18 April – 23 May (6 weeks)
Members: £80 Non-members: £100
Concessions: £10 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
This 6-week course builds on the decline of the country house course, but can also be taken independently. The country house has been a setting for fiction that explores the eerie (strange, frightening or creepy) in a range of genres including gothic literature, detective novels, horror and mystery. This course examines texts that use the country house as a location to explore themes that unsettle and mystify the reader, using the space and structure of grand houses and their isolated locations and insular cultures. We will look at a range of genres and themes, including murder-mystery, thriller, trauma, the uncanny, and the supernatural to explore how this space works as eerie.
By the end of this course, you will:
- Have a sound understanding of uses of the eerie in literature and some of the genres that explore this
- Understand how authors were using the country house as a space to create eerie narratives
- Have explored a range of genres and authors writing in different periods
Week one – The Warlow Experiment (2019) by Alix Nathan
Named by The Times and the BBC as one of the best new books of 2019, The Warlow Experiment is based on a real 18th century advert Alix Nathan found in which an aristocrat offered any man who would live alone under his country house and in darkness for 7 years a substantial amount of money. No one knows if anyone responded to this advert, but Nathan used it as the starting point for her extraordinary novel about different types of confinement and madness in a Welsh country house in the 1700s. This historical novel builds on a tradition of the gothic, and this class will include discussion on how gothic literature developed and works so well with the country house.
Week two - The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James
This late-Victorian novella about a governess in a remote country house who is sure the children she’s charged with looking after are being controlled by supernatural spirits has become a classic of the horror genre. James disrupted the gothic genre by making his ghosts appear as ordinary living people, something readers of the time were not used to and found unsettling. We will look at the text by Charlotte Bronte that is said to have inspired The Turn of the Screw, whilst also examining how James moved the genre forward and inspired twentieth century authors of the eerie.
Week three – Short stories
This week we will look at how the eerie country house works in shorter format, with authors able to quickly introduce and conclude eerie themes and styles. We will read Afterward (1910) by Edith Wharton in which an American couple seek a haunted country house in England to buy, so they can show off to friends, Playmates (1927) by A.M Burrage in which a middle-aged man isolates his young female ward in a country house to see how she grows up without other children, and Mrs Charbury at Eltham (2018) by Max Porter. These stories are taken from two collections – Fear by Roald Dahl (new Penguin edition 2017 – short stories curated by him) and Eight Ghosts (2018) which consists of 8 commissioned short stories by English Heritage inspired by 8 of their properties.
Week four – The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) by Agatha Christie
This was Agatha Christie’s introduction to the character of Hercule Poirot, and has been analysed for its use of clues and motives, some saying it’s the perfect murder novel, others saying the clues are too easy - it will be interesting to see which the class agree with. Christie wrote 66 novels in detective and murder-mystery genres, using the country house repeatedly as a setting for crime and crime-solving. Christie was influenced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other Victorian crime writers, but scholars say her work surpassed them by developing the genre considerably, working with closed-circle mystery devices, and designing crimes readers found non-predictable and shocking. The Mysterious Affair at Styles was also used by Christie, herself from a wealthy background, to comment on the post WWI decline of the country house and aristocracy.
Bonus read - Murder of the Ninth Baronet (1932) by J.S Fletcher. This is completely optional, a very short novel from a writer of over 100 detective stories, it will be used to compare to Christie and examine her as innovator. This story is a good example of how writers of the time used the double horror of losing wealth and status alongside murder in country house mysteries. A short extract will be photocopied for anyone who doesn’t read the whole novel.
Week five - Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier
Currently chosen as Queen Camilla’s book group read, Rebecca is a novel in the gothic tradition about an unnamed woman marrying a wealthy widower and owner of a country house very much presided over by the terrifying housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. We will analyse how age, class and status intersect to unsettle both protagonist and reader, and how the house itself becomes a character in the novel. We will look at examples of how Manderley is presented in film adaptations, including the seminal Hitchcock version (1940) in which he wanted set design to strongly convey the eerie.
Week six – The Little Stranger (2009) by Sarah Walters
Combining historical novel with mystery, gothic, and supernatural themes, Walters uses her scholarly research of the past to create an evocative novel. This was her first fiction to move away from the Victorian period, and is set in the 1940s where one family face the loss of their country home. A lower-middle class doctor whose mother used to be a servant at the house in its heyday is drawn to the space, despite its apparent haunting. This novel is influenced by Henry James and Willkie Collins, whilst also commenting on the post-war decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the welfare state. We will discuss how eerie works to convey shifting social hierarchy and roles for women. This final class will also be a chance to go over our previous texts and discuss how they explored the eerie, and how the motif of the country house interconnects with this.
