Sarah Waters is an author far better known in the U.K. than in the U.S. A Welsh author whose historical novels are often set in the Victorian period and involve lesbian protagonists, her books have thrice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and in 2019 she was named Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). My choosing her novel The Little Stranger would likely be a controversial decision among her devoted fans, should any of them actually happen upon this review, since it is my understanding that this tends to be their least favorite of Waters’ novels, presumably because it differs from the others in so many ways: it is set in the 1940s rather than the Victorian era; it is her only novel that contains no openly lesbian characters; alone of her novels it has a male narrator; and it’s the only one of her novels that could be described as “gothic.”
The Little Stranger was shortlisted for the highly regarded Booker Prize in 2009, which it lost to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (which also appears on this list). It was also shortlisted for the prestigious Shirley Jackson Award, which focuses on the genres of gothic horror or psychological thriller. Still, I was unaware of the book’s existence until I found it on the BBC Culture list of the “100 Greatest British Novels,” chosen by critics from outside the UK. The list, originally published in 2015, is intended to give an outsiders’ perspective on the best in British fiction. The Little Stranger came in as number 45 on that list (interestingly, Wolf Hall came in at number 44). And although I have found no other significant “Great Books” lists on which it appears, my reaction upon reading Waters’ ghost story was so favorable that I immediately felt I needed to include it on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
The story is told by a country doctor in Warwickshire, who befriends an old gentry family (mother, son and daughter) whose fortunes are declining in the developing socialist atmosphere of post-war Britain. Their old family mansion is decaying little by little, and they are less and less able to maintain it without selling off their ancestral lands. Waters has said that she did not set out to write a ghost story, but rather a study of how the economic changes of the late forties and fifties affected the fading class of gentry faced with losing their familial estates. But the setting of the dilapidated mansion, the stress and anxiety of characters under the enormous pressure of inherited responsibilities, lead to strange and puzzling, even mystifying events that may be construed as supernatural.
More specifically, in the fall of 1948 the narrator, a G.P. in Warwickshire named Faraday, is called to attend to a sick maid, 14-year-old Betty, at the large 18th century manor house called Hundreds Hall, the ancestral home of the Ayres family. The girl is simply homesick, but Dr. Faraday is caught up in memories of his childhood: His mother had been a maid in this house, and once as a child he had come to this house on Empire Day and was presented with a medal by the Lady of the house, Mrs. Ayers. Ever since he has been drawn to the ancient glamor of the house. Entering it now, he finds it sadly in disrepair, and learns that the family has sold off many furnishings and some of the manor’s land to keep up the house. Invited to take tea while he is there, with the same (now widowed) Mrs. Ayres who presented him with his medal years before, Faraday meets the practical, boyish daughter Caroline and her aloof brother Roderick, distracted by the financial woes of the estate. A veteran, Roderick has a bum leg injured in the war. Faraday offers to treat the leg with electrotherapy for no charge, claiming to be writing a paper on the results. This enables him to visit the mansion regularly, and to spend a good deal of time with Caroline.
A series of strange and baffling events occurs that drive the Ayres’ estate ever closer to ruin. First, at a cocktail party Mrs. Ayres throws to welcome the Baker-Hydes, a family who have bought another large manor near Hundreds, Caroline’s usually docile lab Gyp attacks the Baker-Hyde’s annoying eight-year-old daughter, mauling the girl’s face. Faraday, being present at the party, works quickly to save the child, but law and the Baker-Hydes insist Gyp be put down, despite Caroline’s miserable objection. Betty, however, claims to have noted some unseen influence that spurred the dog to the attack.
Meanwhile Roderick, who had been too ill to come down for the party, is beginning to behave erratically, and Caroline claims to have found what look like burn marks in the walls and ceiling of his room. Roderick tells Faraday that something appeared to him in his room the night of the party, something that, when Roderick tried to force it to leave, used the dog to attack the little girl. Ever since, he has been trying to keep this entity from harming his mother and sister, forcing it to focus its attention on himself. Faraday, the logical scientist, dismisses any supernatural influences and tells Caroline that Roderick may be having a nervous breakdown. After Roderick throws Faraday off the estate, Caroline awakens to a fire in Roderick’s room, which appears to have been started deliberately in several corners of the room. Roderick is sent to a mental hospital.
