “wartime, none of them war stories … studies of climate, war-climate, and of the strange growths it raised.”68 The abnormal “territory” of war is marked by “the violent destruction of solid things,”69 a territory which impacted particularly on women on the home front, confronted during the Blitz with the destruction not only of homes but of the idea of home. The “dessication, by war, of our day-to-day lives” permeates the fragmented narratives which often follow the modernist predilection for setting the story on a single day,70 or in a fleeting moment enhanced by the uncovering of memory traces. Henri Lefebvre’s paradigm of appropriated space is particularly pertinent to the ways in which women in wartime reinvent or repurpose homes in a state of collapse. The certainty of ghosts, even if subjective, assuages the hollowness of wartime subjectivity, as, according to Bowen, “hostile or not, they rally, they fill the vacuum for the uncertain ‘I’ … [in] the anaesthetized and bewildered present.”71 The allure of the past, its indestructibility, is brighter in the face of the violently unstable 1940s. War Gothic, an important framework for tracing what has happened to the haunted house in the bewildered 1940s, has begun to address women’s experiences of inhabiting the darkened city or returning to the bomb-damaged home. Blackout, enforced from 1 September 1939, accentuated London’s spectral qualities, with its disorientating darkness and eerie silences. Sara Wasson notes the ways in which the blackout “transformed even daylight interiors into dark, claustrophobic chambers,” as “disturbing interiors contradict the dominant home front rhetoric which constructs the domestic sphere as a place of triumphant collective labour.”72 Architectural and human vulnerability are entwined in wartime literature and visual art, according to Thomas S. Davis, who

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describes Bowen’s bombed ruins as “decorat[ing]” the landscape of her short stories, where architectural damage is analogous with bodily injury.73 Adam Piette has written of the “voiding of wartime Gothic,” a blend of nineteenth-century and modernist forms of storytelling, in which “trace memories of older patterns, a Jamesian complex of conduct codes, repressions, rituals combin[e] with the abrupt, fragmentary and cryptic style … [of] modernity’s war nervousness.”74 He reads Bowen’s uses of “uncanny returns to abandoned houses and hauntedness which is ambivalently mental or supernatural” in relation to characters “seduced by the uncanniness, … [lost] in fearful forms of memory,” though does not elaborate on the gendered dynamics of this seduction.75 In Bowen’s Court , the increased relevance of the private past, shorn of its “false mystery,” needs to be revisited and revalued in wartime: “in the savage and austere light of a burning world, details leaped out with significance” (454). The instability of the wartime home, its existence as a place of danger and “dislocation,” makes it a place of hidden memories, which offer solace from the savage everyday. The London bombings generated a compulsion for assemblage and intensified attachments to objects, images and places. Those seeking “broken ornaments, odd shoes, torn scraps of curtains that had hung in a room – from the wreckage,” according to Bowen,76 were clutching at household items which would help to preserve the illusion of domestic life at a time when rooms and streets could vanish overnight. This attachment to objects is also to the fore in Rose Macaulay’s wartime story, “Miss Anstruther’s Letters” (1942), written shortly after the bombing of her London flat in 1941. Like her friend Bowen, Macaulay depicts the wartime woman searching for objects of value which will help to atone for the ruination of the domestic.77 An important postscript to Macaulay’s non-fictional work The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), which ostensibly celebrates the visual beauty of the time-worn picturesque ruin, considers the very different experience of contemplating ruined Europe and the startling “wreckage” caused by the Blitz. This “Note on New Ruins” confronts the broken walls and empty window sockets of “blackened” ruins, not yet overgrown or marked by “the weathered patina of age.”78 In the ruins of the city it is hard to trace the lost streets, as “we stumble among stone foundations and fragments of cellar walls, among the ghosts of the exiled merchants and publicans,” or gaze on the charred prayer books and broken statues in the shells of churches. Yet, even the “chaos” of the ruined streets has “a bizarre new charm,” as the exposed interiors

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and stairways climbing up into the sky of even “drab” little houses draw the gaze: “here is a domestic scene wide open for all to enjoy.”79 But the ghosts of London architecture rendered many homeless and shattered notions of home, so that Macaulay’s claim “out of its dereliction [the house] flaunts the flags of what is left” strikes a false note.80 If ruin has been achieved through the destruction of war rather than weather and natural decay, dereliction renders the domestic scene a site of absence, its houseness threatened by its openness, its strange exposure. The wartime home becomes an uncanny space, both familiar and unfamiliar, its interiors eerily visible to the outside, its doors often unlockable and its blacked-out windows adding to the foreboding darkness. If these spaces function not as refuges but as “sites rendered strange by grief, psychological strain and decades of inequity,” as Wasson argues,81 then this strangeness can also be examined in terms of the exposure of the transformation of the traditional domestic economy. Bombed-out houses in a mysterious London square have acquired a distinct uncanniness in the opening story “In the Square” (1941), with their “glassless,” “shuttered or boarded up” windows (609) and their “exposed wallpapers” lit up by the sun entering through the gaps where houses had previously stood. As Emma Zimmerman has argued in the context of modernist anxieties about wartime architecture, “for Bowen, the image of the hollow shell becomes a potent symbol for what is lacking in domestic life.”82 When the male visitor Rupert is admitted to the “shell of the place” he once frequented, he goes up “familiar steps” but the door is answered by an “unfamiliar person, not a maid,” in a telling reminder of the ongoing absence of servants and the departure of the traditional rituals of the household. This shell is an uncanny version of Phillips’ servantless house, after war conditions have left a “permanent mark” and the servant has become “an extinct being.”83 The wartime transformation of gender roles combined with fear of homelessness lends authority and agency to women. Far from running like clockwork, the house, no longer a family home but “like a machine with the silencer off it” (610), accommodates a number of disparate individuals, including a wife, a mistress, a nephew and some noisy caretakers, each confined to a number of designated rooms and floors but constantly trespassing on each other’s privacy. Their appropriation of space allows them, to follow Lefebvre, to produce new spaces which no longer accommodate the comfort of ritual.84 The mistress Gina, who had inhabited the shut-up house whilst the wife Magdela was away,

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listens in on telephone calls and the nephew Bennet interrupts conversations by opening doors unannounced and leaving them open. Bowen noted that in the story, “a well-to-do house in a polite square gives the impression of having been organically dislocated by shock” (96), a dislocation evident in both the dialogue and the state of architectural uncanniness. Magdela’s tellingly unfinished sentences, “These days, there is no one to ….,” “The last time we -” gesture to the traumatic collapse of the household hierarchy and social niceties. Haunted by half-revealed pre-war memories, the house is uneasy with its own unwanted modernity, with a wife who must live side by side with a mistress and the disappearance of the hostess role no longer valid in wartime Britain. Rupert meets Magdela in what had been “the room of a hostess,” a drawing-room crowded with worn-out chairs and sofas, “discoloured,” dusty lampshades and a no longer glossy parquet floor, with the Victorian bric-à-brac noticeable by its absence, though “these occasional blanks were the least discomforting thing in the dead room” (610). Davies reads this alteration in the arrangement of rooms in terms of the house as “extinct scene,” “the place where we glimpse an uneasy coexistence of familiarity and disorientation, of everydayness and history.”85 The dead rooms of the ruined house, and the alienated people who move through them, no longer obey the rules of space: “The house seems to belong to everyone now” (612). This spatial confusion results in a loss of intimacy; Robert realised that “he and she could not be intimate without many other people in the room” (612), and his desperate enquiry about those who had once occupied the “empty pattern of chairs” around them suggests both the hollowness of middle-class sociability, and the missing visitors potentially killed in action or serving abroad. This is reiterated at the end of the story, when Bennet looks back at the two, appearing “quite intimate, as though they had withdrawn to the window from a number of people in the room behind them – only in that case the room would have been lit up” (615). The ringing telephone, as in Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, seems to signal a voice of the dead, as if “something happened out of its time” (612)—ringing telephones, remembers the visitor, were a remnant of the days before the war. Gina walks through the “sheeted up” front dining-room to open the window to get air into “the room that was hers to sit in” (613) before the blackout, though “the perspective of useless dining-room through the archway, the light fading from it through the bombed gap, did not affect her. She had not enough imagination to be surprised by the past – still less, by its end” (613). The useless, dead

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rooms and the new perspectives afforded by the bombed gaps of London town houses may not affect the forward-looking modern mistress, already planning to “clear out” of the house and move onto a new relationship, but the memories of the house in its former days unsettle both the visitor and the reader. The visitor seems fascinated by what is missing, “‘How curious that light is,’ he said, looking across at the gap” (615). The uncanny half-light of the wartime home increases its eeriness, as what Lee Mellor refers to as “blackout spatiality” contributes to the house’s disorientating interior.86 The airless house, soon to be plunged into darkness, most affects the middle-class woman whose hostess days are over. The remote square, cut off from the city with its locked-up houses, is an eerie non-place, haunted by its vanishing conventions. The emptiness of the wartime house is contradictory, both denying homeliness and offering some kind of consolation. Minna Vuohelainen has analysed the convergence of medical discourses of debility, restlessness and spatial phobias within the Gothic mode, showing how in the writing of Richard Marsh “trangressive acts of entering forbidden spaces directly set off claustrophobic narratives” conditioned by anxieties about urban life.87 In a symbolic passage describing Bowen’s parents’ “desertion” of County Cork for a “new home” in Dublin, Bowen’s Court is repeatedly referred to as a “house” or “the house,” a place facing “the challenge of emptiness” (403) as its status as “family home” is contested by this desertion. The shuttered windows and sheeted furniture prefigure the strange, dark interiors of the wartime home. Yet to be empty is also paradoxically to be more “house-like”: “it is to these first phases of emptiness that I trace the start of the house’s strong own life […] when I re-enter the house after an absence, I feel I must come to terms with something already there” (403). In his analysis of agoraphobia, Anthony Vidler has traced the “variety of terms” used to name the disease at the turn of the century, including the French term, “horreur de vide,” which can be translated as fear of emptiness or the void.88 The symptoms of palpitations, trembling and fear of dying were often felt by patients walking through empty streets or across open spaces or squares, so that fear of space or place, “angoisse des places,” was understood as an urban disease.89 Spatial fear for Bowen is often more anchored in the claustrophobic, a term she uses directly in her writing. In Bowen’s Court, domesticity is defined in terms of “isolated households,” lives lived for generations “in psychological closeness to one another and under the strong rule of the family

