ABSTRACT
Like Elizabeth Bowen’s houses, the houses of Young’s early novels are haunted by death, the heavy hand of the past and the coercion of convention. We find these early texts inhabited and inhibited by ghosts of other writers and the phantom of nineteenthcentury realist prose. A restless disembodied omniscient narrator prowls through these stories seeking to draw together the strewn parts of the self. As is the case for Woolf in her first two novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), Young has yet to settle into her subject and technique.1 The prevalence of characters who mourn lost or absent mothers or confront repressed sexual desires and fears, and of spectral others who return to haunt fragile and troubled selves, suggests a Freudian uncanny. This drift seems to reflect both Young’s uncertain narrative strategy and the too evident traces of the Romantic poets, the Brontës, Eliot and Hardy.
