No Direction Home: The Uncanny In Literature

By Francis Booth

The purpose of this book will be to attempt to show, at great length, that the literature that falls under the category Freud and Jentsch describe as unheimlich is a kind of literature that at first makes us feel at home, feel comforted, feel safe and reassured and then, surreptitiously, stealthily, silently, leads us astray, takes us off the beaten track and into a place we do not quite recognise, into an unhome.

Like the thief in the night, like the Pied Piper, like the Big Bad Wolf, the uncanny story steals us away from the reassurance, the safety, the cosiness, of our very familiar, very homelike home and quietly, almost unnoticed, delivers us to our not-home, our unhome, a place which is both familiar and strange, a place where we ought to feel comforted, where we ought to, and where we used to, feel ourselves, feel at home.

But instead, we find that the rug – metaphorically the rug in front of our cosy hearth – has been pulled from under us. We are suddenly in a place where we are not reassured, not ourselves anymore. Not, in other words, at home.

We may have arrived in this familiar yet strange place unknowingly, only slowly realising that we have got lost somewhere along the road, that we missed a turning some way back. Or perhaps we may have been plonked by the writer directly in medias res, dropped right into the middle of this strange new world and left to fend for ourselves with no direction seeming to be home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wu Wei Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227607768

Francis Booth

As well as Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938 Francis Booth is the author of several books on twentieth century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive) No Direction Home: The Uncanny In Literature Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant Garde A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell A Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman's Novel Francis is also the author of two novel series: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers Young adult fantasy series The Watchers

Book preview

Prolegomena

With the word unheimlich the German language seems to have produced a rather fortunate formation. Without a doubt, this word appears to express that someone to whom something ‘uncanny’ happens is not quite ‘at home’ or ‘at ease’ in the situation concerned, that the thing is or at least seems to be foreign to him. In brief, the word suggests that a lack of orientation is bound up with the impression of the uncanniness of a thing or incident.

Ernst Jentsch, On the Psychology of the Uncanny, 1906

The uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar. . . unheimlich is clearly the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, vertraut [intimate, familiar], and it seems obvious that something should be frightening precisely because it is unknown and unfamiliar. But of course the converse is not true: not everything new and unfamiliar is frightening. All one can say is that what is novel may well prove frightening and uncanny; some things that are novel are indeed frightening, but by no means all. Something must be added to the novel and the unfamiliar if it is to become uncanny.

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 1919

Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.

FWJ Schelling

~~~~~

What do we mean by the uncanny in stories and novels? What did Freud mean by it? And what does the word uncanny really mean? Is uncanny even the right word?

Although Freud’s seminal work is universally known in English as The Uncanny, this is not actually a very accurate translation of its German title, Das Unheimliche. Freud himself worries at length about the word, devoting several pages of his short essay to various German language dictionary definitions of heimlich, including: belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, dear and intimate, homely, etc.

My own 1909 Cassell’s German-English dictionary, from close to the time Freud was writing, translates unheimlich as:

adj. uncomfortable, uneasy; gloomy; sinister.

and heimlich as:

adj. & adv. private, secluded, secret; stealthy, underhand; secretive, close; domesticated; homely, comfortable, snug.

A major issue in translating unheimlich as uncanny is that it does not capture the symmetrical nature of its opposition with heimlich: uncanny is not the opposite of canny. But if we translate unheimlich as unhomely or as – a word I made up – unhomelike, this does work as the opposite of homelike, another word I made up. And these two antonyms, homelike and unhomelike, nicely describe the two modes of storytelling I want to contrast in this survey of uncanny literature.

~~~~~

So in this book I will generally translate unheimlich as unhomelike and heimlich as homelike, even though neither of these is a normal English word. Using this translation, part of Freud’s introduction reads:

This species of the frightening would then constitute the unhomelike, and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or arose from another affect. In the second place, if this really is the secret nature of the unhomelike, we can understand why German usage allows the homelike to switch to its opposite, the unhomelike.

