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The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost
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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 inter-
related, global and ‘extended’ cultural aspects to show how the taste for
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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
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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 Lind-
field, 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 Fin-
De-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 Town-
shend and Minna Vuohelainen. For illuminating conversations, helpful
references and searching questions about the uncanny, ruins, interior
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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 unwa-
vering 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 ques-
tions 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 Eliz-
abeth Gaskell House all generated thought-provoking comments from
audiences. Librarians in the Special Collections and archives at Manch-
ester 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
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
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, swim-
ming and walking in the Lakes. A special mention to my Devon friends
Sharon Gedye and Richard Jones, for some great holidays, lots of silli-
ness and late-night cheese-boards. Sharon, thanks for sharing the eeri-
ness 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
1 Introduction: Women in the Haunted House 1

Women Writers, the Ghost Story and Female Gothic 7
Domestic Space and the Architectural Uncanny 16
The Haunted House and Modernity 21
Bibliography 35
2 The Old Ancestral Mansion and Forbidden Spaces

in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ghost stories 41
The Reverence for Old Architecture and Victorian Haunted
Space 43
Open and Locked Doors: Servants and Forbidden Spaces
in “The Old Nurse’s Story” and “The Grey Woman” 51
The Ancestral House and Servant Space in “The Poor Clare”
and “The Crooked Branch” 64
Bibliography 76
3 Left Out in the Cold: Exclusion and Communications

with the Female Ancestor in the ghost stories
of Margaret Oliphant 81
Strangers in the Drawing-Room: The Horrors of Visiting 84
The Haunted Garden: “Earthbound” and “The Lady’s Walk” 88
Ghostly Communication and Female Inheritance: “Old Lady
Mary” 96
xi
xii CONTENTS
Between the Drawing-Room and the Father’s Library: “The

Portrait” and “The Library Window” 101
Bibliography 113
4 The Rapture of Old Houses: Dust, Decay and Sacred

Space in Vernon Lee’s Italian ghost stories 117
Spectres and “Definite Places”: Museums, Crypts
and the Sacred 119
Gothic Italy and the Allure of the Church 124
Italy as a Haunted Museum: The Lumber-Room of the Past 129
The Exquisite Creepiness of Old Houses: Where Devious
Routes Lead in “The Legend of Madame Krasinska”
and “The Doll” 136
Bibliography 150
5 “Ghosts Went Out When Electricity Came in”:

Technology and Mistress-Servant Intimacy in the ghost
stories of Edith Wharton 155
Modernist Domestic Interiors, Privacy and The Decoration
of Houses 157
Between the Italian Garden and the Crypt: “The Duchess
at Prayer” 163
Letters, Electricity and Household Hierarchies
in “Pomegranate Seed” and “Afterward” 170
Ghostly Machinery: Telephones and Servants’ Bells 178
Bibliography 190
6 Finding Her Place: Claustrophobia, Mourning

and Female Revenants in the ghost stories of May
Sinclair 195
Claustrophobia and the Haunted Brontë Parsonage 199
Mourning and Maternal Space in “The Intercessor” and “If
the Dead Knew” 204
In the Haunted Library 212
Haunted Bedrooms and the Horror of Sexual Intimacy 218
Bibliography 230
CONTENTS xiii
7 Ideal Homes? Emptiness, Dereliction and the Ruins

of Domesticity in the Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen 235
Demolishing the Big House: Bowen’s Court and Lost
Architecture 237
In the Shadows of the New House: Bowen’s Stories of the 1920s 243
The Ruins of the Wartime Home: Bowen’s Stories of the 1940s 255
Bibliography 271
8 Conclusion 275
Bibliography 282
Bibliography 283
Index 297
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 invis-
ibility 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 spec-
tral 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 1

E. Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories,
Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_1
2 E. LIGGINS
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 architec-
tural 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 demon-
strate 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.
1 INTRODUCTION: WOMEN IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE 3
Freudian notions of the uncanny and the familiar/unfamiliar distinc-

tion have become essential to our understandings of the nineteenth-
century 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 “some-
thing 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 bour-
geois 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,
4 E. LIGGINS
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 Vuohe-
lainen has claimed, it is surprising that “critical attention to Gothic
spatiality is only slowly gathering pace.”11 An examination of the spatial-
ities of women, of the ways in which they inhabit and navigate space in
the Gothic mode, opens up new understandings of gender and moder-
nity. 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 transforma-
tions 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
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 character-
istics” 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 occu-
pants 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 secu-
rity 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 chal-
lenging 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
6 E. LIGGINS
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 imagi-
nary 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 impor-
tance 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 house-
ness. 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 tech-
nology 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
explorations of the past as well as shifting attitudes to the domestic inte-

rior. 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 architec-
tural 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 rela-
tion 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 identi-
fication 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 characteris-
tics 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
8 E. LIGGINS
violent patriarchal villain.25 The groundbreaking work of Sandra Gilbert

