Book Review: A Jealous Ghost, A. N. Wilson

 A Jealous Ghost, A. N. Wilson

Read: 27/10 - 10/11/2023

My rating: 3 /5 stars

Book of 2023: 13

Sallie Declan, the heroine of this erudite and compelling little novel, is a 27-year-old American in London writing her PhD on Henry James’ famous ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. Her friends joke that she is the innocent Jamesian heroine let loose among the social complexities of Europe; in reality, she is sad, friendless and adrift, havng been invited into only one English home that of her well-meaning professor in the eight months since she stepped off the plane. Struggling with her thesis, and feeling increasingly bleak, Sallie decides to take some time out and see the real England. So she lands a job as a temporary nanny to the children of Charles Masters, a high-flying city lawyer who spends much of his time abroad. The children’s mother, Sallie assumes, is dead. 

This book was on my Gender and Monstrosity module at university. I never read it, and I’m finally reading it since it’s spooky season and I fancied something a little more aligned with my old Gothic preoccupation. I read James’ The Turn of the Screw and ended up writing my final essay of the module looking into the constant return of the past within Turn and Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.  

Look at my opening sentences!!!!: “James, uses conventional motifs of Gothic setting to create an unstable physical and mental landscape within his unnamed governess, who fears for the children’s safety from the figures they have lost.”

This novel isn’t a rewriting of Turn, and it doesn’t ignore the book’s existence. Our protagonist, Sallie (who is named in A Jealous Ghost!) is actually studying the text, and constantly refers to the story. She gets the children’s names mixed up with the kids from Turn, she mistakenly calls the house “Bly”. The reader constantly visits Turn throughout this novel, and I can’t imagine this book is much fun to read without having read James’ story. 

“She was becoming the central figure in that story which she had been so obsessively contemplating all year.” (13)

I’ve never read a book like this before, where the main narration mirrors or refers to another text so closely. In retellings of Greek mythology, we the reader are aware of the original tale, but the narrator or protagonists rarely are. In The Jealous Ghost, Wilson uses Sallie to both offer some level of literary criticism of the James story, and as a device to further explain the delusions or obsessions of our protagonist. Wilson has Sallie mis-narrate at times, having her refer to Steverton as Bly, having her confuse the children in her care as Florence and Miles. It’s an interesting plot device, because we are so often reminded of Turn that it seems impossible that our narrator is also forgetting that she isn’t actually at Bly. Her insistence of referring to the text so frequently, surely means she is so knowledgeable of it, that she cannot possibly confuse where she is, with the story she has read. It’s slightly oxymoronic. If she knew the original text less intensely, she may be forgiven for getting elements of it confused with Staverton. 

“She had never felt so strongly, as she did during this particular walk, that she was destined to stay at Staverton for a very long time, perhaps for ever, to become its, and hence Charles’s, mistress.” (100)

This book is a strange one. Our protagonist Sallie feels undercooked. Her obsession with looking down upon those who engage in sexual activity is a sort of half-baked contrast of the unnamed governess in Turn, but it feels reductive. It feels unnecessary. Sallie can hate the ghost of the ex-wife without having a distaste for sexually active women. Perhaps it is some attempt to normalise the idea that she loves Charles, to make it make sense that their relationship exists without any physical proximity. I don’t know, but Wilson throws in some frankly cringe-worthy sentences, the use of the acronym “B.L.”. It just pulls you out of the story, because of how weird she sounds in these moments. It doesn’t serve her character any more, in my opinion, it doesn’t make her more complicated, or unlikable, or psychopathic. I think it is in Wilson’s attempt to parallel the referential text that it is shoehorned in. 

“She hated so much, so very, very much, the idea of what men had between their legs.” (145)

A question I am left thinking is whether you expect the ending, whether Sallie is predisposed toward violence against children. Does she not like children? Is she too sensitive to criticism? Is she just deluded in her fantasies towards Charles? It’s a complicated story line and though you’re reading it from her perspective (it is third person narration, but omniscient and extremely focalised), you never really understand where she is coming from. 

“What the hell did age matter when a man looked like Lord Byron?” (16)

“Excuse me, but forget Mr Rochester. We are into serious, serious Mr Darcy territory here.” (19)

Unlike the governess in Turn, we never really fret for Sallie. It is abundantly clear from the narration that there is no danger here. From the beginning, we know there is something not quite right with our protagonist. We know she sees things differently to everyone else. Morally dubious, internally skewed, she is obviously out of touch from reality. So you spend the whole of the novel waiting for it to become clear just how misaligned she really is. 

“Be rational, Sallie. Maybe you are going crazy. Maybe, after all you’ve been through you are going, just a little, crazy.” (110)

While reading this I can’t help but daydream to Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of James’ tale The Haunting of Bly Manor. The series is so brilliant, and adds delicious exposition and storytelling to the gaps left behind by James. It’s loosely based on Turn, whereas this novel only refers to the novella, and has some of the key aspects recreated for our protagonist Sallie. With these reimaginings of the original plot, the differences, the similarities, it’s easy to see the remaining trope: the past is always returning to the present. 

“There could be no doubt. The face staring back at Sallie from its silver frame was the woman she had seen framed by the door in the garden wall. It was the dead woman.” (117)

“The only thing that had stood between her and happiness with Charles had been the children. And the ghost. The jealous ghost.” (136)

So, who is this jealous ghost? Is it Rosie - the ex-wife who was never really dead? Is it James, the novelist whose story is being rewritten in front of our eyes? Is it Sallie, the childminder obsessed with gothic preoccupations, doomed to be taken away from this house, doomed to commit an atrocity against the children she was hired to care for? I’m unsure. In Sallie’s mind, the ghost is the ex-wife, except she has never been a ghost, but her lingering scent and impact on the family do serve as a spectral presence on both Sallie and the house. 

Whilst I certainly didn’t fall completely in love with this book, it was nice to return to my Gothic roots and enjoy a world I would have overanalysed at university. I can’t believe I never read it alongside Turn (as Sallie calls it). I don’t think I’ll ever read this again, but I’m glad I have. I continue on my adventure of reading the books I already own.