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myth” (19). In the 1945 preface to Demon Lover, she notes “the claustrophobia of not being able to move about freely and without having to give an account of yourself.”90 Vidler’s readings of the warped, paranoiac spaces of modernism do not distinguish between the potential pathologies and phobias of modern male and female subjects, nor explore their specific anguished responses to what psychoanalysts referred to as “the void.”91 For Bowen, the emptiness of the urban streets or of the gaps where houses once stood is both terrifying and strangely comforting, or something to be contested, with the empty privileged over the ruined. Both servant and mistress contemplate the ruins of a London town house and the tatters of the hierarchical domestic economy in a lesser-known emblematic story, “Oh, Madam …,” from the earlier wartime collection Look at All Those Roses (1941). Uncharacteristically written in the first person, the story is a monologue spoken by an unnamed female servant, punctuated with ellipses to indicate both shocked pauses and the censored voice of the listening mistress, the “madam” of the title repeated like a hollow mantra throughout the narrative. Often dealt with rather briefly by critics who read it as a narrative of “class cruelty” or “the expendability of the servant,”92 its uses of haunting and the past are worth re-examining in relation to notions of the uncanny demolition of architecture. Mimicking the structure of the opening chapters of Bowen’s Court, the story takes the reader on a room-by-room tour of the bomb-damaged home in order to delineate “the shock to the house” and the memories it encloses. Although the servant has begun the process of dusting and sweeping up glass, the house is partially uninhabitable, with missing ceilings and windows and doors that will no longer open, restricting freedom of movement around their former home. The dining-room is now inaccessible and the telephone room likened to an ashtray. The mistress’s uncanny “home-coming” (578) shatters the pretence of the house remaining a home: “There does go the house!” (579). At the centre of the story is the mistress’s tearful vision of her ruined drawing-room, which “doesn’t look decent” without its windows and with its “torn and torn” satin curtains (580); the room in its former glory haunts both of the mourning women, “it used to sort of sparkle, didn’t it, in its way” (580). “Car[ing] for things” (580) makes the mourning process worse. The servant’s deluded belief that a glazier and labour-saving devices can restore the room’s sparkle—“I’ll have the drawing-room fit for you in no time! I’ll sheet my furniture till we’re thoroughly swept, then take the electro to the upholstery” (581)—clashes

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with the mistress’s quick decision to shut up the house. This perceived abandonment of their way of life, “But you couldn’t ever, not this beautiful house!” (581), is an anguished response to the shock of being uprooted from a place that has defined both their identities. Reading the ruin in terms of “the physical terrain of bomb-damage,” Leo Mellor suggests that “the physical cracks and gaps of the house start to be performed in the lacunae of the story.”93 If both women are learning to recognise that it is “for the best” (581) to retreat from the ruination of the home, then this story exposes the effects on a class of workers for whom the bombed-out house shattered their experiences of the domestic economy. The servant’s traumatic witnessing of the collapse from the sitting-room in the basement suggests her unquestioning approval of household hierarchies and a shared investment in what the house stands for: “It would have sickened you, madam, to hear our glass going” (579, my italics). Equating the loss of the house with the loss of its owner, Davis goes so far as to suggest that this absence may be literal, asking “Are we to infer that Madam isn’t there?” To read the speaker as a “traumatized servant … perhaps rambling … to no one at all”94 could suggest a severing of the tie between owner and employee, with the trauma relating to this ghosting of the absent mistress, “a phantom interlocutor” whose return is only imagined. The fitness of the female servant to bear witness to the blasting of the home contrasts with other ghost stories which mourn the demise of the upstairs/downstairs hierarchy through the absence of maids and cooks, and the collapse of domestic conventions this entails. In the servant’s eyes in “Oh, Madam …,” it is only right that the mistress had been absent on a visit during the bombing: “it would not have been fit for you … thank goodness madam’s not here tonight” (579). In an unpublished elegiac sketch of her “unforgettable” cook and caretaker Sarah Barry, employed in the Bowen Court kitchen from the 1880s to her death in 1943, Bowen reinforces the necessity of staff for the smooth running of the household. We are told, “Under the Mistress’s calm rule, the household ran like clockwork” but also that the new mistress, Elizabeth’s aunt Sarah, relied on her servant “lieutenant” as “the steady dynamo of the house.”95 The constant stream of visitors and the laughter of the past are wistfully attributed to her servant’s “power to magnetize people home again.”96 Yet the magnetic appeal of devoted domestic staff, a dwindling number, would not preserve this outdated notion of the hospitable home. The ending of “Oh Madam …” leaves the weeping servant with her

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fears about domestic emptiness balanced against the mistress’s unspoken rejoinder that, like many other London houses, it will have to remain empty or ultimately be demolished. Relishing the last opportunity to “just run up to the box-room after the trunks and cases” (582), the servant shows how she is defined by her enabling of the mistress’s visiting, even as she rescues the things of value from a now defunct storage space. As Delap maintains, “transition to a servantless state” was often incomplete, insecure and problematic, bound up with changing ideas about modernity and modern living.97 The final line, “Lonely? No; no, I don’t feel lonely. And this never did feel to me a lonely house” (582), gestures to the deep attachment of servants to the ideal of the pre-wartime home, though its ambiguity also testifies to the denied but traumatic loneliness of the dissolving mistress-servant bond. In “The Happy Autumn Fields” (1944), the middle-class woman becomes another witness to demolition in a lonely house crammed with memories. The disorientated Mary, lying on a bed in the “hollowness” of a collapsing London terrace, also “unburies” things of value. Drawing on her own recent experience of being bombed out of her home on Clarence Terrace,98 Bowen describes her heroine as “the last soul left in the terrace,” as sinister “furniture-movers” are heard brutally “smashing out” (683) a conservatory at the other end of the building. The “musty old leather box” dismissed by Mary’s lover Travis as “gaping open with God knows what – junk, illegible letters, diaries, yellow photographs, chiefly plaster and dust … family stuff” (677) is valuable because of its openness to a forgotten, half-illegible domesticity. The opening of this musty box of memories enables the spectral encounter with the spirit of Sarah Fitzpatrick, a middle daughter in a large Victorian family, living on a rural Irish estate, the setting for the other half of the story. Marked by dashes and gaps in the text, the difference between the two time frames, as in other stories in this collection, mobilises a meditation on changes in the domestic economy brought about by war. Alexandra Harris has analysed the story in relation to the “archive” of Bowen’s Court, typical of its wartime moment in dwelling on “the talismanic power of relics.” Yet, whilst the memoir resists fragmentation in the attempt to build something solid, the story “imagines a sunlit world of ‘bulk and weight’ torn apart by interruptions.”99 Piette’s description of the wartime house itself as “evacuated memory-box” is useful here in terms of pinpointing the differences between Victorian and modern domestic spaces.100 The bombings which necessitated evacuation, or the overnight demolitions of homes, had different effects to the deaths of family members or spouses,

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or the moving into new properties, all of which rendered the occupation of space troubling and traumatic. Evacuation, with its etymological links to vacating, eviction and emptiness, left scars because memories often had to be clutched at quickly before houses collapsed into nothingness. Relics were precious because they were so difficult to grasp; in Bowen’s story, the illegibility of Mary’s musty box signals the feared severing of connections with ancestors in houses on the brink of collapse and demolition. Covered in dust, looking like she has been crawling through ceilings, Mary is urged to relocate to a hotel by the end of the story, whereas Sarah and her sister, after a family walk, remain trapped in the overcrowded drawing-room controlled by their mother. Taking place on the day before her brothers return to school, the story ends with the death of Eugene, Sarah’s suitor, whose horse has shied on his ride home across the fields, with a question mark hanging over the cause of his death. Given the closeness of the two sisters and the revelation from the letters that they both died young and unmarried, it is implied that either Henrietta after an angry outburst has willed the accident, or that a spiritual communication with Mary in her unstable house has somehow prevented a potentially dangerous marriage. Mary’s surmise that she may be “descended from Sarah” is supposedly disproved by the “negative evidence” of their missing weddings, but it is unclear why the box has been hidden in the 1940s house; as Mary laments, “I am left with the fragment torn out of a day, a day I don’t even know where or when, and now how am I to help laying that like a pattern against the poor stuff of everything else?” (684). The “poor stuff” signals the wartime home, in which the strained relationship is perhaps in danger of collapse like the fragile walls, where things of value become difficult to decipher and family histories are destroyed. Typically, the women of Sarah’s ghostly era gather in the drawingroom, a favoured family and female space, in which Eugene is the only gentleman in a room of women and children, when the other men have positioned themselves in the gunroom or the stables. The drawing-room as a cherished but disturbing space of mother–daughter intimacy recurs in Bowen’s writing, which typically locates the daughter in the darker recesses of the room. The final chapter of Bowen’s memoir of her Dublin childhood, Seven Winters (1942), relates “Drawing-Room,” a greentoned space, with its Florentine mirrors, frilled cushions and upright piano, to the “Sunday evening illusion of perfection.” More importantly, when it is not in general use on Sundays, it becomes a maternal space,

