Literature feeds off other literature and why ever not? Think of Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, bred from, respectively, Jane Eyre and Mrs Dalloway. Think of Shakespeare for that matter, who told a good story provided someone else had told it to him first.
To get the most out of this chilling little tale you really do need to have read Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. If you have not, shame on you, but Penguin Popular Classics have it for all of £1.50 and you have the treat in store of the greatest ghost story ever written. Come back here when you’ve done.
Right. Good, isn’t it ? Now read on.
Sallie Declan is a young American PhD student living in a London, which is not at all as she pictured it, after filling her head with the Bloomsbury of Virginia Woolf. In Ohio she had the Group, after the novel by Mary MacCarthy (literature breeding literature again), who were close, intimate, sworn sisters. ‘She missed the sense of belonging not merely to a set but to the clever set.’ In London Sallie lives in an impersonal Hall of Residence and has no friends, though her tutor occasionally invites her to vegetarian family Sunday lunch in Wimbledon, ‘the glacial equivalent of home life’.
None of it really matters, though, because Sallie is obsessed by the subject of her thesis, a post-modern interpretation of The Turn of the Screw. She eats, sleeps and dreams it. It becomes her friend, her refuge, her comfort blanket, but when she slips from gloom into serious depression she thinks of getting away completely for a break from work and London. So she answers an advertisement.
Two children, eight and ten, living in the country, need a ‘nanny-friend’. No domestic duties (full-time housekeeper employed) but full responsibility required since without parents.
See why you need to know your Henry James? The screw gives its first slight twist into the psyche with the words ‘full-time housekeeper employed’.
Sallie goes to an office in the City to be interviewed by Charles, the children’s father, a hopelessly handsome banker who flies round the world, and falls in love with him. Her fantasies about him join those about Henry James in her head and when she, rather improbably, gets the job and travels to the huge, isolated, spooky country house called Staverton, it becomes Bly, just as the children, Michael and Frannie, become Miles and Flora.
But Staverton’s housekeeper, Gloria, is nothing like Miss Jessel and there does not appear to be a Quint. The children are precocious little brats but may never, ever be left alone and the house is a Fort Knox of locks and burglar alarms. The problem is that once Sallie arrives there, the danger comes from within not from without, as we gradually learn a little of her history through her own, innocence-protesting soliloquies. Sallie once looked after a child in America, a little boy, but there was a dreadful accident. Well, of course it was an accident, no one could ever prove that it was not, and she just has to hope the friend she gives as her referee now will keep quiet about the whole business. Sallie has to do a lot of lying and the children quickly suss out that, for example, she has never climbed onto a horse before when she accompanies them on their ride. Odd that.
A lot of things about Sallie are odd and when she discovers the portrait of Charles’s late wife, the children’s mother, Rosie, she becomes obsessed with that, too, and goes to sleep in Charles’s bedroom under Rosie’s creepy-looking picture. Rosie begins to haunt her. But the real world is unpleasant for Sallie, too, with the hated Gloria bringing her tobacco-smelling husband to the house, and the children asking awkward questions, catching Sallie out.
Inside her own head, everything begins to simmer.
This is not really a ghost story, it is a story about a psychopathic young woman and child-murder. A. N. Wilson mixes the ordinary, messy everyday with the fantasies in Sallie’s head and the literary references to Henry James into a potent and very toxic soup. A short book and one that repays re-reading, once you have got the plot out of the way, as it were, so that the literary references and subtleties come up all the richer.
Oh, and like The Turn of the Screw, once you have read A Jealous Ghost, I’m afraid you won’t be able to get it out of your head. Ever? Quite possibly.
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