ABSTRACT
Asking what the ghost wants in Patrick McGrath’s latest novel The Wardrobe Mistress (2017) is the remit of the chapter, along with pursuing the question of how anti-Semitism acts like a ghost, hard to kill and forever haunting us. What can free characters from a spectral invasion is also investigated. Thinkers tapped for this exploration include Sir Oswald Mosley, Adolf Hitler, C. S. Lewis, Jacques Derrida, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Slavoj Žižek, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, James VI and I, William Godwin, George Steiner, William Shakespeare, and Patrick McGrath himself, from recent interviews that I have conducted with him.