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“the scene of my mother’s personal life,” with her cherrywood writing table and her books scattered around, a room self-consciously differentiated in a bracketed sentence from “my father’s study” (512). In “The Happy Autumn Fields” the over-crowded drawing-room is a place ruled over by a benign but conventional maternal presence, “muted, weighted, pivoted by Mamma,” where the mother has the power to speak what she cannot articulate “from her place at the opposite end of Papa’s table” (680). The pianoforte and the unplayed harp seem dwarfed by the preponderance of sofas, whatnots, armchairs, “towering vases” and albums piled up on tables, yet even in this crowded space Sarah can position her chair in “the middle of the wreath of the carpet, where no one ever sat” (681), as if to distance herself from the conventions demanded by the room. At the moment of spectral connection, the family group is waiting in darkness for the lamps to be lit by the servants, eerily doubling the ritualistic moment of blackout which punctuated the wartime evening. Sarah’s terrified cries and fears about the terrors of the future are partly assuaged by Henrietta and Eugene who gravely declare, “There cannot fail to be tomorrow” (682), though her suitor’s imminent death also signals the lost generation of soldiers missing from the 1940s. The failure to establish a line of descent between Sarah’s family and Mary threatens the foundations of the Victorian ghost story—the lost family history and the thousands of missing, empty houses, subject to war and demolition, could not have been imagined by those in the Victorian drawing-room. Considering questions of architecture and embodiment, Elizabeth Grosz has argued: “Bodies are absent in architecture, but they remain architecture’s unspoken condition … traces of the body are always there in architecture.”101 Grosz’s notions of “lived spatiality” are particularly pertinent to women’s experiences within the war-damaged home. Mary’s architectural place where there is “nothing left” (683), but traces of a lost family, triggers a traumatic out-of-body experience. In a paragraph which uncannily repeats her name, as if she were someone else, we are told: Frantic at being delayed here, while the moment awaited her in the cornfield, she all but afforded a smile at the grotesquerie of being saddled with Mary’s body and lover […] she looked, as far as the crossed feet, along the form inside which she found herself trapped: the irrelevant body of Mary, weighted down to the bed, wore a short black modern dress, flaked with plaster. The toes of the black suede shoes by their sickly whiteness showed Mary must have climbed over fallen ceilings. (677)

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“Saddled” with her own irrelevant body, the modern woman, inspired by her memory-box, is desperate to return to a moment waiting for her in the past, when she, it is implied, either was or is spiritually connected to Sarah. The story ends with the modern male voice reiterating the impossibility of a family connection between the two women of different eras, as the letters imply that Sarah and Henrietta remained unmarried and childless. But this presupposes an absent connection from the maternal line, when it is more likely that the archive has been passed down from aunts. Maud Ellmann refers to the earlier time sequence as a “dream,” with Mary’s survival ensuring “the obliteration of the past.”102 Davies’ reading that the modern woman is haunted or possessed by Sarah, the latter’s early death linked to Mary’s potential tragedy, is more persuasive.103 The important line, “The one way back to the fields was barred by Mary’s surviving the fall of ceiling” (683), could be read differently. Survival in the face of the destruction of the wartime home prevents the desired return to the fragments of the past, when “family stuff” took priority, as the story juxtaposes the uncertain destinies of unmarried daughters trapped in their moments, but desperate to communicate: “Sarah was right in doubting that there would be tomorrow: Eugene, Henrietta were lost in time to the woman weeping there on the bed, no longer reckoning who she was” (683). Ellmann’s view that the happy autumn fields “represent not only the historic past but the idealised world of childhood, unravaged by the blitz of sexuality” needs modifying,104 as the past is shown to be not only precarious but confining and suffocating, a place where women can never be alone. As in Marghanita Laski’s chilling Gothic novella, The Victorian Chaise Longue (1953), in which an invalided modern woman wakes up trapped in the body of a tubercular bedridden Victorian woman,105 the modernist woman writer imagines the cross-currents between Victorian and modern women and their experiences of spatial restriction. This precarious link to a possible but uncertain female ancestor, who offers an unclear message, is an echo of the Victorian haunted house narrative, but one which reinforces the disintegration of family ties in the modernist era. Preoccupation with emptiness, either due to modern living or after demolition or ruin, sets Bowen apart from other women writers of the ghost story. Reflecting the post-war culture of enforced domesticity, her uncanny stories of the 1920s rework the Victorian trope of the home as site of Gothic terror by rendering the clash between old and new uncanny. “The Shadowy Third” shows both live and dead women as restless and

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dissatisfied, locating women’s psychic terrors in their thwarted desires to create the “ideal home.” Her war stories dwell on the menacing incongruity of old furniture in modern drawing-rooms, and adjustments in mistress-servant intimacy, as well as in the sinister demolition of houses in wartime, suggesting a broader demolition of what the domestic space represents. The image of her ancestral home may sustain Bowen in the wartime climate—“War made me that image out of a house built of anxious history” (457), she concludes in Bowen’s Court —but the effects of emptiness are both unsettling and undeniable, an irrefutable condition of modernity.

Notes 1. Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” (1929) in Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 144. 2. Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 9, 13. 3. Ibid., 16–19; Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 15–19, 30–36. 4. Elizabeth Bowen, “Preface to Encounters ,” (1949) in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen ed. Hermione Lee (1986; London: Vintage, 1999), 122. 5. All quotations are taken from Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters ed. Hermione Lee (1942/3; London: Vintage, 1984). 6. Elizabeth Grosz, “Architecture from the Outside,” in Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 135. 7. Ibid. 8. Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 249. 9. Vernon Lee, “In Praise of Old Houses,” in Limbo and Other Essays (London: Grant Richards, 1897), 23. 10. Elizabeth Bowen, “Pictures and Conversations,” in Mulberry Tree, 280. 11. Ibid. 12. Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 359–60. 13. Ibid., 367, 369. 14. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 64. 15. Ibid., 60, 64.

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16. Vita Sackville-West, The English Country Houses (1940; London: Unicorn Press, 2014), 91. 17. Ibid., 44. 18. Ibid., 77, 81. 19. Ibid., 91. 20. Ibid. 21. Trigg, Aesthetics of Decay, 123. 22. Ibid., p. 133. 23. Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 160. 24. Trigg, Aesthetics of Decay, 133. 25. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” (1951) in Poetry, Language, Thought trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971), 160. 26. Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York and London: Knickerbocker Press, 1917), 113. 27. Elizabeth Bowen, “The Bend Back,” (1950) in Mulberry Tree, 57. 28. Ibid., 59. 29. Ibid., 59. 30. Matt Foley, Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Melancholy and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), 9. 31. Elizabeth Bowen, “Modern Lighting,” Saturday Review, October 27, 1928, 294. 32. Deborah Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism, 1918–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 81. 33. Ibid., 65. It had been running since 1908. 34. “The Reason for Good Housekeeping,” Good Housekeeping (March 1922) in From Ragtime to Wartime: The Best of Good Housekeeping, 1922–39 eds. Brian Braithwaite, Noëlle Walsh and Glyn Davies (London: Leopard Books, 1995), 11. 35. Margaret Benn, “Daily Maids in the Small Town House,” Good Housekeeping (April 1923), in ibid., 15. 36. Alan Fortescue, “The Thousand Pound House,” Good Housekeeping (June 1928) in ibid., 106–7. 37. Dr. Cecil Webb-Johnson, “Women’s Clubs,” Good Housekeeping (March 1927) in ibid., 89. 38. Lara Baker Whelan, Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 76, 78. 39. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 60. 40. Mrs. Eustace Miles (Hallie Killick), The Ideal Home and Its Problems (London: Methuen, 1911), 250, 8.

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41. R. Randal Phillips, The Servantless House (London: Offices of Country Life, 1920), 9. 42. Ibid., 20. 43. An Engineer and his Wife, The Ideal Servant-Saving House (London: W.R Chambers, 1918), v, 17. 44. Ibid., 20; Flora Klickmann, ed., The Mistress of the Little House (London: Office of the Girls’ Own Paper, nd [1915]), 34. 45. Lucy Delap, Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 98. 46. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 93. 47. Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 205. 48. The reading of this story is developed from an earlier chapter, which considers liminality and the past in relation to the ghost stories of Bowen, E. Nesbit and May Sinclair. See Emma Liggins, “Beyond the Haunted House? Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories and the Troubling of Modernity,” in British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now eds. Emma Young and James Bailey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 36–37. 49. Luke Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (London: Routledge, 2012), 167. 50. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 12. 51. All quotations are taken from The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen ed. Angus Wilson (London: Vintage, 1999). 52. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 83. 53. Matt Foley, Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), 150. 54. Bowen, “Modern Lighting,” 294. 55. Ideal Servant-Saving House, 17. 56. Baker Whelan, Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties, 83. 57. Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 75–76. 58. David Punter, “Hungry Ghosts and Foreign Bodies,” in Gothic Modernisms eds. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 16. 59. Céline Magot, “The Haunting House: Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Shadowy Third,’” in The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural Encounter in the 1890s and 1920s eds. Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell and Rebecca Soares (London: Routledge, 2019), 85. 60. Ibid., 88. Magot points out further similarities between the two women, who are both described as “rattling” things in the house. 61. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 141. 62. Foley, Haunting Modernisms, 146–47.

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63. Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007), 55. 64. Magot, “The Haunting House,” 94. 65. Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 111. 66. Magot, “The Haunting House,” 87. 67. Elke D’Hoker, Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 60, 63. 68. Preface to the Demon Lover (1945), Mulberry Tree, 95. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 96. 71. Ibid., 98. 72. Sara Wasson, Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 12, 105. From 1939 to April 1945, neon signs were forbidden, traffic lights reduced to slits, street lights dimmed, house windows covered and car headlights screened. Church bells were also forbidden after June 1940. 73. Thomas S. Davis, The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2016), 160, 161. 74. Adam Piette, “War and the Short Story: Elizabeth Bowen,” in British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now eds. Emma Young and James Bailey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 77, 76. 75. Ibid., 77. 76. Ibid., 96. 77. Rose Macaulay, “Miss Anstruther’s Letters,” (1942) in Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War ed. Anne Boston (London: Virago, 1988). 78. Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker and Company, 1953), 453. 79. Ibid., 454. 80. Ibid. 81. Wasson, Urban Gothic, 129. 82. Emma Zimmerman, “A ‘Tottering Lace-Like Architecture of Ruins’: The Wartime Home in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day,” Literary Geographies I, no. 1 (2015): 46. 83. Phillips, Servantless House, 9. 84. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 81. 85. Davies, Extinct Scene, 2. The “extinct scene” is a phrase used in the story itself to describe the approach to the square, which Davies uses as the title of his book. His opening paragraphs use this key story to

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86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99.

