English Heritage: "Eight Ghosts"

Give eight writers an assignment, and you never know what they’ll come up with. 

The English Heritage organization cares for more than 400 properties, buildings, and monuments, ranging from Roman forts and medieval castles to Cold War bunkers. To help raise funds for conservation work, it asked eight English authors to choose their own English Heritage site, spend time there, including after hours, and write a ghost story involving the site.

 

The result is Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories. It’s a small gem of book, with some cracking good stories that each pack at punch.

 

For “They Flee From Me That Sometimes Did Me Seek.” Sarah Perry (After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent) selected Audley End, a house built on the site of an abbey in Essex. She tells a tale of a young woman who joins a team restoring an old tapestry, who soon finds out that the work will figuratively and literally absorb her. In “Mr. Lanyard’s Last Case,” Andrew Michael Hurley (The Loney, Devil’s Day) visited Carlisle Castle, and spins a historical story of an attorney prosecuting the rebels who fought and lost the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

 

In “The Bunker,” Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Pier Falls) selected the York Cold War Bunker, telling the story of a woman caught between present and future. Kenilworth Castle is the setting for Kamila Shamsie’s (Burnt Shadows, Home Fire) “Foreboding,” in which a new guard starts his job and finds what he’s not looking for.

 

Stuart Evers (If This is Home, Ten Stories About Smoking) goes to Dover Castle for his story, “Never Departed More,” about an actress who stays there to soak in the atmosphere and soaks in a bit more than expected. Housesteads Roman Fort is the setting for “The Wall” by Kate Clanchy (Meeting the English, Antigona and Me), in which a mother and father takes her truant teenaged daughter for a day trip – and little is what it seems. 

 

Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?) selected Pendennis Castle for “As Strong as Death,” about in impending wedding haunted by a ghost of woman who disguised herself as a sailor. And Max Porter (Lanny, Grief is the Thing with Feathers) used Eltham Palace to tell his story “Mrs. Charbury at Eltham,” about an elderly woman who returns to the place where her sister disappeared.

 

The volume also includes a short essay by Andrew Martin (The Somme Stations, Soot), which explains how the castles, abbeys, and houses of England inspired the ghost story. Also included is a gazetteer of English Heritage hauntings, a detailed list of all the places said to have ghosts. 

 

Eight Ghosts is both a collection of some really good (and scary) stories and a clever way to raise funds for a worthy cause.

 

Related:

 

My review of The Porpoise by Mark Haddon.

 

My review of The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry.

 

My review of Lanny by Max Porter.

 

Top photograph by Joakim Honkasalo via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"The Essex Serpent" by Sarah Perry

It’s London, 1893. Cora Seaborne has just buried her husband, a highly regarded professional well-known for his expertise in the halls of Parliament. He was also something of a sadist; he liked to inflict pain upon his wife. Cora is not exactly sorry to see him gone.

Left well-off by her husband’s death, she moves with her rather odd 10-year-old son Francis and her companion Martha to Essex. She throws herself into the countryside. She walks, she hikes, she digs, she explores. The local inhabitants take Cora in their stride, although they wonder at her rather odd behavior, which includes wearing an overlarge coat and men’s boots. She throws herself into the natural world and all things of science related to it. When she hears rumors of a beast the locals call the Essex serpent, a demon-like thing that lives in the marshes and is responsible for missing pets and livestock, she decides to find it.

One of the local families she meets and becomes good friends with is that of the vicar, William Ransome. He is rather taken by Cora, even though she holds views that he clearly rejects. He also thinks the stories of the serpent are nonsense. And while he is devoted to his wife Stella, who’s increasingly beset by consumption (tuberculosis), he enjoys Cora’s company and the two talk many long walks together. And they argue about the serpent.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry is many things. It is first a historical novel, and Perry captures the countryside and the London of the 1890s extraordinarily well. Second, it is a different kind of historical novel in that it does not play to the standard picture we have of the late Victorian period. Or as Perry points out in an afterword, she discovered that the Victorian period, once you moved beyond the caricatures, was a period not unlike out own.

Third, the novel is about science and religion. It is not a story of the battle between the two, although there is clearly conflict. But just as two dissimilar people as Cora and William come to realize they need each other, so, too, does science and religion.

And then there’s that serpent, which comes to represent far more than a local folk tale or a possible prehistoric beast or fish that has somehow managed to survive.

Sarah Perry

Perry’s first novel, which received a wide array of literary recognitions, was After Me Comes the Flood (2014). She’s also received awards for travel writing. She received an M.A. degree in creative writing and a Ph.D. degree in creative writing and the Gothic at Royal Holloway, University of London. The Essex Serpent was a No. 1 bestseller in hardback in Britain, was named Waterstone’s Book of the Year for 2016, and was nominated for a slew of literary awards. Perry lives in Norwich, England.

It’s easy to see why The Essex Serpent has gained so many recognitions and so many accolades. It’s well written. It has a fascinating story and recognizable characters, characters that the reader takes to and sympathizes with. And it’s powerful: it starts slowly and carefully, and you wonder where all this is going. But then you’re caught, and you realize that this story simply won’t let go, even after the last page.

Related:

‘I was wonderstruck; transfixed by strangeness’ – Sarah Perry’s account in The Guardian of seeing a mirage (the Fata Morgana); a similar sighting involes a key scene in The Essex Serpent.

Twenty Questions with Sarah Perry – The Times Literary Supplement.

Top photograph: Salt marshes in Essex, England, via CoastalCare.org.