In this translation Freud captures exactly the move from the homelike to the unhomelike that I believe – and intend to show at great length – is the essence of the uncanny in literature.

~~~~~

The purpose of this book will be to attempt to show, at great length, that the literature that falls under the category Freud and Jentsch describe as unheimlich is a kind of literature that at first makes us feel at home, feel comforted, feel safe and reassured and then, surreptitiously, stealthily, silently, leads us astray, takes us off the beaten track and into a place we do not quite recognise, into an unhome.

Like the thief in the night, like the Pied Piper, like the Big Bad Wolf, the uncanny story steals us away from the reassurance, the safety, the cosiness, of our very familiar, very homelike home and quietly, almost unnoticed, delivers us to our not-home, our unhome, a place which is both familiar and strange, a place where we ought to feel comforted, where we ought to, and where we used to, feel ourselves, feel at home.

But instead, we find that the rug – metaphorically the rug in front of our cosy hearth – has been pulled from under us. We are suddenly in a place where we are not reassured, not ourselves anymore. Not, in other words, at home.

We may have arrived in this familiar yet strange place unknowingly, only slowly realising that we have got lost somewhere along the road, that we missed a turning some way back. Or perhaps we may have been plonked by the writer directly in medias res, dropped right into the middle of this strange new world and left to fend for ourselves with no direction seeming to be home.

A poem of Robert Frost’s has the lines, Home is the place where, when you have to go there / They have to take you in.

But supposing they don’t?

Supposing, when you get there, that the place you thought was home isn’t home anymore?

Then what?

Then you’re in an uncanny story.

Let’s hope, for your sake, that you can find the direction home before the story takes over and you are stuck in the unhome.

Forever.

~~~~~

home is the resort

Of love, of joy, of peace and plenty, where,

Supporting and supported, polish’d friends,

And dear relations mingle into bliss.

This quote, from a poem by the Scottish poet James Thomson, is the epigraph to what is usually considered the first Gothic and perhaps the first uncanny novel: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. But she has taken the lines out of context: the first line of the quote actually starts, For home he had not; and the line after Radcliffe’s quote says, But this the rugged savage never felt.

Thomson’s point is that the idea of home is something modern civilisation has brought us but it can also be taken away: the homelike can become unhomelike, suddenly, inexplicably, without warning, at any time, and this is the essence of the uncanny or weird story.

~~~~~

The unhome in the uncanny story will probably have recognisable elements of the home, but they may be reversed, mirrored, inverted, like The Upside Down in the Netflix series Stranger Things, which is a mirror of the very homelike small middle-American town where the kids live. It is inverted not just physically but also morally, as the place where light becomes dark and good becomes evil.

Or as where the Pevensey children go through the wardrobe of their new home – which has not yet become homelike to them – and stand on the brink of Narnia. Behind them were coats hanging on pegs, in front of them were snow-covered trees.

In both cases there is a border region between the two worlds, the home and the unhome, as there is where Lewis Carroll’s Alice can see at the same time both her own familiar, homelike world and its mirror image. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. And in Alice’s other book, as she falls down the rabbit hole it all seems very homelike at first; in fact the tunnel seems as though it must be someone’s actual home that Alice is just visiting on her way through.

First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled ORANGE MARMALADE, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

Despite Alice generally enjoying her adventures in the various unhomelike worlds, Carroll emphasised in the preface to The Nursery Alice – the more reassuring version for younger readers who couldn’t take too much of the uncanny – that Alice really would have preferred to have stayed in her own, homelike home rather than venture into a series of unhomelike situations.

Full to the brim with girlish glee,

A child, a very child is she,

Whose dream of Heaven is still to be

At Home : for Home is Bliss.

~~~~~

In fantasy author Neil Gaiman’s Young Adult novel Coraline, and in the film of it, the eleven-year-old heroine has the key to an old wooden door in their new home, which is an old house that has partly been converted to flats. Her mother shows Coraline that the door opens only on to a brick wall: when the house had been converted the door had just been left there. But one day, when she is by herself, Coraline opens the door and the wall has gone; where the wall was there is now a corridor, familiar but not familiar, like Alice’s tunnel but horizontal not vertical.