100. 101.

102. 103.

104. 105.

pose “a broader set of questions about everyday life that cuts across late modernism” (1–2). Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 159. Minna Vuohelainen, “‘Oh to Get Out of That Room!’: Outcast London and the Gothic Twist in the Popular Fiction of Richard Marsh,” in Victorian Space(s), ed. Karen Sayer, Leeds Centre Working Papers in Victorian Studies 8 (2006): 115. Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 29. Ibid. Preface to Demon Lover, 98. Ibid., 6, 31. Wasson, Urban Gothic, 127; Mellor, Reading the Ruins, 161. Ellmann does not refer to this story. Mellor, Reading the Ruins, 160, 161. Davis, The Extinct Scene, 161. “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met,” (1944) Mulberry Tree, 255, 257. Ibid., 265. Delap, Knowing Their Place, 98. Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen, 128–30. The Regent’s Park area of London was badly bombed in 1941–1942 and, more seriously, in 1944, when every room in her home in Clarence Terrace was wrecked. Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames Hudson, 2010), 270, 271. Piette, “War and the Short Story,” 78. Elizabeth Grosz, “Embodying Space: An Interview,” in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 14. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 171. Davies, Extinct Scene, 182. Corcoran’s reading acknowledges both possibilities, describing Mary’s “mysterious return, in a kind of waking dream, or, it is hinted, in some form of metempsychosis … a return enabled … by her being an unexpected survivor … the merging of identities across time is effected by the sudden abject loss of identity for [Mary].” Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 171. Marghanita Laski, The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953; London: Persephone Press, 1999).

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Bibliography An Engineer and his Wife. The Ideal Servant-Saving House. London: W.R. Chambers, 1918. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas. 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014. Baker Whelan, Lara. Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Bowen, Elizabeth. Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters ed. Hermione Lee. 1942/3; London: Virago, 1984. Bowen, Elizabeth. Collected Stories ed. Angus Wilson. London: Vintage, 1999. Bowen, Elizabeth. “Introduction” to The Second Ghost Book ed. Lady Cynthia Asquith, vii–x. 1952; London: Pan Books, 1956. Bowen, Elizabeth. “Modern Lighting.” Saturday Review, October 27, 1928, 294. Braithwaite, Brian, Noëlle Walsh and Glyn Davies, eds. From Ragtime to Wartime: The Best of Good Housekeeping, 1922–39. London: Leopard Books, 1995. Corcoran, Neil. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Davis, Thomas S. The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2016. de Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” In The Practices of Everyday Life in The Certeau Reader ed. Graham Ward. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Delap, Lucy. Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. D’Hoker, Elke. Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. Ellmann, Maud. Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Foley, Matt. Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Melancholy and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” (1919) In The Uncanny trans. David McClintock, 121–62. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Giles, Judy. Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Women, Chora, Dwelling.” In Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Hamlett, Jane. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.

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Harris, Alexandra. Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. London: Thames Hudson, 2010. Harris McCormick, Lizzie, Jennifer Mitchell and Rebecca Soares, eds. The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s. London: Routledge, 2019. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” (1951) In Poetry, Language, Thought trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon, 1971. Hornstein, Shelley. Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Klickmann, Flora. The Mistress in the Little House. London: Offices of the Girls’ Own Paper, n.d. [1915]. Lawrence, Richard Russell. The Book of the Edwardian and Inter-War House. London: Aurum Press, 2009. Laski, Marghanita. The Victorian Chaise-Longue. 1953; London: Persephone Press, 1999. Lee, Hermione, ed. The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. London: Virago, 1986. Lee, Vernon. Limbo and Other Essays. London: Grant Richards, 1897. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. 1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lethbridge, Lucy. Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Liggins, Emma. “Beyond the Haunted House? Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories and the Troubling of Modernity.” In British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now edited by Emma Young and James Bailey, 32–49. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Macaulay, Rose, “Miss Anstruther’s Letters.” (1942) In Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War edited by Anne Boston. London: Virago, 1988. Macaulay, Rose. The Pleasure of Ruins. New York: Walker and Company, 1953. Magot, Céline. “The Haunting House: Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Shadowy Third’.” In The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural Encounter in the 1890s and 1920s edited by Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell and Rebecca Soares, 84–96. London: Routledge, 2019. Mellor, Lee. Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Miles, Mrs. Eustace (Hallie Killick). The Ideal Home and Its Problems. London: Methuen, 1911. Piette, Adam. “War and the Short Story: Elizabeth Bowen.” In British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now edited by Emma Young and James Bailey, 66–80. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

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Punter, David. “Hungry Ghosts and Foreign Bodies.” In Gothic Modernisms edited by Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, 11–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Randal Phillips, R.. The Servantless House. London: Offices of Country Life, 1920. Rosner, Victoria. Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007. Sackville-West, Vita. The English Country House. 1940; London: Unicorn Press, 2014. Scarborough, Dorothy. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York and London: Knickerbocker Press, 1917. Smith, Andrew and Jeff Wallace, eds. Gothic Modernisms. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Sugg Ryan, Deborah. Ideal Homes: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism, 1918–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Thacker, Andrew. Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Thurston, Luke. Literary Ghosts, from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval. London, Routledge, 2014. Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Vuohelainen, Minna. “‘Oh to Get Out of That Room!’: Outcast London and the Gothic Twist in the Popular Fiction of Richard Marsh.” In Victorian Space(s) edited by Karen Sayer, Leeds Centre Working Papers in Victorian Studies 8 (2006): 115–26. Wallace, Diana. “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic.” Gothic Studies 6, no. 1 (2004): 57–68. Wasson, Sara. Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” (1929) In Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays edited by David Bradshaw, 140–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Young, Emma and James Bailey eds. British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Zimmerman, Emma. “A ‘Tottering Lace-Like Architecture of Ruins’: The Wartime Home in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day.” Literary Geographies 1, no. 1 (2015): 42–61.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

Venerating the “emotion of the past” accessed through “the rapture of old towns and houses,” Vernon Lee was not alone in her fascination with the “strange possibilities” of experiencing and writing about architecture.1 Both old and new houses called up these strange possibilities for women writers who figured unease, exclusion, servantlessness and claustrophobia, as well as a troubling rapture, through uncanny manifestations of haunted space. An examination of the key settings used by women writers for their ghost stories in the Victorian and modernist period has shown how the secluded, ancestral country house was replaced by, or set alongside, the modern sub/urban dwelling powered by technology as the site of haunting. The ideal of the “old house” was disintegrating by the time of the Second World War, as women’s traumatic witnessing of the bombing and destruction of London manifested itself in stories which showed the domestic space haunted by emptiness and loss. As Fred Botting has cogently argued, “the spectres, rather the spirit of an age, define it. As a gap in which excluded or suppressed figures arise, the uncanny announces the doubleness of modernity.”2 The spectral inhabitation of the Victorian and modernist house is revealing not only of the rooms and spaces which make up the haunted house, the gaps which let in the half-forgotten past, but of a broader hauntedness of home in this period, the uncanniness of modernity. The drawing-room, the heart of the ancestral home, both mausoleum and museum, coalesces many of the key tropes of the haunted room in © The Author(s) 2020 E. Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_8

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its stifling claustrophobia and its menacing intimacy. Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Back Drawing-Room” (1926), a story which mocks the conventions of the haunted house narrative with the constant interruptions and embellishments of the listeners, offers a final example of the enduring uncanniness of this haunted room. A tentative male cyclist is drawn through the enticingly open door of an old Irish house towards a sombre back drawing-room, with its “musty” wallpaper. His intrusion “unintroduced, in a back drawing-room, really quite an intimate room, where I believe only favoured visitors are usually admitted,”3 not only breaks the rules of hospitality but also confirms the gendered dynamics of domestic intimacy: the spectral “lady sobbing on the sofa” awaits visitors but cannot articulate the source of her distress. Significantly, his remark that the oldfashioned mustiness could have been improved by central heating shows the modernist tendency to think in architectural terms. Female spectrality is here a rebuke for male inertia, “she made me feel the end of the world was coming.”4 The sobbing phantasm in a dangerous menacing place, “like the House of Usher” suggest the listeners,5 fulfils the role of the lady lamenting the decline of the Big House; the apocalyptic ending of the story confirms that the house is an impossibility, as it had been burnt down two years ago. The phantom drawing-room, like the tomb-like space of Edgar Allen Poe’s “mansion of gloom,” is a place of intimacy, confinement and distress for suffering women, “terribly dangerous” in what it represents.6 If, as Elizabeth Grosz suggests, architecture can operate “as a set of and site for becomings of all kinds,”7 the drawingroom stages the distress of middle-class women struggling against the anachronistic role of hostess. The intrusion of male visitors into a space of female intimacy, marked by signifiers of a vanished past, unlocks the menace and danger of a room where women can be buried alive, doomed to lament the loss of the Big House whilst never fully articulating their stories. Women’s troubled inhabiting of the home in the ghost story is revealing of cultural anxieties about tradition and modernity, about the old and the new; the spaces of the past leave traces in the present which clash and terrify. Despite or perhaps because of the drive towards modernisation, the buried stories of previous occupants cannot be exorcised. If “female predecessors abound in the female gothic,”8 then this is an aspect of the mode which is fully exploited in the women’s ghost story. Bowen, Wharton and Sinclair welcome in the dead wives and mothers whose presence cannot be exorcised, spectral inhabitants not only frozen

