Virago Press

Sarah Waters' Top Ten Ghost Stories - March 2009

W. W. Jacobs, 'The Monkey's Paw'

This is one of the most anthologised of all ghost stories, and its 'be careful what you wish for' message has become one of the clichés of the genre. (I've seen it brilliantly pastiched on The League of Gentlemen and The Simpsons.) But it made a huge impression on me when I first came across it as a child, and I still think it's pretty wonderful. Every time I re-read it, I realise how economical it is: we never see the son who, summoned up by the diabolical power of the monkey's paw, has dragged his mangled body out of its grave and back to his parents' house; we only hear his baleful knocks at their front door. But it's the anticipation that makes the moment so hair-raisingly good.

Sheridan LeFanu, 'Carmilla'

OK, this is about a vampire rather than a ghost. But for unnerving atmosphere and general queerness, this story of a beautiful revenant and her fascination with attractive teenage girls really can't be beaten. As in many early vampire stories, Carmilla gets her violent come-uppance in the end. More memorable, however, is the 'very strange agony' into which her voluptuous wooing plunges the story's unworldly narrator: 'Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat ... '

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills

As far as I know, none of Ishiguro's fiction is actively supernatural, but his novels have a brilliant strangeness to them, which makes reading them always a challenging and unnerving experience. In A Pale View of Hills, his Nagasaki-born narrator has become so detached from her own traumatic past, she has effectively turned it into someone else's life. As in many great ghost stories, the result is a tightly controlled narrative surface, with half-glimpsed, terrifying depths.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 'The Yellow Wallpaper'

This isn't a ghost story exactly; it's a brilliantly economical depiction of a woman's descent into insanity. But the room in which its unnamed protagonist slowly loses her wits is definitely a 'haunted' one: the ghosts are other women, trying furiously but fruitlessly to 'shake the bars' of the claustrophobic patterns in which they are trapped. The story is a classic of nineteenth-century feminism, and still frightening today.

Kelly Link, 'The Specialist's Hat'

All of Link's stories are wonderfully odd and original. Some are also quite scary - and 'The Specialist's Hat', from her collection Stranger Things Happen, is very scary indeed. It's the story of ten-year-old twin girls in a haunted American mansion, being instructed by an enigmatic babysitter just what it means to be 'Dead' ... The narrative is all the more unnerving because you don't know exactly what's going on - only that it's something rather unpleasant.

Henry James, 'The Turn of the Screw'

I'm not really much of a Henry James fan, but I think this has to be on my list, if only because its story - of a lonely governess whose infant charges may or may not be being haunted by the ghosts of wicked servants - has been such an influential one. As far as chills go, I actually prefer the two brilliantly spooky films for which it provided the inspiration: the 1961 The Innocents, with a fragile Deborah Kerr, and The Others (2001), with a demented Nicole Kidman.

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

The definitive haunted house story, and another novel that inspired a fabulously scary film, the 1963 The Haunting. It has one of the best and creepiest first paragraphs of any book I know, and I love it so much I'm going to quote it here in full:

'No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.'

Elizabeth Bowen, 'The Demon Lover'

In many of her novels and stories, Bowen beautifully captures the eerie atmosphere of wartime London, with its blitzed, abandoned houses. In this story, that landscape becomes definitely supernatural, as a middle-aged woman tries to evade an assignation with the sinister soldier fiancé lost to her many years before. Like lots of good ghost stories, the punch is in the chilling final lines, as the woman, being whisked away in a taxi into 'the hinterland of deserted streets', realises to her horror that her date has been kept after all ...

Susan Hill, The Woman in Black

Watching the BBC adaptation of this several Christmases ago, I got so frightened, I was sick. Admittedly, I had eaten a lot of Christmas pudding - but Hill's story is at times genuinely terrifying, an absolute classic of the genre. The 'woman with the wasted face', made so ravenous and malevolent by the loss of her own infant that she destroys the children of others, is a fantastic creation; and the scenes in lonely Eel Marsh House, where the hapless narrator wakes to hear the rhythmic creak and bump of a rocking-chair in an empty room, are just magnificent.

