Halloween, 2017

The Haunted House at Latchford - Charlotte Riddell

Charlotte Riddell (1832 - 1906, rhymes with "riddle") wrote her entire adult life, first to support her widowed mother and then to bail out her husband who struggled with financial reverses. Riddell was one of the first Victorians to write about people who had real jobs, instead of the idle upper middle-class so often found in novels of the time (I'm looking at you, Tony T.). But she also wrote mysteries with supernatural elements, such as Fairy Water, also known as The Haunted House at Latchford.

The narrator of this novel is a barrister who speculates. He alternately charms and annoys us with a confirmed bachelor’s view of the good life, which consists of dining out and eating strawberries. The first chapter is written in a glib tone that borders on the obnoxious. So much so that I knew I couldn’t handle even a novella if this cocksure prattling tone kept on.

The next chapters, however, reassured me with an introduction to the setting, "where beyond the fated house and ruined garden lay the belt of pine trees and the lake of the dismal swamp, which had furnished Crow Hall with no less than two tragedies." The first tragedy is a December-May marriage that becomes an ordeal to both partners. With the insanely jealous husband’s death, we get, per Victorian custom, his vicious will. The second tragedy is a ghost story that is perfectly integrated into the story lines of hopeless love and cruel last will and testament. We fascinated readers wonder why the ghost returns to the scene of her mortal troubles and why she approaches the living to reveal her sorrows.

An Irishwoman, Riddell has the keen senses we like in Irish writers: humor, exuberance, melancholy, uncanniness, and realism about the dark sides of marriage, child-raising, and materialism. Her sketch of a woman’s life wasted in an unhappy marriage begs for a dissertation by a student in gender studies. Convincing is her view on the harsh necessity of money. Delightful is her send-up of the impudent aristocrat Lady Mary Carey. While she deals in the themes of suffering femininity that the audience expected, her tone is not that of the stereotypical Victorian lady novelists, neither complacently know-all nor syrupy fluttery. This is well worth reading. I’d read more of Riddell’s fiction if I could find it. It’s one thing to be a minor writer but she ought not to be forgotten.