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in time but also often frozen into drawing-rooms and bedrooms of the haunted house. Looking further back into the more distant past, Gaskell, Oliphant and Lee locate female ancestors and lost women in the decaying ancestral houses on the outskirts of Italian towns or in remote rural areas, in the shut-up, dusty disused spaces with their museum-like appeal. Sometimes the female ancestor is a servant, like Wharton’s dead lady’s maid anxious to answer her mistress’s bell or Bowen’s beloved housekeeper. Melissa Edmundson Makala has argued that the uninhabitable house can be transformed from a place of fear to a space of reconciliation for the haunted woman, who “learns the importance of compassion from the ghost and is able to tell her story to others.”9 Yet the difficulties of communicating between female ghosts and new occupants, usually but not always female, suggest the complexities of these buried stories of confinement, spatial restriction, illegitimacy and disorder, stories which increasingly remain opaque, incomplete or lost. Gaston Bachelard’s “oneiric house … lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past” may beckon us towards “the crypt of the house that we were born in.”10 Yet for women writers the cryptic space is not always the nostalgically conceived childhood home but the darkly mysterious house of the female ancestors, embodied in the phantom or lost rooms as much as in the dusty portrait galleries which recur in tales of the supernatural. In the ghost stories examined here, terror becomes a condition of dwelling for women, their spatial phobias intensified by the economies of restraint and division which govern their unhomely homes. Even dead women cannot find a comfortable place within their lost domains. Revisiting Bachelard’s claim that “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home,” and his dismissal of “hostile space,” of the topophobic,11 has shown that male spatial theorists have offered a misleading and incomplete representation of the spatialisation of the domestic. Inside spaces for women writers become dark, threatening and undomestic, taunting their female inhabitants with their failure to live up to their prescribed roles. Diana Wallace is right to recognise that the domestic uncanny functions differently both for the woman writer and her heroines: possession, confinement, penetration, loss of identity are all shadows which haunt the home for women, particularly those who inhabit – or fear inhabiting – the roles of housewife and mother … [for women and girls], the home is an uncanny space haunted by lost possibilities and shadowed by patriarchal power.12

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Unhomeliness becomes a condition of both the lost traditions of the ancestral house and the new desirability of the ideal or modern home in the early twentieth century. According to Bachelard, “The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little bedchamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound.”13 Women writers detected different echoes in both old and new houses, in vast rooms and little chambers. The emphasis on the tourist gaze in some of these stories, particularly those by Vernon Lee and Edith Wharton, both keen travellers, has highlighted the ways in which the terrors of inside space were inseparable from perceptions of place and the fearful admiration of old or ruined architecture. Sacred space as haunting in both its chilly immensity and its crypt-like qualities is a recurring trope in Lee’s writing, which seems anomalous in relation to the woman writer’s fixation with enclosed, suffocating spaces, increasingly understood in terms of claustrophobia, the newly labelled spatial fear. Yet the haunted houses imagined by women writers in this period are both disorientating, excessively dark, places to get lost in, as well as crushingly small, domestic prisons. The tendency of a dark domestic space to tip over from the felicitous into the hostile, the discomforting and the disturbing has been fully exploited in the Female Gothic mode and has particular effects on female inhabitants. To read women’s ghost stories alongside non-fictional discourses on architecture, tourism and modernisation is to appreciate the necessity of gendering the architectural uncanny. Rooms are described as mausoleums, sacred shrines and places of fatality, prison-like in the patriarchal observation of the rules of space. The haunted house is both Pandora’s box and memory-site, its architectural uncanniness generating terror and wonder.14 Forbidden spaces have always acquired uncanny resonances in Gothic texts, so it is perhaps unsurprising that traditionally male spaces such as libraries and billiard rooms, as well as disused rooms, shut-up wings and some servant spaces, generate disturbance for the woman writer. Challenging critical interpretations of women’s ghost stories which have focussed on the bedroom or portrait gallery as the primary scene of the spectral encounter, I have demonstrated that drawing-rooms, libraries, nurseries, entrance halls, east wings, lumberrooms and servants’ quarters all became key haunted spaces, Lefebvrian domains of denial, raising questions about privacy, service and gendered behaviour. Haunted kitchens are rare in the stories I have analysed,

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whereas ghostly drawing-rooms, marital bedrooms and nurseries, familiar terrain for middle-class women, spaces organised around entertainment, sexuality, death and motherhood, are prominent. But it is not the case that middle-class women writers only envisioned the spaces they knew best as sites of fear. Attention to the plight of female servants is an ongoing concern, which further distinguishes women’s ghost stories from those of their male contemporaries. The points of contact between mistress and servant, warned against in servant manuals and architectural treatises, are explored even as this bond is disintegrating. Female ghosts or haunted mistresses often cross the boundary between servant space and family space, venturing “below stairs” in order to overturn household hierarchies or to symbolise the movement towards a new domesticity. Both the forbidden and the familiar generate spatial unease. A rethinking of the relations between women and space is necessary in order to fully appreciate the complex negotiations with Female Gothic conventions in women’s ghost stories of this period. Gothic architecture is never neutral for the fearful heroines affected by the breakdown of Victorian spatial hierarchies. Highlighting the ongoing problem that “there has never been a space by and for women,” Elizabeth Grosz argues that “even women-only spaces … are ones set up in reaction or opposition to patriarchal cultural space.” Her arguments about the different terms needed to understand space and spatiality are relevant to a wider consideration of how women might “reoccupy [space] as their own.”15 Spatialising the Female Gothic allows us to ask difficult questions about inhabitation and reoccupation, how women (re)appropriate rooms and routes around the house, how what is hidden affects their dwelling and what the implications are of gendering the architectural uncanny. Spatial theory needs to take more account of gender in its approach to the domestic, in order to add to our understandings of the changing relationship between gender, space and modernity in this transitional period. To allow women to reoccupy genealogies of the ghost story, more work needs to be done on the contribution to the genre by the plethora of under-researched women writers. To name but a few, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and Mrs. Henry Wood are known for their sensation fiction but this has over-shadowed their supernatural tales of the 1860s and 1870s. Like Oliphant, Braddon focussed on the haunted garden as both domestic and non-domestic space in stories such as “Eveline’s Visitant” (1867). Neglected women writers of the early twentieth century such as H. D. Everett and Marjorie Bowen both drew on the

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tropes of the haunted hidden room in detached villas and the old wings of family dwellings to explore the historical entrapment of women or the impending losses of war. The fabric of the old house in Everett’s wartime story “The Whispering Wall,” with its eerie echoes in the sunlit playroom, figures the imminent death in Flanders of the son and heir.16 A more disturbing enclosure is that of the abused tongueless wife in the “secret chamber no larger than a cupboard” behind the walls of her husband’s library in Marjorie Bowen’s “The Scoured Silk” from her collection The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949).17 Rather than being buried in the churchyard under her headstone, the lost wife is buried in the walls of her reclusive husband’s house, cramped in the dark space unable to speak. Shirley Jackson’s dark tales of suburban unease and the lovely but faded rooms of the lost such as “The Beautiful Stranger” (1946) and “A Visit” (1950) anticipate the horrors of the everyday to be explored in her more famous novels such as The Sundial (1958) and The Haunting of Hill House (1959).18 Women’s contributions to the development of weird fiction in the early twentieth century are now being reconsidered, as Melissa Edmundson’s recent collection Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940 (2019) attests.19 The publication of modern editions of women’s Gothic short fiction and the continuing interest in “gendering the supernatural” will hopefully generate more research on these under-explored writers and subgenres. Writing in 1953, Rose Macaulay concluded The Pleasure of Ruins with the following observation: “we have had our fill. Ruin pleasure must be at one remove, softened by art … a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings,” a necessary retreat from “our fearful and fragmented age.”20 If we accept this framing of the ruins of modernity, then maybe the woman writer stepped back from the demolished house as a source of the uncanny, of a ruin-pleasure grown rotten and disturbing after two world wars. Maybe she retreated into the discomforts of her suburban home, or maybe, like Lee and Bowen, she continued to look back with reverence to the vanished past. At the end of the 1940s, the haunted house, repository of dark imaginings, continued to exercise its magnetic power. There are more stories to be told about what it concealed within its hidden corners, secret chambers and disused rooms and the unease experienced by women in its unearthly modern interiors.

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Notes 1. Vernon Lee, “In Praise of Old Houses,” in Limbo and Other Essays (London: Grant Richards, 1897), 21, 35. 2. Fred Botting, Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 8. 3. Elizabeth Bowen, Collected Stories ed. Angus Wilson (London: Vintage, 1999), 208. 4. Ibid., 208–9. 5. Ibid., 209. 6. Ibid. 7. Elizabeth Grosz, “Architecture from the Outside,” in Space, Time and Perversion (London: Routledge, 1995), 135. 8. Helen Hanson, Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 60. 9. Melissa Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), 98, 99. 10. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 37. 11. Ibid., 19. 12. Diana Wallace, “‘A Woman’s Place,’” in Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion eds. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 75. 13. Ibid., 81. 14. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 18. 15. Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 25. This is from “Embodying Space: An Interview,” 3–29, conducted by Kim Armitage and Paul Dash. 16. See H.D. Everett, The Crimson Blind and other Stories. Ware: Wordsworth, 2006. 17. Marjorie Bowen, “The Scoured Silk,” in The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949; Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006), 149. 18. See Shirley Jackson, Dark Tales. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2016. 19. See Melissa Edmundson (ed.), Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940 (Bath: Handheld Press, 2019). 20. Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker and Company, 1953), 455.