and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) also paid atten-
tion 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 supernat-
ural.”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 simul-
taneously “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 move-
ment 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
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 “imag-
inary 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 “ridicu-
lous,” “silly tales.”33 The maid’s melodramatic recounting of the “strange
stories” of the missing Lady Laurentini, who supposedly haunts the shut-
up 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.
10 E. LIGGINS
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 encom-
passes 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 super-
natural: “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, expla-
nation, 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, build-
ings, scenes, “places more often than faces have sparked off stories.”39
Unlike the multidimensional Gothic narratives of Radcliffe and her imita-
tors, the short story, a genre steeped in the apprehensions of place,
lends itself to the unexplained supernatural, which increasingly under-
pins 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
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 organi-
sation, 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 Black-
wood and M. R. James, explored the uncanny effects of haunted interiors
and landscapes in their stories in similar ways to women writers. Cross-
currents 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 promi-
nent 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’ conceptual-
isations of the unhomeliness of space is revealing of the hauntedness of
12 E. LIGGINS
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 under-
standings 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 Brig-
gs’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 colo-
nial 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 fore-
grounding 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
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 topogra-
phies.49 The collection is indicative of the vibrancy of research on women
writers of ghost stories, though of the ten chapters on individual Victo-
rian 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 Eliza-
beth 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 depic-
tions 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 prop-
erty, 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 histo-
ries 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
14 E. LIGGINS
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 spir-
itualist 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 super-
natural: “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. Dicker-
son’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 Victo-
rian 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
also a rewarding genre because it allowed them “more license” to exper-

iment 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 conver-
sation” 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 correspon-
dences 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 under-
standings of space and the supernatural in the different decades examined,
rather than simply constructing an artificial opposition between the Victo-
rians 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 represen-
tations 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 rela-
tion to the maternal, mourning, material culture and formal innovation,
exploring Female Gothic as a protean form and a slippery generic cate-
gory. 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
16 E. LIGGINS
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 read-
ings, 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 problem-
atic, 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 twentieth-
century 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
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 inte-
rior design. They offer another perspective on what Bachelard calls “the
intimate values of inside space,” described in his nostalgic vision as “eulo-
gized 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 circum-
scribed 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 spec-
tral. 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 unfor-
gettable 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 disap-
peared. 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 nineteenth-
century women’s writing has been noted by Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar.72 They read women’s representations of space as always already
18 E. LIGGINS
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 “representa-
tional 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 ‘inhab-
itants’ 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 nine-
teenth 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 inte-
rior, that women might “pervade” space in different ways to men, or that
women might (re)appropriate spaces which have previously been patri-
archal, allows for a rethinking of the positioning of women within the
“spatial world”79 of the ghost story.
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 under-
standings 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 impor-
tance 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 Eliz-
abeth 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 all-
female 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.
20 E. LIGGINS
The domestic interior, the politics of “inside space,” privacy and the
middle-class family, has become a renewed focus of attention for archi-
tectural historians and cultural critics. Well-known Victorian texts such
as Robert Kerr’s The Gentleman’s House: Or, How to Plan English Resi-
dences, 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 deco-
ration of middle-class homes, which were influential into the twentieth
century. Drawing on the work of Kerr, Jane Hamlett’s fascinating explo-
ration 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 occu-
pation 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 Deco-
ration 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 hall-
mark 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.
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 encour-
aged 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 house-
hold,”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 modern-
ization.”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 contradic-
tions of discourses of modernity. If haunted house narratives can be
seen as “fictions of historical collapse, in which distinctions between past
22 E. LIGGINS
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 home-
owners’ 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 Moderni-
sation 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 revi-
sionary 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 imag-
ined 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. Eliz-
abeth 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
female servants can reveal the “malleability” of the dichotomies of master-

servant 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 rele-
vance 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 spec-
tral, 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 prob-
lem” 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 some-
thing 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
24 E. LIGGINS
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 house-
hold management as well as the work of cultural historians in the growing
fields of country house studies and material culture,111 this study recon-
siders 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 attrac-
tions like dungeons, prisons and Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.112
Townshend has meticulously mapped the influence of Radcliffe’s archi-
tectural 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 moder-
nity itself might be characterised and confronted.” Interestingly, he lists
nineteenth-century adjectival combinations emphasising overcrowding,
such as “tourist-crammed” and “tourist-mobbed,” alongside “tourist-
haunted,” 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
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 specta-
torship. 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. Estab-
lished 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 demoli-
tion of medieval churches.122 In her monumental work, The Pleasure
of Ruins (1953), the modernist novelist Rose Macaulay wrote of the
26 E. LIGGINS
“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 rela-
tion 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 ances-
tral 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 fascina-
tion 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 exclu-
sion, visiting practices and patriarchal traditions in ancestral homes and
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 contradic-
tions 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 poten-
tial chamber of horrors, are examined in terms of the lost mother and
stifling Victorian spatial divisions. The chapter uses Bachelard’s discus-
sions 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 rela-
tion 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 “rap-
ture” 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 elec-
tricity 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
28 E. LIGGINS
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 spec-
trality 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 connec-
tions between bomb-damaged London town houses and the lost ancestral
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.
30 E. LIGGINS
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 Subver-
sion 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 Architec-
tural Imagination, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019),
141.
35. Ibid., 234.
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 (Manch-
ester: 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.
32 E. LIGGINS
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.
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 Perver-
sion: 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 Nineteenth-
Century 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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Then aunt took him upstairs to his room, and I was left alone with
Jack, who looked rather out of humour.
"How different from the dry-as-dust old professor we expected!" I

said to him. "He looks quite young."
"He says he is thirty-two," replied Jack. "I don't call that exactly
juvenile."
"It may not seem so to eighteen," I responded loftily.
"I shall be nineteen in July," said Jack hastily, "and you are only a
few months older, so there, Nan."
"I am aware of the fact," I said calmly, "and I consider myself quite
old enough. We were not discussing my age but Professor
Faulkner's."
"He does not like to be called Professor Faulkner," said Jack. "He
told me so."
"Did he?" I said. "That is rather sensible of him. He seems very