Toni Morrison, Beloved

'Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief,' one of Morrison's characters points out, when Sethe, the novel's protagonist, suggests fleeing from the spiteful spirit inhabiting her home. One of the great fictional studies of slavery and its scars, Beloved is also a sublime literary ghost story: a meditation on the ways in which individuals and communities - ultimately, an entire nation - can be haunted by the violence and injustice of the past. A breathtaking book.

Sarah Waters on the BBC adaptation of Tipping the Velvet

‘What if they completely re-write it?’ people invariably asked me, when they found out that my first novel Tipping The Velvet was going to be adapted for television. ‘Wouldn’t you rather do the screenplay yourself?’ Frankly, I wouldn’t have had a clue where to begin. I was much happier handing the novel over to someone who really knew what they were doing. And from the start, screenwriter Andrew Davies reassured me that, having loved the book, he was only interested in doing a faithful adaptation of it; he was particularly insistent that he would not be toning down any of the novel’s sometimes rather racy lesbian content. He was true to his word: his screenplay is a fantastically faithful one and—for better or worse—the series’ lesbian sex scenes are already fast becoming one of its main selling-points.

Inevitably, however, the text as I wrote it has undergone changes. A novel is the work of a monomaniac: as author, you have complete control over dialogue, costume, scenery—even the weather. A tv drama is a collaborative thing, full of variables. My first meeting with the crew was at the actors’ read-through of the script: an event, close to the start of filming, at which the cast, director and producer assemble with costume designers, camera operators and technicians for a rudimentary ‘performance’ of the entire screenplay. Walking into a crowded room marked TIPPING THE VELVET filled me, I must confess, with a sort of panic: an alarming feeling that things had gone too far. The novel had run away from me; the livelihoods of an entire team of professional people were involved; my writing had spawned a world—a sort of parallel universe to that of the novel itself—in which I had no control, or even much right to be present...

Ultimately, though, this is where the excitement of the adaptation lies. Tipping the mini-series and Tipping the book have a weirdly symbiotic relationship: like identical twins, they are intimately related, and yet thoroughly distinct. At times, it has been almost uncanny to see images from my own head brought to life in lush period style; it was especially odd and thrilling to be given a part as an extra in one of the music-hall scenes—to find myself sitting in a wig and a corset and gown, watching Keeley Hawes, on a real Victorian stage, play the male impersonator Kitty Butler, just as I had imagined. But it has not proved strange or frustrating to see the minor ways in which book and screenplay diverge—to see parts taken, for example, by actors who don’t much resemble the characters as I’ve described them. I just now have two Tippings in my head—my own, and the BBC’s. I like them both, in different ways. I hope audiences will, too.

Sarah Waters' third novel, Fingersmith, takes its title from a 19th-century term for a pickpocket. One of the book's narrators, Sue Trinder, is a member of a London 'family' of petty thieves and fraudsters. But the author also describes the novel itself as an act of theft – it is, she says, about 'appropriating all the stuff I most love about 19th-century fiction for a lesbian agenda'.

Waters' previous novels, Tipping the Velvet and Affinity, have been critically very well received, winning her the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award; she is included in the 'Orange Futures' promotion, and with a BBC TV drama serial adaptation by Andrew Davies now in the pipeline for Tipping the Velvet, is undoubtedly a rising name.

From the start, her approach to the historical novel has been critical and creative. She began her career as an academic, gaining a doctorate at Queen Mary and Westfield College (after which she taught at the Open University) on the subject of history in lesbian and gay writing from the late 19th century onwards. 'I was looking at the changing nature of the appeal to the past,' she explains. 'I started with gay writers like John Addington Symonds, who were appealing to Ancient Greece as an explanation of homosexuality, and women like Renée Vivien and Natalie Barney at the turn of the 20th century, who were looking back to Sappho.'