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Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas. 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014. Botting, Fred. Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Bowen, Elizabeth. Collected Stories ed. Angus Wilson. London: Vintage, 1999. Bowen, Marjorie. The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories. 1949; Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006. Edmundson, Melissa (ed.). Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940. Bath: Handheld Press, 2019. Edmundson Makala, Melissa. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010. Everett, H.D. The Crimson Blind and other Stories. Ware: Wordsworth, 2006. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Women, Chora, Dwelling.” In Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Hanson, Helen. Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Jackson, Shirley. Dark Tales. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2016. Lee, Vernon. Limbo and Other Essays. London: Grant Richards, 1897. Macaulay, Rose. The Pleasure of Ruins. New York: Walker and Company, 1953. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Wallace, Diana. “A Woman’s Place.” In Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 74–88. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

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Index

A Adams, Sarah and Adams, Samuel The Complete Servant: A Practical Guide to the Peculiar Duties and Business of all Descriptions of Servants , 34, 76 Agoraphobia, 259 Ancestral home/house, 42, 44, 47, 53, 56, 60, 64–68, 156, 244, 266, 275, 277, 278 Ancestral mansion, 41, 54 An Engineer and his Wife The Ideal Servant-Saving House, 268 The architectural uncanny, 4, 7, 12, 16, 26, 47, 98, 99, 130, 134, 163, 185, 236, 246, 278, 279 Armitt, Lucie, 31, 59, 74 Armstrong, Tim, 158, 179 Art galleries, 117, 124 Asquith, Cynthia, 222 The Ghost Book: Sixteen New Stories of the Uncanny, 230 The Second Ghost Book, 158 Attic(s), 136, 141, 243

B Bachelard, Gaston, 26, 42, 53, 85, 94, 126, 157, 162, 277 The Poetics of Space, 16, 201 Bailey, James, 186, 229, 268, 269 Baker Whelan, Lara, 246, 250, 267, 268 Ballroom(s), 119, 135 Bann, Jennifer, 98 Banta, Martha, 155 Barker, Lady The Bedroom and Boudoir, 198, 226 Basham, Diana, 32 Bedrooms, 1, 8, 11, 23, 28, 46, 47, 53, 61, 64, 70, 84, 97, 98, 100, 135, 180, 182, 184, 195, 198–200, 204–212, 215–224, 277–279 Beecher Stowe, Harriet, 48 Beer, Janet, 184, 185, 190 Beeton, Mrs. Book of Household Management , 52, 74 Bell, Karl, 21, 33, 120, 146 Berry Pomeroy, 49

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 E. Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0

297

298

INDEX

The Big House, 28, 184, 235, 237, 238, 276 Billiard room(s), 58, 212, 278 Billy, Ted, 175, 189 Bilston, Sarah, 84, 90, 110, 112 Black, Barbara, 25, 35, 129, 148 Blackwood, Algernon, 11 Boll, Theophilus, 226 Bont, Leslie de, 209 Botting, Fred, 21, 33, 275, 281 Boudoir(s), 52, 61, 143, 144 Bowen, Elizabeth, 10, 13, 28, 31, 158, 172, 178, 179, 184, 186, 189, 206, 235, 236, 266–270, 276, 281 “The Back Drawing-Room”, 276 “The Bend Back”, 243, 267 “The Big House”, 237, 242 Bowen’s Court , 29, 235–241, 249, 256, 266 “The Demon Lover”, 15, 173, 179, 189 The Demon Lover and other Stories , 237, 255 Encounters , 236, 247 “The Happy Autumn Fields”, 29, 237, 262, 265 “In the Square”, 237, 257 “Introduction” to The Second Ghost Book ed. Lady Cynthia Asquith, 158, 186 Look at all those Roses , 260 “Modern Lighting”, 244, 267, 268 “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met”, 270 “The New House”, 28, 236, 243, 247 “Oh Madam…”, 29, 261 Pictures and Conversations , 237, 266 “Preface” to Encounters , 266 Seven Winters , 263, 266

“The Shadowy Third”, 28, 236, 249, 265, 268 Bowen, Marjorie, 279–281 The Bishop of Hell and other Stories , 280, 281 “The Scoured Silk”, 280, 281 Bown, Nicola, 14, 32, 112 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 11, 23, 279 “Eveline’s Visitant”, 279 “The Shadow in the Corner”, 23 Brewster, Scott, 12, 31, 33, 110, 186 Briefel, Aviva, 206, 228, 229 Briganti, Chiara, 5, 30 Briggs, Julia, 12, 31 Brontë, Charlotte, 49, 72 Brontë, Emily, 42 Wuthering Heights , 42 Brontë Parsonage, 28, 199, 200, 203 Broughton, Rhoda, 279 Bussing, Ilse, 5, 29, 55, 75, 93, 203, 227 Buzard, James, 24, 35, 124, 143, 147, 150, 165, 188

C Cadwallader, Jen, 14, 32, 50, 74, 75, 105, 106, 113 Calder, Jenni, 100, 105, 111, 113 Capesthorne Hall, 48, 56 Castles, 7, 11, 24, 34, 42, 55, 84, 107, 182, 241 Cathedrals, 25, 27, 47, 117–119, 122, 124, 127 Certeau, Michel de, 16, 27, 82, 149 “Walking in the City”, 149 Chapman, Alison, 124, 145, 147, 149 Chase, Vanessa, 160, 186–189 Chatsworth, 88 Churches, 22, 25, 27, 43, 117, 119, 120, 122–125, 127, 137, 171, 241, 256

INDEX

Claustrophobia, 17, 28, 158, 171, 179, 195, 196, 199, 201–204, 224, 240, 247, 259, 260, 275, 276, 278 Coit, Emily, 158, 181, 185, 190 Colby, Vineta, 117, 125, 145, 147, 149 Collins, Wilkie, 5, 11, 75, 227 Cook, Clarence, 161 The House Beautiful , 101, 113, 160, 187 Corcoran, Neil, 235, 266 Corridors, 1, 2, 49, 155, 180–182, 220, 221 Cosslett, Tess, 124, 147 The country house, 2, 17, 25, 27, 43, 87, 109, 235, 237–239 Crowe, Catherine, 44–47 The Night Side of Nature, 26, 44, 53, 64, 73 Crypts, 117–122, 135, 144, 163, 165–169 D Darling, Elizabeth, 110 Darvay, Daniel, 129, 148 Davenport, Caroline, 48 Davies, Owen, 120, 146, 198, 218, 226 Davis, Thomas S., 255, 261, 269, 270 Delamotte, Eugenia C., 31 Delap, Lucy, 24, 33, 34, 157, 170, 183, 185, 189, 190, 246, 262, 268, 270 D’Hoker, Elke, 254, 269 Dickens, Charles, 11, 59 “A Christmas Carol”, 11 Dickerson, Vanessa D., 14, 15, 32, 34, 82, 99, 110, 112 Dickie, John, 147 Dining-rooms, 240, 251, 252, 258, 260

299

Doors, 2, 5, 7–9, 26, 28, 29, 42, 46, 48, 49, 53–63, 65–68, 70, 71, 90, 100, 104, 106, 132, 133, 135–137, 140, 155, 156, 160, 162, 165–167, 169, 171–173, 176, 179, 181, 182, 200, 201, 205–207, 210, 217, 218, 221, 222, 238–241, 251, 257, 258, 260, 276 Downey, Dara, 16, 32, 162, 177, 179, 187, 189 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 11 Drawing-rooms, 27, 28, 50, 52, 57, 58, 72, 83, 84, 86, 87, 100–106, 109, 160, 162, 170, 173, 176, 184, 210–212, 217, 219, 229, 236, 240, 242, 248, 249, 251, 252, 258, 260, 263, 266, 275–279 Drayton House, 92 Dressing-room, 62, 63 Drewery, Claire, 10, 31, 222, 227–229 E Eastlake, Charles, 20, 43, 72, 125, 147, 148, 212, 213, 228 Hints on Household Taste, 43, 72, 228 A History of the Gothic Revival , 43, 72, 125, 148 Ederline House, 92 Edmundson, Melissa Makala, 21, 33, 67, 76, 100, 277, 280 Electricity, 13, 27, 158, 161, 170, 183, 215 Elliott, Kamilla, 84, 89, 91, 110–112 Ellis, Kate Ferguson, 7, 30 Ellmann, Maud, 247, 265, 266, 268, 270 Enville Hall, 88 Evangelista, Stefano, 117, 145

300

INDEX

Everett, H.D., 11, 279 The Death Mask and other Stories , 11 “The Whispering Wall”, 280 The explained supernatural, 43

F Female Gothic, 7–9, 15, 30, 32, 51, 60, 69, 81, 94, 102, 106, 201, 211, 276, 278, 279 Ferguson, Christine, 31 Fireplaces, 87, 156, 175, 200, 213 Foley, Matt, 244, 249, 251, 267, 268 Forbidden Space, 18, 26, 41, 42, 49, 51, 55, 58, 60, 62, 63, 175, 259, 278 Forster, E.M., 124 Foucault, Michel “Of Other Spaces”, 130, 149 Fox, Michael, 5, 29 Freeman, Nick, 21, 22, 33, 34 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 14, 29, 32, 45, 73, 82, 110, 139, 148, 150, 197, 209, 225, 228, 229 “Mourning and Melancholia”, 209, 228 “The Uncanny”, 10, 29, 32, 73, 110, 126, 148, 150, 197 Fryer, Judith, 155, 167, 185, 188

G Galef, David, 56, 75 Gardens, 2, 4, 13, 15, 17, 27, 28, 47, 53, 55, 57, 60, 68, 83, 84, 88–92, 109, 133, 134, 156, 163–165, 167, 168, 170, 200, 201, 205, 209, 214, 239, 241, 250, 251, 253, 254, 279 Gaskell, Elizabeth “Clopton House”, 26, 42, 46, 73