nice."
"Oh, of course, you'll think him so," said Jack impatiently. "Girls are
always taken with a fellow who gives himself airs like that."
"Airs like what?" I asked, but Jack vouchsafed no reply, and aunt
coming downstairs the next moment, he at once said that he must be
off. She detained him while she told him about the Americans, a
piece of news which seemed to cheer him somewhat. Then she
reminded him that he and his father were to dine with us on the
following evening, and he departed.
"Oh, auntie, how different from what we expected!" I said, as soon as

we were alone in the drawing-room. "He is not in the least like the
Vicar."
"Very different from what you expected," she retorted. "He is so
pleased with his room, Nan. He says he feels that he has come to a
haven of rest."
"How nice of him!" I said. "You like him, do you not, Auntie?"
"Yes," she said decidedly. "I feel sure that we shall find him easy to
get on with, and I am not often mistaken in first impressions."
Our guest did not join us till the dinner-gong sounded. When he
entered the dining-room I was glad that I had taken pains with my
toilet, for he was carefully dressed, and a little cluster of my
primroses adorned his dinner-jacket. He saw my eyes rest on them,
and said with a smile:
"You cannot think how pleased I was to find some primroses in my

room. It is years since I plucked an English primrose."
"You will be able to do so here," said my aunt; "they are coming out
in our woods, and will be plentiful in a week or two."
"I am so glad to hear it," he said simply. "They will be a delight to

me."
"Then you are not like the immortal Peter Bell?" I said, speaking my
thought almost involuntarily.
"By no means," he said, smiling, "since all the joys of my childhood

seem to live again for me when I see a primrose."
We got on marvellously well together on that first evening. Aunt and I

found him such an interesting companion that we almost forgot how
recent our acquaintance was. He talked a good deal about his life in
India, and it was evident that he had relinquished his work there with
great reluctance. He had met with sundry adventures there, too, of
which he spoke in the simplest fashion, but which showed me he
was a man of fine courage and a good sportsman. I thought that
Jack would like him better when he came to know more about him.
He made very light of the health failure which had brought him home.
It was the result of the warm, moist climate of the place of his
sojourn. He had got the better of the feverish attacks which had
prostrated him. What he lacked now was nervous strength, and that
he believed the fresh air and repose of the country would soon
restore.
When he said this, Aunt Patty explained that I too was suffering from
nervous exhaustion, and, rather to my vexation, told the story of my
disappointment. But as I met his look of perfect comprehension and
sympathy, I felt that I did not mind in the least.
"Ah, Miss Nan, don't I know what that meant for you!" he said. It was
strange how from the first he fell into the way of addressing me as
"Miss Nan," just as if he had known me all my life. And stranger still it
was that, though I was rather wont to stand on my dignity, I felt no
inclination to resent his thus dispensing with ceremony.
"It did seem hard at first," I murmured, "but now I don't mind."
"I know," he said. "It went sorely against the grain with me when I
found that I must resign my post at the college, and go back to
England. My students were very dear to me, and I hoped that I was
impressing some of them for good. But there was no alternative—if I
would go on living. So you and I have the same duty before us at
present—to lay up a fresh store of energy."
"I have found it an easy duty so far," I said cheerfully.
"Indeed, in this fair home, with the spring unfolding about us, and all
the lovely summer to come, it promises to be a delightful one," was
his ready response.
So a bond of mutual comprehension was at once established

between me and Alan Faulkner.
Aunt Patty got on with him equally well, and I could see by the way in
which he listened to her and deferred to her that he felt the attraction
of her unaffected goodness and kindness.
Nor was the Vicar less pleased when he made the acquaintance of
our guest on the following evening. He found an affinity with the
Professor at once, and showed a desire to monopolise his attention;
but whenever, as we sat at the table, their talk threatened to become
too abstruse, Mr. Faulkner would seek, by some explanatory word, to
draw me and aunt into it, or would try to divert it into a more ordinary
channel. How deep they plunged, or how far back in human history
they went after we left them to themselves, I cannot say. Their
conversation soon wearied Jack, for within five minutes, he joined us
in the drawing-room.
Jack was in rather a perverse mood.
"I suppose that is the sort of chap the governor would like me to be,"
he growled, "able to jaw on learned subjects in that conceited
fashion."
"Then I am afraid he will be disappointed," I said severely; "for even

if you succeed in passing your exam, you will never be in the least
like Mr. Faulkner."
"I am exceedingly glad to hear it!" he said with a disagreeable laugh.
It was so odd of Jack to take such a dislike to the Professor. I never

saw the least trace of conceit in his bearing, and he showed the
utmost consideration for Jack. I was vexed with the boy for being so
unreasonable; but it was of no use my saying anything—he only
grew worse.
For my part the more I saw of Alan Faulkner, the better I liked him. I
was glad we had time to get well acquainted with him before any
other guests arrived. For aunt's sake I was, of course, glad, but
otherwise I could have regretted that the Americans were coming on
the morrow.
CHAPTER VII
THE AMERICANS
MR. JOSIAH DICKS and his daughter arrived on the following day,
just as we were about to sit down to luncheon. They drove in a fly
from Chelmsford and brought with them a goodly array of trunks and
valises, though they presently explained that this represented but a
fraction of their luggage.
He was a tall, thin, cadaverous-looking man, and had the yellow,

