Hello, dearest Friend and Reader. As the days grow shorter and a certain introspective mood settles in, I felt compelled to reach out and see how you are faring. This period, with its unexpected turns and abrupt changes, has been a unique experience for us all. I trust you are navigating it with resilience.
On a personal note, life has been kind. Our family welcomed a precious new member, my granddaughter Ruby Vera, who arrived a bit early in February. She is, of course, a source of immense joy – beautiful, healthy, and possessing a wisdom beyond her eight months. The time I spend with her each week is truly cherished, a peaceful haven amidst the noise of the world. Being her Mamie fills me with a profound happiness.
Yet, as we emerge from a time of uncertainty, perhaps some of us find ourselves still dwelling in shadows, in private spaces of loss and longing. We carry our ghosts, these lingering attachments to past griefs, which can inadvertently limit our capacity for growth and new experiences. Where there is a ghost, there is often grief.
Interestingly, I find a peculiar comfort in stories centered around women, houses, and ghosts. Some of the most compelling ghost stories unfold within the walls of houses. Consider Daphne du Maurier’s masterpiece, Rebecca (1938), set in the haunting Cornwall estate of Manderley. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” the iconic opening line whispers. This novel, a global bestseller that remains in print, was famously adapted into Alfred Hitchcock’s Academy Award-winning film in 1940, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Rebecca has since become a powerful metaphor for a woman’s journey of self-discovery. Du Maurier’s own home, Menabilly, became intertwined with her life’s work, a recurring motif of women, houses, and ghosts. The full scope of her “ghostly lives” only came to light after her passing.
My personal All Hallows Eve ritual involves immersing myself in suspenseful short stories and obscure black and white thrillers, particularly those of English and Irish origin. Curled up in bed with spiced hot apple cider, my cats, and a small indulgence of fine chocolates, my pleasure is complete when the ghost story features a house harboring secrets. Every home, in a way, safeguards the secrets of the woman who once resided there, mirroring the woman’s own love for the house in her time. The American poet Louise Townsend Nicholl captured this sentiment beautifully:
I gave my love to the house forever
I will come till I cannot come, I said
And the house said I will know
Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish writer, is a particular favorite for her ghost stories, especially her chilling short story Hand in Glove (1952). Bowen believed that the true essence of a terrifying supernatural tale lies in its proximity to reality, “just, just out of the true.” These ghosts exist just beyond the frame of our ordinary lives, lingering, observing, haunting, and remembering.
Another essential Halloween read is Alison Lurie’s collection, Women and Ghosts, featuring nine eerie tales. I am particularly drawn to the story of a woman visited by the ghost of her fiancé’s first wife, warning her successor. How often do former wives attempt to caution those who follow? And how often do we fail to heed these warnings? Ignoring such spectral insights can lead to becoming trapped within a near-life experience, a shadow of our potential selves.
The spine-tingling world of American author Edith Wharton is unveiled in a rediscovered collection of ghost stories, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, recently republished by the New York Review of Books with her original preface. While Wharton is celebrated for her astute portrayals of New York’s upper classes during the Gilded Age, and known for novels like The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1921), which earned her the Pulitzer Prize, the paranormal might not be the first association with her name. Yet, in this collection of ghostly short stories written between 1902 and 1937, she liberated the phantoms of unfulfilled passions and desires, allowing them to roam the shivery night.
Wharton spent her last three decades as an American expatriate in France, dividing her time between a Paris apartment and a 17th-century convent-turned-house in Hyéres, overlooking the Mediterranean. Like Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Bowen, Wharton was a complex woman, living multiple secret lives that were only revealed posthumously. They, too, lived with ghosts throughout their lives. But now, their ghosts can inspire us, offering insights to those who read between the lines.
Edith Wharton eloquently describes the multifaceted nature of women: “I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they like; but beyond that far beyond, are the other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”
In her autobiography, A Backwards Glance, Wharton reflects on aging: “Years ago I said to myself: “There’s no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.”… I have learned with the passing of time that this, though true, is not the whole truth. The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily, the inconsequential life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
“In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
Perhaps women are drawn to ghost stories because we often struggle with letting go. Bring up the topic of ghosts at any gathering, and you’ll likely find many women with personal anecdotes of sightings or hauntings, often set in old houses.
Dominique Browning, in her insightful book, Around the House and In the Garden: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing, and Home Improvement, reminds us that “objects have ghostly emanations, too that attach themselves to their solidity. Things with drawers—chest, armoires, night tables, trunks—seem to be most populated pieces of furniture.”
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