Sarah Blake, the author of Grange House (2000), is a Victorianist, and this neo-Victorian novel might well be taken as a rethinking of all those debates over the meaning of both literary foremothers and female authorship. Grange House does not rewrite Victorian texts per se, although the novel alludes (explicitly and otherwise) to Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, Lord Tennyson, among others. Similarly, while the novel harps on a number of Gothic themes and structures--ghosts, incest, repetition--it cannot be pinned down to any Gothic precursor in particular.
As in most Gothic novels, Grange House's residents appear doomed to repeat events from the past. But what are those events? Near the beginning of the novel, the cook's daughter, Halcy Ames, and her young lover are found drowned under mysterious circumstances, although it seems clear from Halcy's note that they are eloping on account of her pregnancy. To make matters worse, our narrator, Maisie, sees Halcy's ghost (more than once, in fact). The real Gothic repetition, however, lies not in the drowning but in the death of one and, perhaps, two children--namely, Halcy and her unborn (or born?) child. Maisie soon discovers that her mysterious friend Nell Grange, who occupies the attic (intentional shades of Jane Eyre), has also lost an illegitimate daughter; moreover, between Maisie's readings in Nell's accumulated diaries and her fraught conversation with the equally mysterious cook, Maisie soon makes a startling discovery that, in effect, leads her own mother to "lose" her daughter. Behind all this drama lies the story of the Widow Grange, an Irish emigrant whose obsession with the son she left behind to die inadvertently destroys her remaining family.
All of the women in this novel are storytellers, deliberately or otherwise, but not all forms of storytelling prove equal. In fact, far from heroically appropriating "the Author" for feminist purposes, female authors frequently become destructive, whether self- or otherwise. After Halcy's death, Maisie becomes furious when another adolescent, Ruth, takes a "greedy delight" in fashioning a grand romantic tale to explain the drowning (27), while much later, Maisie's mother tries to write through her husband's death in a different but no less problematic way, posting the dead man letter after letter (189). Even the beautiful but supposedly conventional Susannah Granger horns in on her sister Nell's text, inserting a love story designed (mistakenly) to provoke Nell into acknowledging that they are competing for the same man (256). These three very different instances all converge on authorship as self-centered desire: a desire which turns sordid events into cliched romance, the better to consume it (Ruth); a desire which replicates the author's real-life fiction of an ideal relationship with a man who actually loves someone else (Maisie's mother); a desire which casts sisterly love as erotic competition (Susannah). In particular, the mother's "dead letters" manifest an unwilling, although increasingly less concealed, recognition
that her communications never quite reached their intended object, even when he was alive.
But these examples of authorship gone awry pale before the threat of imagining revenants. Nell Grange first tells Maisie the story of her childhood as a Gothic narrative, complete with ghosts, mysterious handprints, and a gruesome death by fire. As the rest of this discussion will give away the plot, I'm going to stick it beneath the fold.