parchment-like complexion with which I had credited Professor
Faulkner; but his restless movements and keen, alert glances
showed him to be very much alive. His forehead was bald, save for a
wisp of hair which stood up on it in such a manner as to give him
somewhat the appearance of a cockatoo. His daughter was a tall,
slight, smart-looking girl. Her face was rather pasty in its colouring;
but the sharp, piquant features were not devoid of charm. She wore
a most remarkable hat, with so many wings sticking out of it that one
shuddered to think how many small birds had been slaughtered for
the gratification of her vanity. I could not admire it, yet it was of a
style that suited her. She was a striking figure as she entered the
house wearing a long, drab travelling coat with gilt buttons, and a
magnificent boa of Russian sable, with a muff of the same fur,
depending from her neck by a gold chain.
"So this is 'Gay Bowers!'" she said in a high, thin voice with the
unmistakable enunciation of an American as she looked about her,
frankly observant, "and really it is as pretty as its name. I call this old
hall perfectly lovely."
"It's real antique, this," said her father, speaking with a still more
striking accent, "that staircase now—"
But here my aunt's advance cut short his words.
"Mr. Dicks, I believe?" she said.
"Right you are, ma'am," he replied; "you see Josiah Dicks of

Indianapolis, and this is my daughter, Pollie—or, as she prefers to be
called, Paulina. We've come, as I wrote you we should, and I hope
you can take us in."
"I have some vacant rooms which I shall be happy to show you,"
said Aunt Patty, "but we were just going to lunch; will you not sit
down with us, and we can discuss business matters later."
"I guess that will suit us excellently, eh! What say you, Pollie?" was
his response. "The fact is, we left our hotel soon after ten, and the
fresh country air on the way hither has given a decided edge to our
appetites."
I took Miss Dicks to my room to refresh herself after the journey. She
sniffed with her pretty little nose as we went up the staircase, and
said, "How deliciously fresh it smells here! I hate the smell of
London, don't you? Are there many people staying in the house?"
"Why, no," I said, rather embarrassed by the question. "You see it is

a new thing for us to have boarders at 'Gay Bowers,' and at present
there are only ourselves and Mr. Faulkner."
She laughed and shrugged her shoulders. "Well, to be sure, and I

thought there would be twenty at least! I looked forward to music and
dancing in the evening!"
I felt inclined to laugh too, but I answered gravely, "Then I am afraid

our home will hardly suit you, for it is small, as you see, and we
could never accommodate more than half the number you name."
"I see," she said with a little pout. "Well, I must make the best of it
now, I suppose. I like the look of the lady, Mrs.—what is her name?"
"Mrs. Lucas," I said; "she is my aunt."
"Oh!" Thereupon she turned and looked at me from head to foot with
a thoroughness which let slip no detail of my appearance. My colour
rose, yet I gave her credit for intending no insolence by her cool
survey.
A moment later, as she removed her hat with her eyes on the mirror,
I took the opportunity to observe her more closely. Her hair was a
pale brown and fairly plentiful. It presented an arrangement of poufs
and combs, and tortoiseshell ornaments, which was quite novel to
me. I found it more extraordinary than beautiful, though when I got
used to the style I saw that it suited her.
The travellers had acquired the art of quickly making themselves at

home. As we took our luncheon they spoke and acted as if "Gay
Bowers" belonged to them. More than once I saw Aunt Patty flush
with resentment at what she evidently considered an impertinence.
But she had the good sense to hide her annoyance.
Cook, knowing that strangers were expected, had risen to the

occasion and sent up some very dainty dishes. Josiah Dicks did
ample justice to her excellent pastry, although he assured us he was
a martyr to dyspepsia.
When luncheon was over, aunt offered to show our visitors the
rooms she could give them. As they followed her from the room,
Miss Dicks turned and said to me in a very audible undertone, "How
very good-looking he is!" She jerked her head towards the window
where Alan Faulkner stood playing with Sweep. It was extraordinary
how that dog had taken to him. Ever since my arrival I had sought in
vain to coax her into accompanying me on my walks. She had
always preferred to wander alone about uncle's favourite haunts, or
to crouch disconsolately on the mat outside his former sanctum; but
now she was ready to follow Mr. Faulkner anywhere.
"Oh, hush!" I responded in a whisper to Miss Dicks's remark. "He
may hear you."
"Would it matter if he did?" she returned coolly. "Men like to be told

that they are good-looking."
"That may be," I replied; "but it is a taste I should not care to gratify."
She laughed.
"Pollie Dicks," called her father from the staircase, "are you coming
to choose your room?"
"He means to stay," she said to me with a sagacious nod, "and I've
no objection."
When she came downstairs a little later, Aunt Patty told me that Miss
Dicks had chosen the room on the left of mine. It was a large room,
commanding the front of the house. Her father had had to content
himself with a smaller room at the back.
"He seems much pleased with the place," said my aunt, "but his
daughter is evidently afraid of finding it dull."
"Do you like them, auntie?" I asked.
An odd smile crossed her face.
"They are mortals," she said. "I don't quite know what to make of
them, but I mean to like them, Nan. I cannot afford to quarrel with my
bread and butter."
"Still, I do think that they might have behaved a little more like
'guests' at luncheon," I said. "Mr. Dicks asked for 'crackers' just as if
he were in an hotel."
"I must confess that I felt rather riled for a moment," said my aunt;
"but I am sure he did not mean to annoy me. They are evidently
used to hotel life, and they cannot guess, nor do I wish that they
should, how it feels to me to receive strangers thus into my home.
My common-sense tells me that I must not allow myself to be over-
sensitive. I only hope Mr. Faulkner will like them."
"He seems to like them," I said.
Indeed I had been astonished to see the friendly interest in the