“The Crooked Branch”, 26, 42, 64, 69 “The Grey Woman”, 26, 43, 51, 60, 61 Letters , 72, 73 “The Old Nurse’s Story”, 26, 42, 55, 59, 60, 71, 75 “The Poor Clare”, 26, 42, 65 Geddes-Brown, Leslie, 112 Georgieva, Margarita, 58, 75 Gilbert, Sandra, 8, 17, 30, 32 Giles, Judy, 20, 33, 170, 188, 247 Gillin, Edward, 146 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 20, 33, 160, 162, 187, 190, 203 The Home: Its Work and Influence, 20, 33, 160, 181, 187, 203, 227 “The Yellow Wallpaper”, 5, 203 Glasgow, Ellen “The Shadowy Third”, 253 Glendinning, Victoria, 242, 267, 270 Gooday, Graeme, 183, 190 Gothic modernisms, 156, 157, 229 The Gothic Revival, 42, 43 Graves, Robert and Hodge, Alan The Long Weekend: A Social History of Britain, 1918–1939, 178, 187 The Great Exhibition, 44 Grosz, Elizabeth, 19, 28, 33, 108, 109, 113, 196, 208, 216, 224, 225, 228, 229, 236, 243, 264, 266, 270, 276, 279, 281 Architecture from the Outside, 270, 281 “Women, Chora, Dwelling”, 33, 113, 225, 228, 229 Gubar, Susan, 8, 17, 30, 32 H Haddon Hall, 44, 45

INDEX

Hall, Julia, 118, 145 Hamlett, Jane, 20, 33, 52, 61, 62, 64, 74–76, 101, 113, 144, 150, 208, 210, 212, 228, 229, 269 Handley, Sasha, 21, 22, 33, 44, 51, 70, 73, 74, 76 Hanson, Ellis, 118, 145, 147, 149, 125 Hanson, Helen, 81, 109, 281 Harris, Alexandra, 262, 270 Harris McCormick, Lizzie, 32, 268 Harvey, David, 33, 129, 148 Hawthorne, Nathaniel The House of the Seven Gables , 49 Hay, Simon, 12, 31, 95, 112 Heidegger, Martin, 236 “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, 18, 32 Heiland, Donna, 29, 33 Henson, Louise, 74 Hill, Kate, 129, 148 Hill, Rosemary, 72, 147 Hogle, Jerrold, 121, 122, 146, 149, 168, 188 Home childhood, 17, 85, 162, 253, 277 family, 11, 17, 26, 42, 53, 66, 69–71, 76, 85, 89, 91, 92, 95, 219, 236, 240, 244, 249, 257, 259, 264 ideal, 8, 22, 28, 161, 162, 172, 186, 189, 201, 202, 236, 245, 246, 249, 251, 262, 266, 267, 278 servantless, 19, 24, 28, 183, 185, 237, 246, 247, 249, 257, 269 suburban, 6, 22, 28, 172, 182, 196, 201, 219, 224, 229, 245, 246, 250, 254, 280 wartime, 235, 255–257, 259, 262, 263, 265, 266, 269

301

Homelessness, 59, 85, 108, 109, 243, 257 Horatio Joyce, H., 146 Horner, Avril, 8, 30, 74, 97, 112, 281 Horn, Pamela, 34, 110 Hornstein, Shelley, 6, 30 Hudson, Kathleen, 22, 34, 59, 75, 76

I Interior design, 13, 17, 159, 161, 163, 186 Irigaray, Luce, 28, 83, 196, 205 Elemental Passions , 110, 112, 113, 227

J Jackson, Shirley, 201, 280 “The Beautiful Stranger”, 280 “A Visit”, 280 James, Henry, 11, 12, 45, 73 “Lichfield and Warwick”, 73 The Turn of the Screw, 11, 45 James. M.R., 11, 31 “The Haunted Doll House”, 11 Jekyll, Gertrude and Weaver, Lawrence Gardens for Small Country Houses , 88, 111

K Kahane, Claire, 102, 113 Keeble, Trevor, 110 Kerr, Robert The Gentleman’s House, 20, 52, 74, 85, 111, 150 Kitchen(s), 54, 57, 144, 184, 246, 278 Klein, Melanie “Mourning and its relation to Manic-Depressive States”, 207, 228

302

INDEX

Klickmann, Flora The Mistress in the Little House, 20, 186, 202 Knole, 239 Kontou, Tatiana, 82, 110 Krueger, Kate, 41, 51, 58, 72, 74 L Lambert, Carolyn, 53, 56, 70, 74–76 Laski, Marghanita, 265 The Victorian Chaise-Longue, 270 Lawrence, Richard Russell, 229 Lee, Hermione, 31, 163, 164, 187, 188, 266 Lee, Vernon (and C. Anstruther-Thomson) Beauty and Ugliness and other studies in psychological aesthetics , 148 “The Doll”, 27, 136, 141 Gospels of Anarchy, 35 Hauntings , 13, 120 “In Praise of Old Houses”, 17, 22, 27, 34, 136, 138, 237, 266, 281 “Introduction”, For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories , 145 “The Legend of Madame Krasinka”, 27, 136, 137 Limbo and other Essays , 34, 266, 281 “Out of Venice at Last”, 134 “Ruskin as a Reformer”, 25, 35 “A Seeker of Pagan Perfection”, 147 The Spirit of Rome, 138, 147, 150 Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, 149, 187 “A Wicked Voice”, 27, 119, 133, 134, 146 “Winthrop’s Adventure”, 27, 119, 121

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 5 “Green Tea”, 11 Lefebvre, Henri, 18, 26, 28, 32, 42, 48, 51, 53–55, 57, 58, 62, 68, 74–76, 85, 103, 105, 111, 113, 170, 189, 198, 211, 219, 226, 228, 229, 236, 255, 257, 269 The Production of Space, 18, 32, 74, 111, 189, 229, 269 Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment , 226 Leighton, Angela, 31, 131, 137, 149 Lethbridge, Lucy, 75, 157, 161, 185, 187 Library(ies), 9, 11, 27, 28, 48, 52, 83, 91, 101–103, 105–108, 130, 142, 160, 166, 170–177, 195, 198, 199, 212–218, 224, 238, 240, 248, 251, 253, 278, 280 Liggins, Emma, 75, 150, 186, 225, 229, 268 Light, Duncan, 127, 148, 200, 226 Lindfield, Peter N., 34, 43, 44, 72 Lovecraft, H.P. Supernatural Horror in Literature, 158, 186 Luckhurst, Roger, 221, 229 Lumber-room(s), 109, 119, 129, 131, 133, 136, 278 Lutz, Deborah, 213, 228 Lynch, Eve, 23 Lyndon Shanley, Mary, 112 M Macaulay, Rose, 25, 27, 118, 123, 142, 145, 147, 149, 150, 256, 269, 280, 281 “Miss Anstruther’s Letters”, 256, 269 The Pleasure of Ruins , 25, 118, 145, 256, 269, 280, 281 Magot, Céline, 250, 252, 268, 269

INDEX

Mahoney, Kristin Mary, 130, 141, 144, 149, 150 Mandler, Peter, 73, 84, 110, 111, 238, 266 Margree, Victoria, 16, 32, 60, 75, 104, 105, 113 Marriott Watson, Rosamund The Art of the House, 87, 111 Marsh, Richard, 259 Massey, Doreen, 19, 33 Mattis, Ann, 180, 181, 190 Mausoleums, 129, 201, 246, 278 Maxwell, Catherine, 117, 128, 134, 145, 146, 148–150 McCorristine, Shane, 51, 67, 74, 76, 120, 146 McCuskey, Brian W., 75 McEvoy, Emma, 33, 34, 46, 49, 72–74 Mellor, Lee, 259, 261, 270 Mezei, Kathy, 5, 6, 30 Miles, Mrs Eustace (Hallie Killick) The Ideal Home and its Problems , 111, 217, 229, 246, 267 Miller, Lucasta, 49, 74, 226 Modernisation, 4, 6, 13, 22, 156, 157, 170, 175, 183, 235, 237, 276, 278 Modernity, 2, 4, 6–8, 11, 14, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 33, 44, 46, 65, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 130, 137, 138, 144, 155, 158, 171, 182, 197, 220, 222, 229, 236–238, 244, 246, 248, 256, 258, 262, 266, 275, 276, 279, 280 Moers, Ellen, 7, 30 Morning-rooms, 52 Mourning, 15, 28, 50, 51, 59, 82, 89, 92, 96, 99, 110, 118, 195, 197, 199, 201, 204, 207–210, 215, 218, 237, 238, 241, 244, 253, 260

303

Muckross Abbey, 241 Mullholland, Terri, 210, 220, 228, 229 Murphy, Bernice M., 201, 226 Murray, Alex, 117, 128, 144, 145 Museums, 25, 107, 117–121, 125, 127, 129–131, 143, 144, 149, 162, 200, 201, 239, 275

N Nesbit, E., 1, 29, 198, 268 “From the Dead”, 198 “The Shadow”, 1 Nursery(ies), 45–47, 57, 58, 73, 172, 208, 210, 236, 253, 278, 279 night-nursery, 57

O Old house, 2, 4, 6, 17, 21, 22, 25, 46, 48, 54, 85, 91, 95, 102, 117, 119, 136, 140, 141, 144, 156, 163–165, 169, 174, 177, 180, 237, 250, 275, 278, 280 Oliphant, Margaret Autobiography, 85, 92, 96 “Earthbound”, 27, 88 “The Grievances of Women”, 83, 110 “The Lady’s Walk”, 27, 88, 92, 99 “The Library Window”, 27, 83 “Old Lady Mary”, 27, 96, 97, 221 “The Open Door”, 15, 26, 53 “The Portrait”, 27, 83, 102 Tales of the Seen and the Unseen, 111 Orrinsmith, Mrs. The Drawing-Room: Its Decoration and Furniture, 111 Owen, Alex, 31, 110

