The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters

In Henry James short novel The Turn of the Screw, either the ghosts are real or they’re the neurotic imaginings of a paranoid governess.  This narrative scheme set the form for many future ghost stories: are the ghosts real or psychotic delusions? Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger describes an upper-class country English family in decline, the Ayres: once wealthy and proud, when we meet them in this novel, shortly after the end of World War II, the husband has been dead for years, the mother mourns a child who died twenty years ago, the farm is failing, and there’s no money. The family home, Hundreds Hall, is falling apart. We’re left with Mrs. Ayres, her daughter Caroline, in her late 20s, and a son, Roderick, wounded in the war, suffering some form of PTSD. The narrator is a doctor, Faraday, from the nearby town.  (Does he have a first name?) He visits the family to treat various ailments and gradually becomes a family friend. He’s unmarried and mindful of the fact that the family which summons him out to treat a young servant girl once employed his mother as a servant.  Class differences are a major factor, though they’re mainly addressed indirectly.

Things begin to go wrong.  The servant girl Betty is afraid of the house and finds it spooky.  Roderick Ayres is increasingly unbalanced and anxious.  Strange writings appear on the walls.  A visiting child is attacked by the usually gentle family dog. A mysterious fire.  A horrifying encounter on the abandoned upper floor of the house. Dr. Faraday is a rationalist who tries to explain away what family members increasingly believe are supernatural manifestations.  The brother, sent to a mental asylum, is convinced the house is “infected.”  The daughter Caroline begins to agree.  The mother believes her dead daughter has returned. The doctor believes he is in love with Caroline and makes plans for their marriage, though she goes along halfheartedly with the idea. (She continues to address him as Dr. Faraday well into their relationship). He pursues the marriage with the eagerness of a stalker and begins to talk of what he will do when he is in charge of the house. People die. Caroline believes that the deranged mind of someone close to the family has produced a supernatural entity that is possessing the house and its inhabitants.  At a coroner’s inquest, Betty testifies that a “spiteful ghost . . . wanted the house all for its own.” In the end, Waters hints at the identity of this someone in a way that is ambiguous but satisfying.

The conflict of reason with the supernatural, the focus on deviant psychology—these are aspects of modern ghost stories so common that they can seem hackneyed.  Though Waters at first seems to hint at such a conflict, it is mainly a tease.  Class conflict is a more pertinent source of tension, along with the narrating Dr. Faraday. Waters largely avoids the pitfalls and stale formulas of ghost stories set in decaying family mansions. 

There is a problem with pacing.  It takes a hundred pages or so for anything supernatural actually to occur, and as the doctor and Caroline and others try to account for what happens in the house, the narrative drags.  I enjoyed and remained interested in the story throughout but was relieved when it ended.