newcomers which he displayed, and the readiness with which he
talked to them.
The following day was Easter Sunday, and for once the weather was
all that one could wish it to be upon that day. It was not exactly
warm, but the sun shone brightly, and there was a delicious,
indescribable feeling of spring in the air. The trees were budding,
and the hedges breaking into leaf. Every day now showed some
fresh sign of spring's advance.
We all went to church in the morning. Mr. Dicks was struck with the
venerable beauty of our church, but he was severe in his criticism of
the service and the sermon. He had no patience with the defects of
our choir, and certainly their singing was very rural. He was anxious
to impress us with the superior order of things to be found in
America.
Jack joined us after the service, and we all, with the exception of my
aunt, took a short walk before luncheon. Mr. Dicks explained that he
was not fond of walking, but that his doctor had advised him to walk
several miles every day. His daughter frankly said that she hated it,
and certainly the smart pointed shoes she wore appeared ill adapted
to our country roads. I saw Mr. Faulkner looking at them, and
wondered whether he were admiring, or merely struck, as I was, with
their unsuitability.
"Pollie is fond of cycling," said Mr. Dicks, looking at me. "Do you
cycle?"
"I can," I said, "but unfortunately I have no bicycle of my own. I use

my sister's sometimes when I am at home."
"That is a pity," he said. "Pollie's machine will be sent down to-
morrow. It would be nice if you could ride with her."
"Do you cycle?" asked Miss Dicks, turning to Mr. Faulkner.
"I have not ridden since I came back from India," he said.
"Did you ride there?" she asked.
"Yes; I often rode with my students," he said. "In the province where I
was living the roads were as smooth and level as a billiard-table, so
that riding was delightful."
"Then I don't wonder that you have not ridden since," Jack said.
"Are the roads very bad about here?" she asked, glancing at him.
"You ride, of course?"
"They are not so bad," he replied, "but I don't say they would
compare favourably with a billiard-table."
"You will ride with me, won't you?" she said to him with a fascinating
smile.
"With pleasure," he responded, adding loyally, "and we'll hire a

machine at Chelmsford, so that Miss Nan can accompany us."
"And you will come, too, will you not?" she said, turning towards
Professor Faulkner.
I did not hear his reply, for at that moment Mr. Dicks addressed a
question to me; but it struck me that she was rather a forward young
woman.
Two days later a consignment of trunks arrived for Miss Dicks. She
had already displayed such a variety of pretty and fashionable
changes of attire that I wondered how many more clothes she had.
Judging by the size of her trunks she might have had a different
gown for each day of the year.
She appeared delighted to receive her luggage, and spent the
greater part of the next day in her room, engaged in unpacking the
boxes. Late in the afternoon I was going upstairs when I heard a
voice calling, "Nan, Nan!" Glancing upwards, I saw Miss Dicks
standing at the door of her room. I had not given her permission to
address me by my Christian name, and it would not have occurred to
me to call her "Pollie." But this was only another instance of the
inimitable coolness with which she made herself at home with us all.
I could only conclude that her free and easy bearing was typically
American, and endeavour to reconcile myself to it with as good a
grace as possible.
"Do come here, Nan, and look at my things," she cried as she saw
me.
As I entered her room I exclaimed at the sight it presented. Bed,

sofa, table, chairs, and even the floor were littered with all kinds of
choice and pretty things, making the place look like a bazaar. There
were mosaics and marbles from Italy, Roman lamps, conchas,
cameos, exquisite bits of Venetian glass, corals and tortoise-shells
from Naples, silk blankets from Como, and olive-wood boxes from
Bellagio. But it is vain to attempt to name all the things that met my
eyes. I think there were specimens of the arts and manufactures of
every place which she and her father had visited.
"Oh, how lovely!" I exclaimed. "But what will you do with all these
things? Are you going to open a shop?"
"Not exactly," she said with a laugh. "I am going to take them back to
America with me. Some are for myself, and some for my friends.
Father wanted me not to unpack them till we got them home, but I
felt that I must look and see if they were all safe."
For the next half-hour I had nothing to do but admire. There were
little boxes packed with small and rare ornaments, which she opened
one by one to show me the contents. I felt sure now that Josiah
Dicks must be a millionaire. It was a delight to me to see so many
pretty things, and their possessor seemed to enjoy my appreciation
of them.
"Aunt Maria begged me to buy everything I wanted. She said, 'Now

don't come home and say "I wish I had bought this, that, or the
other." Get all that pleases you while you are there,'" Miss Dicks
explained.
"You seem to have obeyed her most thoroughly," I remarked. "Does