304

INDEX

P Palmer, Marilyn, 190 Pantazzi, Michael, 165, 188 Parlour, 46, 50 Piette, Adam, 256, 262, 269, 270 Poe, Edgar Allen, 5, 276 “The Fall of the House of Usher”, 5 Portrait gallery(ies), 46, 48, 56, 84, 91, 103, 131, 278 Privacy, 5, 16–18, 20, 28, 52, 55, 56, 58, 66, 82, 86, 90, 92, 93, 102, 143, 156, 160–162, 178, 180, 181, 187, 196, 203, 212, 257, 278 Psychoanalysis, 10, 228 Pugin, Augustus W.N., 44, 123, 146 Pulham, Patricia, 117, 141, 145, 146, 150 Punter, David, 146, 156, 185, 250, 268 R Radcliffe, Ann, 7, 9, 10, 24, 30, 42, 55, 60, 101, 124, 201 The Mysteries of Udolpho, 9, 30, 101, 201 “On the Supernatural in Poetry”, 7, 30 Raitt, Suzanne, 199, 209, 225, 226, 228 Randal Phillips, R. The Servantless House, 23, 34, 246, 268 Riddell, Charlotte, 5, 12, 60, 75 Rose, Gillian, 19, 33, 222, 229 Rosner, Victoria, 28, 101, 113, 156, 159, 185, 186, 202, 211–213, 227–229, 269 Royle, Nicholas, 3, 4, 29 Ruin(s), 13, 24, 25, 34, 53, 54, 118–120, 123, 130, 132, 134,

163, 164, 177, 236, 239–241, 256, 260 Ruin studies, 25, 28, 119 Ruskin, John, 25, 43, 44, 72, 122–124, 126, 134, 146, 147 Modern Painters , 123, 147 “The Nature of Gothic”, 43, 72, 146 The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 44 The Stones of Venice, 43, 72 S Sackville-West, Vita, 229, 239, 267 The English Country House, 6, 35, 187, 239, 267 Scarborough, Dorothy The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, 10, 31, 158, 186, 197, 225, 243, 267 Scepticism, 7, 21, 50, 82, 122, 196, 225 Schönle, Andreas, 118, 145 Scott, Sir Walter, 89 “The Tapestried Chamber”, 89 Seaton Delaval, 239 Seed, David, 229 Servant(s), 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11–13, 20, 23, 24, 28, 41, 42, 45, 46, 50, 52–56, 59–62, 64–72, 75, 83, 86, 99, 106, 155, 157, 160, 161, 166, 169, 171, 175, 176, 179–185, 204, 206, 207, 217, 237, 238, 246, 254, 257, 260–262, 264 Servants’ bells, 178 Sick-room, 198 Sinclair, May, 251 “Dreams, Ghosts and Fairies”, 31, 196, 225 “If the Dead Knew”, 28, 199, 204 “The Intercessor”, 28, 199, 204, 228

INDEX

The Three Brontës , 199, 203, 226, 227 “The Token”, 28, 217 “The Villa Desirée”, 199 Uncanny Stories , 13, 195, 229 “Where their Fire is not Quenched”, 28, 199, 219, 224 “Women’s Sacrifices for the War”, 226 Sissinghurst Castle, 239 Smith, Andrew, 12, 30, 31, 140, 150, 215, 229 Smith, Charlotte The Old Manor House, 8, 30 Smoking-rooms, 52 Society for Psychical Research (SPR), 120, 195 Space family, 20, 26, 44, 52, 57, 58, 62, 66, 69, 92, 94, 95, 98, 101, 130, 140, 157, 162, 175, 181, 203, 205, 209, 212, 262, 263, 279 female, 4, 7–9, 14, 18–20, 23, 27, 41, 42, 50, 52, 57, 58, 60, 66, 67, 69, 72, 81–84, 87, 89, 90, 95, 101, 105, 106, 109, 155, 160, 167, 170, 181, 195, 196, 198, 199, 202, 204, 211, 213, 216, 220, 221, 224, 251, 263, 276, 277, 279 forbidden, 5 male, 4, 103, 105, 107, 109, 156, 168–170, 181, 199, 208, 210, 212, 214–216, 218, 222–224, 251, 276–279 maternal, 28, 54, 84, 109, 196, 204–211, 221, 222, 224, 263, 264 patriarchal, 9, 18, 19, 26, 28, 62, 68, 72, 85, 101, 108, 166, 168, 196, 218, 278, 279

305

sacred, 5, 25, 27, 70, 117, 120– 125, 127, 128, 134, 135, 142, 144, 167, 168, 200, 206, 210, 220, 247, 278 servant, 5, 8, 17, 18, 20, 22–24, 26, 29, 34, 42, 51, 54–57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69, 99, 103, 155–157, 160, 168, 170, 176, 177, 181, 184, 185, 197, 205, 207, 213, 236, 245, 246, 253, 262, 278, 279 suburban, 35, 196, 214, 216, 236, 246, 250 Sparke, Penny, 159, 186 Spatial hierarchies or divisions, 213, 279 Spatial theory, 5, 7, 16, 18, 279 Speke Hall, 48, 49 Spiritualism, 11, 14, 27, 50, 51, 82, 89, 98, 110, 195–197, 206, 223, 225 Staircases, 44, 46, 49, 64, 76, 102, 122, 140, 184, 198, 209, 222, 242 Steere, Elizabeth, 22, 23, 34, 61, 64, 75, 76 Sterry, Emma, 189 Strawberry Hill, 24, 34 Study, 62, 211, 212, 264 Styler, Rebecca, 62, 70, 71, 76 Sugg Ryan, Deborah, 22, 34, 170, 186, 188, 189, 196, 225, 229, 245, 246, 248, 250, 267, 268 Superstition, 9, 21, 22, 45, 50, 51, 67, 74 Sword, Helen, 195, 197, 225

T T.B.M. In Praise of Old Gardens , 111

306

INDEX

Technology, 2, 6, 17, 27, 156–159, 161, 172, 178, 179, 182–185, 187, 275 Teddesley Hall, 48 Telephones, 4, 27, 155, 172, 178– 181, 184, 189, 237, 250, 258, 260 Thacker, Andrew, 197, 225 Threshold(s), 53, 58, 59, 106, 135, 142, 155, 168, 169, 173, 206, 239, 248 Thurston, Luke, 12, 14, 31, 33, 85, 86, 110, 111, 156, 185, 204, 227, 247, 268 Tinniswood, Adrian, 35 Tosh, John, 210, 211, 228 Tourism, 4, 5, 12, 13, 24, 26, 46, 84, 124, 127, 130, 141, 144, 200, 201, 238, 278 The tourist gaze, 24, 25, 34, 47, 73, 88, 125, 127, 129, 132, 141, 163, 165, 201, 204, 278 Townhouses, 105, 142, 215 Townshend, Dale, 9, 24, 30, 34, 43, 72, 120, 122, 146 Trigg, Dylan, 26, 27, 35, 118, 119, 133, 145, 149, 150, 164, 188, 236, 241, 266, 267 Trotter, David, 178, 189 U Uglow, Jenny, 88, 111 The uncanny, 3, 10–12, 14, 24, 26, 29, 47, 49, 82, 90, 94, 119, 124, 139, 143, 164, 173, 175, 177, 181, 195, 196, 202, 212, 217, 219, 235, 236, 243, 246, 259, 260, 275, 280 The unexplained supernatural, 8, 10, 197 Urry, John, 24, 34, 46, 47, 73, 133, 149, 226

V Veritas, Amara The Servant Problem: An Attempt at its Solution by an Experienced Mistress , 34, 76 Victorian Gothic, 5, 21, 33, 42, 46, 55, 72 Vidler, Anthony, 2–4, 29, 45, 73, 98, 112, 127, 148, 162, 185, 187, 190, 196, 201, 202, 225–227, 238, 239, 259, 260, 266, 270, 281 The Architectural Uncanny, 2, 29, 73, 112, 187, 225, 238 Warped Space, 226, 227, 270 Visitors, 2, 14, 18, 27, 45, 46, 48, 64, 81, 84–87, 89, 90, 94, 103, 106, 107, 124, 127, 129–131, 135, 142, 143, 156, 160, 161, 164, 175, 176, 199–201, 212, 237, 240, 241, 245, 251, 257–259, 261, 276 Vuohelainen, Minna, 4, 29, 259, 270

W Wallace, Diana, 8, 15, 30, 32, 47, 60, 73, 75, 102, 106, 113, 224, 229, 277, 281 Wanitzek, Leonie, 128, 129, 148 War Gothic, 28, 179, 236, 255 Warwick, Alexandra, 21, 33, 42, 72 Wasson, Sara, 255, 257, 269, 270 Watson, Nicola, 24, 35 West, Ian, 190 Wharton, Edith, 244 “Afterward”, 27, 157, 174, 176 “All Souls”, 28, 157, 182, 183 A Backward Glance, 164, 171, 187–190 (and Ogden Codman, Jr.) The Decoration of Houses , 17, 20,

INDEX

57, 75, 135, 149, 156, 159, 160, 173, 185 “The Duchess at Prayer”, 15, 156, 163 Ghosts , 157 Italian Villas and their Gardens , 156, 163, 188 “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”, 28, 157, 180, 190 “Pomegranate Seed”, 27, 157, 171, 173, 177, 179 “Preface” Ghosts , 157 Whitworth, Lesley, 110 Whyte, William, 122, 146 Windows, 8, 26, 28, 42, 48, 53, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63, 66, 69–71, 85, 89, 98–100, 103, 105–109, 130, 133, 137, 141, 143, 156, 162, 165, 199, 204, 207, 247, 256–260, 269

307

Wolfe, Elsie de, 159, 186 Wolfreys, Julian, 3, 29, 32, 134, 139, 149, 150 Wood, Mrs. Henry, 279 Woolf, Virginia, 11, 31, 201, 226, 235, 266 “Haworth, November 1904”, 226 “Professions for Women”, 235, 266 Wynne, Deborah, 201, 226 Y Young, Arthur, 241 Young, Craig, 127, 148, 200 Young, Emma, 186, 229, 268, 269 Z Zimmerman, Emma, 257, 269 Zlosnik, Sue, 8, 30, 74, 97, 112, 281 Zorn, Christa, 133, 149