Coraline walked down the corridor uneasily. There was something very familiar about it.

The carpet beneath her feet was the same carpet they had in their flat. The wallpaper was the same wallpaper they had. The picture hanging in the hall was the same that they had hanging in their hallway at home.

She knew where she was: she was in her own home. She hadn’t left.

She shook her head, confused.

She stared at the picture hanging on the wall: no, it wasn’t exactly the same. The picture they had in their own hallway showed a boy in old-fashioned clothes staring at some bubbles. But now the expression on his face was different – he was looking at the bubbles as if he was planning to do something very nasty indeed to them. And there was something peculiar about his eyes.

Coraline stared at his eyes, trying to work out what exactly was different.

She almost had it when somebody said, ‘Coraline?’

It sounded like her mother. Coraline went into the kitchen, where the voice had come from. A woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother.

Only . . .

Neil Gaiman, Coraline, 2002

Only she isn’t Coraline’s mother, she is an inverted version of her, living in this inverted version of Coraline’s house: This is her other mother. When Coraline returns to her real house, her real parents have disappeared. Coraline’s home has become unhomelike without them; her only home has disappeared. Coraline has to go back through the door to the inverted version of it to look for her parents and make her home homelike again.

Doors in uncanny stories are often a gateway to somewhere else altogether, the border between a home and an unhome. Elsewhere Gaiman has said, I love doors. Anything that leads to possibilities. His novel Neverwhere, about an inverted London called London Below, has a heroine called Door, short for Doreen. At the beginning of the novel the hero meets a strange old woman. He tells her he is going to London.

‘You got a long way to go . . .’ she said, puzzled.

‘London,’ Richard told her.

‘Not just London . . .’ the old woman paused. ‘Not any London I know.’ It started to rain, then, softly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It starts with doors.’

‘Doors?’

She nodded. The rain fell harder, pattering on the roofs and on the asphalt of the road. ‘I’d watch out for doors if I were you.’

Neil Gaiman Neverwhere , 1996

Wise words. And good advice for anyone who finds themselves in an uncanny story. Don’t open a door if you don’t know what’s behind it.

~~~~~

In Tzvetan Todorov’s influential book about fantastic literature [la littérature fantastique], he describes the fantastic in a similar way to my interpretation of the uncanny, though he regards the fantastic and uncanny genres as distinct. Nevertheless, Todorov’s description of the period of uncertainty [le temps de cette incertitude], which is reflected in my examples of the borderland between the real, recognisable, homelike world and the strange, as yet unrecognisable, unhomelike world will be very useful for the following discussions of uncanny literature.

In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an emotion of the senses, of a product of the imagination – and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality – but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. Either the devil is an illusion, an imaginary being; or else he really exists, precisely like other living beings – with this reservation, that we encounter him infrequently.

The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic foreign neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, 1970

His Atmospherical Medium

Writers of serious fiction have always looked down on writers of the fantastic or uncanny, though several uncanny authors wrote both and moved seamlessly between the two worlds. One such was Nathaniel Hawthorne, a New England intellectual like Edith Wharton–  who also wrote both literary novels and uncanny stories – as well as Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft, to all of whom we shall shortly return.

Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, home of the witch trials, and in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables, a story about the effects of witchcraft trials resonating through many generations, he distinguishes between the Novel, by which he may mean novels like his own The Scarlet Letter, and the Romance, which may include uncanny stories like Seven Gables. Like some other uncanny writers we will look at later, Hawthorn suggests that in the Romance, the shadows should be darkened, the chiaroscuro enhanced, the sfumato suitably smudged.

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, 1851

~~~~~

Many uncanny stories start by assuring the reader that everything to come is true, even if it defies explanation, as it probably will: as Todorov suggested, a story losses its uncanniness if it can be explained away rationally; the world it inhabits should, as Hawthorne says, be of the writer's own choosing or creation and need have no connection to the rational, everyday, homelike world or it will lose its power to unsettle.