your aunt live with you at home?"
"Yes, I have no mother, you know," she said. "She died when I was a
child. She nursed my little brother through scarlet fever. He died, and
then she took it and died."
She told me this in the most matter-of-fact way; but somehow I felt
differently towards her after she said that. I was feeling rather
envious of the girl who had carte blanche to spend money so
lavishly, and wondering what Olive and Peggy would say when they
heard of it, but now I felt that, though we girls had so few of the
things that money could buy, yet, as long as we had father and
mother and one another, we were richer than Paulina Dicks.
When I had looked at everything, she startled me by saying:
"Now I want you to choose something for yourself."
My colour rose as I replied by saying hurriedly:
"Oh, no, I cannot do that!"
"Why not?" she asked, surveying me with frank surprise. "When you
see that I have such heaps of things? I can never make use of them
all myself." But I still decidedly declined.
"Take this coral necklace," she said. "You were admiring it, and it
would look pretty on the black frock you wear of an evening. Why,
what is the matter with you? Are you proud? I believe you are, for
you never call me by my name, although I call you 'Nan.'"
"I will call you whatever you please," I said, "but I cannot accept any
of your pretty things, for you did not buy them for me."
"No, because I did not know you when I bought them; but I meant to
give a good many away. Oh, very well, Miss Darracott, I see you do
not mean to be friendly with Paulina Dicks!"
So in the end I had to yield, and accepted a little brooch of Florentine

mosaic, which I have to this day. And I promised that I would call her
Paulina.
"Paulina Adelaide is my name," she said. "No one calls me Pollie

except my father. And one other person," she added, as an
afterthought.
Presently she asked me if I thought Mrs. Lucas would like to see her
collection of pretty things. I said I was sure that she would, and ran
to call my aunt. When aunt came, Paulina exhibited everything
afresh, and described in an amusing fashion how she had made
some of her purchases. The dressing-bell rang ere aunt had seen
everything. Then their owner plaintively observed that she did not
know how she should get them all into their boxes again. Unpacking
was much easier than packing, she feared. Thereupon aunt and I
pledged ourselves to help her after dinner, with the result that we
were busy in her room till nearly midnight.
Paulina came to the dinner-table wearing a set of quaint cameo

ornaments, which excited Mr. Faulkner's attention. It appeared that
he knew something of cameos. He had passed through Italy on his
way home from India, and he and the Americans were soon
comparing their experiences of Vesuvius, Sorrento, and Capri, or
discussing the sights of Rome.
I listened in silence, feeling out of it all and rather discontented as I

compared Paulina's exquisitely-made Parisian frock with my own
homely white blouse. I must have looked bored when suddenly I
became aware that Alan Faulkner was observing me with a keen,
penetrating glance that seemed to read my very thoughts.
"We are wearying Miss Nan with our traveller's talk," he said. "She
has yet to learn the fascination of Italy. But the time will come, Miss
Nan."
"Never!" I said almost bitterly. "I see not the least chance of such
good fortune for me, and therefore I will not let my mind dwell on the
delights of travel!"
The look of wonder and regret with which Alan Faulkner regarded
me made me instantly ashamed of the morose manner in which I
had responded to his kindly remark. I heartily wished that I could
recall my words, or remove the impression they had created.
"Whatever he may think of Pollie Dicks," I said to myself as we rose

from the table, "he cannot help seeing that she is more good-natured
than I am."
CHAPTER VIII
A PRINCELY GIFT
"IS Miss Nan here?" asked Mr. Dicks, opening the door of the
drawing-room, where I had been pouring out tea for Aunt Patty and
such of her guests as liked the fragrant beverage. Josiah Dicks
never drank tea; his daughter took it with a slice of lemon in Russian
fashion.
"Yes, I am here," I responded. "What can I do for you, Mr. Dicks?"
"Just come this way, young lady, that is all," he said. "I have
something to show you."
As I rose and went towards him, I saw a look of amusement on Alan

Faulkner's face. Our eyes met, and we smiled at each other as I
passed him. He and I got a little quiet fun sometimes out of the
Americans. I could not help thinking that he wanted to come too and
see whatever Mr. Dicks had to show me.
It was a lovely day towards the end of April, the first really warm day
we had had. The hall door was open. Signing to me to follow him,
Josiah Dicks led the way to the back of the house, where was the
tool-house in which Pollie's bicycle was kept. She had already taken
one or two rides with Jack Upsher, but there had been some little
difficulty in hiring a bicycle for me, and I had not yet had a ride with
her.
As I approached the tool-house I saw Paulina within, flushed with

sundry exertions. She had just removed the last wrapping from a
brand-new machine.
"What!" I exclaimed. "Another bicycle! What can you want with two?"
Her beautiful machine had already moved me to admiration, if not to
envy, and here she was with another first-class one!
"Pollie does not want two, but I guess you can do with one," said Mr.
Dicks. "This is yours, Miss Nan."
I think I was never so taken aback in my life. I did not know what to
say. It seemed impossible that I could accept so valuable a gift from
one who was almost a stranger; yet I could see that both Josiah
Dicks and his daughter would be dreadfully hurt if I refused it. I knew
too that he did not like the idea of Paulina's riding about the country
alone, and that this was his way of securing a companion for her. I
tried to say that I would regard it as a loan; but that would not do. I
had to accept it. I had heard mother say that it sometimes takes
more grace to receive a gift than to bestow one, and I felt the truth of
the words now. I fear I expressed my thanks very awkwardly, yet I
was truly grateful in spite of my overwhelming sense of obligation.
"You must try it," cried Paulina eagerly. "Let us take it round to the
front of the house, and I'll mount you."
In a few minutes I was riding up and down the short drive before the
house. Mr. Faulkner caught sight of me from the drawing-room
window, and he and aunt came out to see what it meant. Aunt Patty
was as much astonished as I was by Josiah Dicks's munificence; but
she had more presence of mind and thanked him very warmly for his
kindness to me.
"That's all right," he said; "you've no need to thank me. It's just as it
should be. I like to see young people enjoy themselves. They'll never
be young but once."
Meanwhile Mr. Faulkner had been quietly examining my machine,

