ABSTRACT
Edward Bulwer-Lytton mixes ghosts, magic, and mesmerism in his account of terrifying manifestations, and his link between scientific inquiry on one hand and the supernatural and/or occult on the other has proved enormously influential. As the haunted house narrative became established in the mid-Victorian period and readers became increasingly familiar with its conventions, stories openly advertised their content in doubly knowing evocations of the supernatural. Faraday, the protagonist of Sarah Waters’s novel, has been fascinated by Hundreds Hall since he attended a garden fete there as a child. It is therefore both a haunted house and a haunting house, one which impresses itself upon the mind and memory with ever more obviously deleterious effects. The haunted house is irresistible for writers of ghost stories, representing an opportunity for them to write themselves into an often illustrious tradition but also to demonstrate their imagination and virtuosity by devising new twists on established conventions.