As a prime example, in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known stories, the narrator begins by presenting a series of mere household events as simple facts, told plainly, succinctly and without comment and also without explanation or rationale. He explicitly mentions the homely, which is about to become wild, and very unhomelike.

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not – and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified– have tortured– have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror – to many they will seem less terrible than baroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place – some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat, 1843

(Poe himself had a real black cat in real life, about whom he wrote, sardonically and no doubt tongue in cheek – not Poe’s normal modus scribendi – in a non-fiction article for Alexander’s Weekly Messenger; Poe was an editor and regular essayist and his reasoned, analytical non-fiction is a world away from his febrile fiction.

The writer of this article is the owner of one of the most remarkable black cats in the world—and this saying much; for it will be remembered that black cats are all of them witches.

Edger Allan Poe, Instinct vs Reason—a Black Cat, 1840)

Back to the story of the uncanny fictional cat. Like Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart, it has a murderer being undone by hearing noises from the murderee and, like his The Cask of Amontillado, this story also involves bricking up a victim behind a wall. We will look at both these stories later. In The Black Cat, the narrator has killed both his wife and a black cat he believes is evil and he has immured them both securely, or so he believes, behind a substantial brick wall. (Never trust a black cat in an uncanny story, even one created by an author who owns one.) The police have come to investigate but the narrator is so arrogant he invites them to come down to the cellar, confident that the bricks are solid enough to conceal his deeds forever.

They’re not.

A shriek comes from behind the wall he built.

Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were tolling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman.

~~~~~

In The Black Cat, Poe’s narrator isn’t just imagining the shrieks of the dead man because others hear them too; in The Tell Tale Heart, only the murderer can hear them, so either he is mad or the ghost is communicating only with him.

Some uncanny stories offer within themselves both a rational, natural explanation and an irrational, supernatural one, such as ETA Hoffmann’s The Sandman, which Freud discusses in The Uncanny; Hoffmann seems to have been for Freud the epitome of the uncanny author: the author leaves us in doubt as to whether we are dealing with the initial delirium of the panic-stricken boy or an account of events that must be taken as real within the world represented in the tale.

As a child, Nathaniel has been told the old-wives’ tale of the sandman, which was used to persuade children to go to sleep at night.

It is a wicked man who comes after children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody, and then he throws them into his sack and carries them to the crescent moon as food for his little children, who have their nest up there and have crooked beaks like owls and peck up the eyes of the naughty children.’

ETA Hoffmann, The Sandman, 1816

Nathaniel never grows out of his fear of this figure, never could I accustom myself to the uncanny ghost: the image of the cruel sandman never grew paler within me. . . The sandman had started me on the road to the strange and adventurous that so easily find a home in the heart of a child. Then one of his father’s friends seems to Nathaniel to be the sandman in real life. The sandman was standing before my father in the middle of the room, his face clearly visible in the bright illumination of the lamps! The sandman, the terrible sandman was the aged advocate Coppelius, who sometimes came to lunch with us.

The man is hideous and Nathaniel is convinced of his real identity, the sandman was now no longer that bogeyman of the nursery tale who took children’s eyes as food to his owl’s nest in the moon: no! he was now a repellent spectral monster bringing misery, distress and earthly and eternal ruination wherever he went. Nathaniel is convinced that Coppelius has killed his father; later he meets a dealer in optical instruments called Coppelia and is convinced it is the same man. Nathaniel writes all of this to a friend but the friend’s sister Clara reads the letter and replies, telling him it is all in his mind.

I think: that all the ghastly and terrible things you spoke of took place only within you, and that the real outer world had little part in them. Old Coppelius may have been repulsive enough, but it was because he hated children that you children came to feel an actual revulsion for him. . . Your father surely brought about his own death through his own carelessness, and Coppelius is not to blame for it.

Clara then articulates very lucidly the thought that many uncanny authors convey, either explicitly or implicitly, that our fears of the unknown and the supernatural are just that: our fears. They are within us not without and they are an external mirror – as with Alice – or, as I have said, an inversion of our internal fears, which were engendered, as both Hoffmann and Freud agree, in childhood. Our feelings of the uncanny, of unhomelikeness, go back to the childhood, not necessarily just of ourselves but of the whole human race; Clara herself uses the metaphor of the mirror, of a world inverted.

Perhaps there does exist a dark power which fastens on to us and leads us off along a dangerous and ruinous path which we would otherwise not have trodden; but if so, this power must have assumed within us the form of ourself . . . But if we possess a firm mind, a mind strengthened through living cheerfully, we shall always be able to recognize an inimical influence for what it is; and then that uncanny power must surely go under in the struggle we must suppose takes place before it can achieve that form which is, as I have said, a mirror-image of ourself. . . the spirit which seems to animate those forms has in fact been enkindled by us ourselves. Through their inner affinity with us and their influence over our heart they have the power to cast us into Hell or transport us to Heaven, but that is because they are phantoms of our own ego.