and he told me, in an aside, that it had all the latest improvements,
and was one of the best he had ever seen.
Certainly I found it an easy one to ride, and after a little practice I

began to feel as if it were part of myself. It was too late for us to do
much that day; but Paulina got out her machine, and we rode as far
as the village. As we passed the Vicarage we caught sight of Jack in
the garden. He shouted as he saw me spinning by, and I had to halt
and show him my delightful gift. He seemed almost as pleased as I
was. We arranged forthwith to ride with him on the following
afternoon. After dinner, I managed to get away by myself for a time,
and wrote a long letter to mother, for I felt that I must tell her about
my present.
It would not be easy to say how much enjoyment I derived from Mr.
Dicks's gift. As long as the weather continued fair, Paulina and I rode
every day. Jack accompanied us as often as he could, and was
sorely tempted to curtail the time he devoted to his studies. Then
one morning, Mr. Faulkner went to London by an early train, and
when he came back in the evening he brought a bicycle with him.
After that he too was often our companion. If we rode out a party of
four, Jack always elected to ride beside me, while Paulina seemed
equally bent on securing Mr. Faulkner as her escort, so that I had
little opportunity of talking with him. This vexed me somewhat, for
Alan Faulkner had generally interesting things to tell one, whereas
Jack's never-ceasing flow of small talk was apt to become a trifle
wearisome. We had some delightful rides and visited most of the
picturesque villages or fine old churches within twenty miles of "Gay
Bowers." But after Miss Cottrell came to stay with us, I was less free
to scour the country.
Colonel Hyde and Miss Cottrell arrived about the same time, when
spring was merging into summer, and we fondly hoped that cold
winds were over. There was no other connection between these two
individuals. The Colonel was an old friend of Mr. Upsher's. He was
Jack's godfather, and being a widower and childless, the chief
attraction "Gay Bowers" had for him was that it was so near
Greentree Vicarage.
Miss Cottrell might have been fifty. She informed Aunt Patty that she
was thirty-nine, and my aunt charitably believed her, though she
certainly looked much older. She was fond of the country, and her
coming was simply the result of seeing our advertisement. She
furnished aunt with references to persons of good social standing,
yet somehow she always struck us as not being exactly a
gentlewoman. She said she had been a governess for many years, a
fact which perhaps accounted for her worn and faded appearance,
but had taught only in the "best families." As she occasionally let fall
an "h" or made a slip in grammar, we came to the conclusion that the
"best families" known to her had not a high standard of education.
She was fond of talking of a certain Lady Mowbray, with whom she
had lived in closest intimacy for many years. "Dear Lady Mowbray"
was quoted on every possible occasion, till we grew rather weary of
her name, and longed to suggest that she should be left to rest in her
grave in peace. We knew she was dead, for Miss Cottrell had
spoken of the "handsome legacy" which this friend had left her. This
sum of money, together with some property she had inherited from
an uncle, had rendered it unnecessary for her longer to "take a
situation," a consummation for which she seemed devoutly thankful.
Yet Miss Cottrell was by no means of an indolent nature. She prided

herself on her active habits, and was especially fond of gardening.
Her love for this pursuit brought her into collision with old Hobbes,
our gardener. He could not forgive her for presuming to instruct him
on certain points, and when she offered to help him, he well-nigh
resigned his post. In order to secure peace between them, aunt had
to make over to her a tiny plot of ground, where she could grow what
she liked, and make what experiments she pleased, Hobbes being
strictly forbidden to interfere with it. The scorn with which he
regarded her attempts at horticulture was sublime.
Unfortunately, though fond of exercise, Miss Cottrell did not care for
solitary walks, and I often felt it incumbent on me to be her
companion. Her society was far from agreeable to me. It was
wonderful how little we had in common. Although she had been a
governess, she seemed absolutely without literary tastes, and even
devoid of all ideas that were not petty and trivial. Every attempt to
hold an intelligent conversation with her brought me face to face with
a dead wall.
All she cared for was to dwell on personal details of her own life or
the lives of others. She had an insatiable curiosity, and was for ever
asking me questions concerning my aunt or her guests, or my own
home life, which I could not or would not answer. Her love of gossip
led her to visit daily the one small shop the village could boast, and
marvellous were the tales she brought us from thence. She was
ready to talk to any one and every one whom she might encounter.
She was fond of visiting the cottagers, and they appreciated her
visits, for she listened attentively to the most garrulous, and told
them what to do for their rheumatism or cramp, and how to treat the
ailments of their children. I must say she was very kind-hearted; her
good nature and her love of flowers were her redeeming qualities.
She professed to admire the Vicar's preaching, and she often found
cause to visit the Vicarage. She paid both the Vicar and his friend
the Colonel more attention than they could appreciate. And the worst
of it was that she was slower to take a hint than any one I had ever
known. How Aunt Patty bore with her irritating ways I cannot tell.
Miss Cottrell certainly put a severe strain upon the politeness and
forbearance of her hostess. She was not a bad sort of woman, but
only insufferably vulgar, tactless and ill-bred.
Paulina made fun of her, yet neither she nor her father seemed to
object to Miss Cottrell's cross-questioning, or to shun her society; but
Colonel Hyde and Professor Faulkner would make their escape from
the drawing-room whenever it was possible, if that lady entered it.
Aunt confessed to me that she longed to dismiss this unwelcome
guest, but had no sufficient excuse.
She had not been with us very long when Josiah Dicks had an attack
of illness. Miss Cottrell, having wrung from me the statement that I
believed him to be a millionaire, evinced the utmost interest in the
American. She annoyed me very much by saying that she could see
that Professor Faulkner was looking after his money by courting
Paulina. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It was, of course,
possible that Alan Faulkner might be attracted by Paulina, but he
was not the man to woo her for the sake of her father's wealth. But it
was absurd of me to mind what such a one as Miss Cottrell said.
Though he was very far from well, Mr. Dicks would not stay in his
room, but hung about the house looking the colour of one of the
sovereigns he spent so lavishly. Miss Cottrell was full of sympathy
for him. She suggested various remedies, which he tried one after
another, while he rejected Aunt Patty's sensible advice that he
should send for a medical man from Chelmsford.
Miss Cottrell's solicitude contrasted oddly with Paulina's apparent