From her thesis, Waters says, it was a short and natural step to begin writing her own novels. In Tipping the Velvet – a sunny, picaresque adventure set in the cross-dressing Victorian music hall – she says she took the chance, intentionally anachronistic, 'to pinch for women' the material she had gleaned about the male upper-middle-class homosexual circles of the 1890s and their encounters with 'rough trade'. In Affinity, a much darker, more claustrophobic tale set in a women's prison, she says she was trying to engage far more with real historical difference; to explore how lesbian desire might actually have been experienced and expressed in 19th-century culture, where it had no public place or acknowledgement.

Fingersmith is different again, a celebration of Waters' passion for the Victorian sensationalist literature of the 1860s, and writers such as Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Braddon. 'I wanted to take all the classic scenarios and tropes of sensation fiction and to take a different path through them, pursuing lesbian attraction, and making them mean different things,' she explains. Fingersmith begins as almost a retelling of Collins' The Woman in White, with a plot to defraud an heiress and incarcerate her in a madhouse. But Waters twists the familiar scenario from a sly, sideways angle, focusing on young opportunist Sue, who becomes lady's maid to the vulnerable Maud Lilly as part of a marriage plot devised by the villainous Gentleman.

Sue finds herself holed up in a country house simmering with dark secrets, fragile nerves and repressed emotions, while the everyday intimacies between a lady and her personal maid take on an increasingly warm and erotic tinge. As with Affinity, Fingersmith racks up the reader's tensions to breaking point, this time adding an extravagant plot that involves betrayal, double-crossing, a master pornographer and scenes of imprisonment in a brutal private asylum. 'I've been drawn to the gothic since I was a child, when I was fascinated by the macabre and supernatural, and watched all the Hammer House of Horror films,' Waters explains. 'Women have often been victimised within the genre, they have never been powerful – but there has often been this frisson around female sexuality and female transgressions. After I had written it, I realised that Fingersmith is all about images of innocence and corruption, and the play between them.'

The twisting plot was paramount to her conception of this novel, she says, and she began it light-heartedly, enjoying the melodrama. Only as the characters became more real and rounded to her did 'a balance between pure melodrama and agonising human emotional predicaments' begin to emerge. Of the developing erotic relationship between Maud and her maid, Waters – who quips that one of the main reasons for writing about the 19th century was 'the corsets' – says that when you really start to think about the reality of having a lady's maid, 'you recognise the enormous intimacy which must have grown up between you. She was washing and dressing you, and brushing your hair; sorting you out. I suppose what I like there is also the power dynamic, the class thing – and, as in the film The Servant, that dynamic can shift.'

Victorian pornography also has a significant presence within the novel, though it would give too much away to explain just how it features; suffice it to say that it involves scenes both chilling and provocative. Waters explains that she thinks lesbian writers and critics should take more notice of the images 19th-century pornographers have left them. 'We tend to think that pornography is too contaminated or male-dominated to be of any use to us, but it seems extraordinary to me that there are all these images from the 19th century – and who was reading and producing it? It's hard to say, but there must have been a significant number of women involved. So I wanted to write about pornography but not in a censorious or prudish way, and to suggest some ways in which women might appropriate it for their own ends.'

The madhouse scenes are Waters' favourite section of the novel, she says. Here again there were some chilling historical precedents for her yarn of wrongful incarceration. 'I was more interested in the small, private madhouses than in the public asylums because there were some notorious cases in the 19th century of troublesome middle-class women just getting shoved in these to get them out of the way. In a lot of cases they didn't escape, not because of bars and locks, but because they had no money and nowhere to go, or because they didn't possess a hat and so couldn't go out in public. In a way that is even more scary than being locked up.'

reproduced with kind permission by The Bookseller www.thebookseller.com