~~~~~

It’s funny – uncanny even – that we have to ask whether the apparitions, spirits, ghosts, bogeymen in uncanny stories are real or figments of the narrator’s imagination. Of course they’re not real. None of the characters are real. They’re all made up, figments of the author’s imagination. In some stories of course we don’t feel the need to ask: we don’t wonder if Jacob Marley’s ghosts of Christmas past, present and future are real, we understand that the story is a fable, a parable of the evils of greed.

But the best authors can make us ask the question by first settling then unsettling us; by making us feel cosily at home (which we may literally be, reading by our own homely fireside) and then luring us away surreptitiously to dark places. In The Turn of the Screw or The Haunting of Hill House we really do need to know if what is happening is real because Henry James and Shirley Jackson are great storytellers, weavers of magic carpets with patterns that shift in front of our very eyes. We will come back to both these books and their authors. (As a sometime novelist I am totally in awe of Jackson’s skill, as are many writers. I tried to convince you in Girls in Bloom and I’ll try again when we get to The Lottery.)

~~~~~

To return to Poe, as we must, the prolific author of horror, sci-fi, gothic and fantasy stories, Frank Belknap Long, wrote a prose poem about Poe’s home: it is simultaneously homelike and unhomelike, both a home and an unhome, occupying the region of uncertainty that Todorov mentioned. The poem was dedicated to Long’s friend, another famous author of the uncanny, HP Lovecraft, who published it and to whom we will be returning frequently. This is all of it.

The home of Poe! It is like a fairy dwelling, a gnomic palace built of the aether of dreams. It is tiny and delicate and lovely, and replete with memories of sere leaves in November and of lilies in April. It is a castle of vanished hopes, of dimly-remembered dreams, of sad memories older than the deluge. The dead years circle slowly and solemnly around its low white walls, and clothe it in a mystic veil of unseen tears. And many marvellous stories could this quaint little old house tell, many weird and cryptic stories of him of the Raven hair, and high, pallid brow, and sad, sweet face, and melancholy mien; and of the beloved Virginia, that sweet child of a thousand magic visions, child of the lonesome, pale-gray latter years, child of the soft and happy South. And how the dreamer of the spheres must have loved this strange little house. Every night the hollow boards of its porch must have echoed to his footfall, and every morn the great rising sun must have sent its rays through the little window, and bathed the lovely tresses of the dream-child in mystical yellow. And perhaps there was laughter within the walls of that house—laughter and merriment and singing. But we know that the Evil One came at last, the grim humourless spectre who loves not beauty, and is not of this world. And we know that the house of youth and of love became a house of death, and that memories bitter as the tears of a beautiful woman assailed the dreamer within. And at last he himself left that house of mourning and sought solace among the stars. But the house remains a vision out of a magical book; a thing seen darkly as in a looking-glass; but lovely beyond the dreams of mortals, and ineffably sad.

Frank Belknap Long, The Home of Poe, 1922

This short work is so wonderful, so evocative and so precisely to the point of the subject at hand that I could probably give up writing this book right now and leave you free to discover some uncanny stories for yourself.

On the other hand, as Robert Frost wrote:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,  

But I have promises to keep,  

And miles to go before I sleep,  

And miles to go before I sleep.