indifference. When she came downstairs the next morning she was
wearing a hat, and carried a coat over her arm, and she said quite
calmly as she took her place at the breakfast-table:
"Poppa says he is worse. He has been in awful pain all night, and
has not slept a wink. He thinks he is dying."
"My dear," ejaculated Aunt Patty, "I am distressed to hear it. And are
you going for the doctor?"
"Oh, no," said Paulina, opening her eyes widely. "He isn't dying, you
know. I am going to London."
"On his account—to get him medicine perhaps?" suggested my aunt

anxiously.
Paulina glanced across the table with amusement in her eyes.
"I am going to London to have a new gown fitted," she said, "and to
do some shopping."
"But, my dear Miss Dicks, what will your father do without you? Is it
well that you should leave him alone all day when he is suffering
so?"
My aunt looked amazed as she put these queries.
"Oh, he says now that he will see a doctor," Paulina replied. "I can
call and tell him to come if he lives near the station. I should do
Poppa no good by staying at home. He has had these attacks
before, and they will take their course. I knew he would be ill when I
saw him eating that salmon."
"But would you not like to see the doctor yourself?" aunt said.
"Cannot you put off going to London for a day or two?"
"That would inconvenience Madame Hortense," Paulina said gravely.

"No, I had better keep my appointment. I know you will look after
Poppa, Mrs. Lucas, and you will help her, will you not, Miss Cottrell?"

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The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost

Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity,

The Haunted House

Editorial Advisory Board

More information about this series at

The Haunted House

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover design by eStudioCalamar

decoration and the short story, many thanks to Rachel Dickinson,

1 Introduction: Women in the Haunted House 1

2 The Old Ancestral Mansion and Forbidden Spaces

3 Left Out in the Cold: Exclusion and Communications

Between the Drawing-Room and the Father’s Library: “The

4 The Rapture of Old Houses: Dust, Decay and Sacred

5 “Ghosts Went Out When Electricity Came in”:

6 Finding Her Place: Claustrophobia, Mourning

7 Ideal Homes? Emptiness, Dereliction and the Ruins

Introduction: Women in the Haunted House

Edith Nesbit’s “The Shadow” (1905), a short story about something

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Freudian notions of the uncanny and the familiar/unfamiliar distinc-

disquiet and estrangement, the terrors of dwelling. Missing from these

when Victorian gendered divisions within the home and mistress-servant

labyrinth, vessel of desire and of terror.”16 Arguing for the complexities of

explorations of the past as well as shifting attitudes to the domestic inte-

Women Writers, the Ghost

violent patriarchal villain.25 The groundbreaking work of Sandra Gilbert

It is in the increasingly popular short story form, with its ellipses,

The earlier ghosts seemed to be more reserved, to know their spectral

domesticity itself, particularly in terms of women’s specific experiences of

for the ghost story, also includes an important section on “Haunting

affected the development of the ghost story.50 Luke Thurston suggests

also a rewarding genre because it allowed them “more license” to exper-

Domestic Space and the Architectural Uncanny

productively read alongside contemporary commentaries on space and

confining, tomb-like, “anxiety-inducing,”73 making the connections to

Feminist geographers and philosophers have intervened in these

Social space can no longer be imagined simply in terms of a territory of

This acknowledges the need to pay attention to the plurality of women’s

The Haunted House and Modernity

and present are questioned, violated or erased,” as Freeman contends,96

female servants can reveal the “malleability” of the dichotomies of master-

According to Lucy Delap, domestic service was “more integrated into

gaze infuses Victorian and modernist descriptions of the haunted house,

“ruin-pleasure” experienced in the contemplation of broken and decaying

Scottish town houses. It explores women’s ghostly occupation of the

manifesto for domestic privacy The Decoration of Houses (1897), which

36. Claire Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in

52. Jen Cadwallader, Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction

78. Heidegger, “Building,” 7.

"How different from the dry-as-dust old professor we expected!" I

"It may not seem so to eighteen," I responded loftily.

"Did he?" I said. "That is rather sensible of him. He seems very

"Oh, auntie, how different from what we expected!" I said, as soon as

"You cannot think how pleased I was to find some primroses in my

"I am so glad to hear it," he said simply. "They will be a delight to

"By no means," he said, smiling, "since all the joys of my childhood

We got on marvellously well together on that first evening. Aunt and I

"I have found it an easy duty so far," I said cheerfully.

So a bond of mutual comprehension was at once established

Jack was in rather a perverse mood.

"Then I am afraid he will be disappointed," I said severely; "for even

"I am exceedingly glad to hear it!" he said with a disagreeable laugh.