Caroline now manages the estate, and sells off a significant portion for public housing. Faraday is unhappy with this development, but begins to see Caroline as a possible candidate for a more meaningful relationship. He talks to Caroline about marriage—and his interest in helping her keep Hundreds in the family. A wavering Caroline wants to keep this developing relationship from her mother, who seems to be growing more forgetful with age. Betty, Caroline and Mrs. Ayres begin to experience very strange sounds at all hours—telephones ringing in the middle of the night, strange knockings inside the walls, bells ringing—none of which can be explained, though Faraday comes up with a number of logical explanations. They also begin to find childish writing hidden on some of the walls, and Mrs. Ayres, investigating a sound coming from the nursery on the second floor, unused for decades, is inexplicably locked into the room in which her beloved first child, Susan, had died in at the age of eight. When she bloodies her wrists trying to break out of the nursery, Faraday is called to tend her wounds. At this point Caroline reveals that she believes Hundreds is being terrorized by a poltergeist. In books that Caroline has consulted, a poltergeist is described as the projection of an unconscious mind manifesting itself as a destructive presence in the house. Dr. Faraday, the man of science, dismisses Caroline’s fears as pseudoscientific claptrap and insists there are logical explanations for the occurrences in the house.
It’s at this point that careful readers will begin to suspect, if they haven’t done so already, that Faraday is an unreliable narrator. After all, Roderick, Caroline, Betty and Mrs. Ayres all become convinced of some malevolent presence in the house. Caroline suspects that somehow Roderick is projecting his presence in the house, disturbed at his forcible removal. Betty believes that the malevolent spirit of some former servant is haunting the second floor of the mansion. Mrs. Ayres comes to believe that the spirit of her beloved daughter Susan is trying to reach her from beyond the grave—and Faraday suggests that she, too, should be committed to an asylum. It’s not until it is too late that Faraday finally entertains the possibility that the house is “consumed by some dark germ, some ravenous shadow-creature, some ‘little stranger’ spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself.”
I don’t want to ruin the ending, so I won’t reveal more of the plot, and will simply say that, although Waters never unequivocally reveals who or what this poltergeist is, there are some significant clues that you may not realize until the very end.
Aside from the nature and form of evil, the novel is also about class. A major underlying motif throughout the novel is the decaying fortunes of the gentry, clearly symbolized by the disintegration of Hundreds manor and the Ayres’ attempts to stem the effects of time and the Labor government on their estate. Class also is a factor in Dr. Faraday’s interest in the estate—which he seems to covet far more than Caroline’s hand in marriage: As a child, he was enamored of the estate and in awe of its ruling family because his mother was a servant there and he was honored by the Empire Day medal he had received there.
The novel will remind you of a number of others by which Waters seems to have been influenced: In its emphasis on class and the decaying estate, it may remind you of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. In the spooky atmosphere of the house, it may recall Du Maurier’s Rebecca (like the narrator of that novel, Faraday has no first name) or Dickens’ Great Expectations (as children, Caroline and Roderick set their broken clock’s hands at twenty minutes to nine, like the clocks in Miss Havisham’s house). The owner of the mansion in Poe’s “Fall of the House on Usher” is also named Roderick, and the reality of the poltergeist is as up in the air as the reality of the ghosts in Henry James’ Turn of the Screw.
Finally, there is a 2018 film version of the novel, directed by Lenny Abrahamson (fresh from his acclaimed 2015 film Room). Though it was not a commercial success, the film starred Domhnall Gleeson as Faraday, Ruth Wilson as Charlotte, and Charlotte Rampling as Mrs. Ayres, and was generally favorably reviewed. But as always, read the book first. You definitely don’t want to lessen the impact of the novel’s powerful conclusion