~~~~~

As we said, Edith Wharton, along with Poe and the other uncanny authors HP Lovecraft and Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a patrician New England intellectual and she is mainly famous for novels of manners like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth – novels of the comforting, homelike world of the New England high society of her time. But Wharton also wrote ghost stories and one of them contains the idea that a story is all the more uncanny for beginning in a recognisable, contemporary, homelike setting rather than in one of Poe’s or Lovecraft’s dim, gloomy haunted houses, lulling the reader into a false sense of security and recognisable normality before stealthily drawing them into the unknown.

I read the other day in a book by a fashionable essayist that ghosts went out when electric light came in. What nonsense! The writer, though he is fond of dabbling in a literary way, in the supernatural, hasn’t even reached the threshold of his subject. As between turreted castles patrolled by headless victims with clanking chains, and the comfortable suburban house with a refrigerator and central heating where you feel, as soon as you’re in it, that there’s something wrong, give me the latter for sending a chill down the spine!

Edith Wharton, All Souls’, 1937

~~~~~

This contrast between the bright, modern, recognisably homelike and the strange unhomelike encroaching on it is also perfectly encapsulated in a story by another Edith: Edith Nesbit, an English political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society, best known for her children’s books as E Nesbit, including most famously The Railway Children.

But Nesbit was also the author of several collections of uncanny stories, including Grim Stories, Something Wrong and Fear.

I told him I thought the house was very pretty, and fresh, and homelike — only a little too new — but that fault would mend with time. He said:

It is new: that’s just it. We’re the first people who’ve ever lived in it. If it were an old house, Margaret, I should think it was haunted.

I asked if he had seen anything. No, he said not yet.

Heard then? said I.

No — not heard either, he said, but there’s a sort of feeling: I can’t describe it — I’ve seen nothing and I’ve heard nothing, but I’ve been so near to seeing and hearing, just near, that’s all. And something follows me about — only when I turn round, there’s never anything, only my shadow. And I always feel that I shall see the thing next minute — but I never do — not quite — it’s always just not visible.

Edith Nesbit, The Shadow, 1905

The new, fresh, homelike home has been made unhomelike by the mysterious shadow, which the narrator also sees. It was crouching there; it sank, and the black fluidness of it seemed to be sucked under the door of Mabel’s room. When the narrator goes in, Mabel is dead but her baby is alive.

At the funeral, another shadow appears. Between us and the coffin, first grey, then black, it crouched an instant, then sank and liquefied—and was gathered together and drawn till it ran into the nearest shadow. And the nearest shadow was the shadow of Mabel’s coffin. Then Mabel’s daughter dies too. I had never been able to forget the look on her dead face.

~~~~~

There is another uncanny story about a shadow by another serious, if rather sensationalist, female novelist who also wrote ghost stories: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, most famous for Lady Audley’s Secret. As in several other stories we will look at, one of the characters is an educated, responsible man, in this case a scientist, who seeks to disprove what he sees as local superstition. We start with a spooky and unhomelike old house, believed to be haunted by the restless spirit of a previous owner who had hanged himself in one of the top floor servants’ rooms.

Wildheath Grange stood a little way back from the road, with a barren stretch of heath behind it, and a few tall fir-trees, with straggling wind-tossed heads, for its only shelter. It was a lonely house on a lonely road, little better than a lane, leading across a desolate waste of sandy fields to the sea-shore; and it was a house that bore a bad name among the natives of the village of Holcroft, which was the nearest place where humanity might be found.

It was a good old house, nevertheless, substantially built in the days when there was no stint of stone and timber — a good old grey stone house with many gables, deep window-seats, and a wide staircase, long dark passages, hidden doors in queer corners, closets as large as some modern rooms, and cellars in which a company of soldiers might have lain perdu.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Shadow