The Little Stranger;
Sarah Waters, 2009
Penguin Group USA
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594484469
Summary
In this chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain...Sarah Waters revisits the fertile setting of Britain in the 1940s—and gives us a sinister tale of a haunted house, brimming with the rich atmosphere and psychological complexity that have become hallmarks of Waters’s work.
The Little Stranger follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline—its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine.
But are the Ayreses haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.Abundantly atmospheric and elegantly told, The Little Stranger is Sarah Waters’s most thrilling and ambitious novel yet. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 21, 1966
• Where—Neyland, Pembrokeshire, Wales, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Kent; M.A., Lancaster University; Ph.D., University of London
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in London, England
Sarah Waters grew up in Wales in a family that included her father Ron, mother Mary, and sister. Her mother was a housewife and her father an engineer who worked on oil refineries. She describes her family as "pretty idyllic, very safe and nurturing." Her father, "a fantastically creative person," encouraged her to build and invent.
Waters said, "When I picture myself as a child, I see myself constructing something, out of plasticine or papier-mâché or Meccano; I used to enjoy writing poems and stories, too." She wrote stories and poems that she describes as "dreadful gothic pastiches," but had not planned her career.
“I don’t know if I thought about it much, really. I know that, for a long time, I wanted to be an archaeologist — like lots of kids. And I think I knew I was headed for university, even though no one else in my family had been. I was always bright at school, and really enjoyed learning. I remember my mother telling me that I might one day go to university and write a thesis, and explaining what a thesis was; and it seemed a very exciting prospect. I was clearly a bit of a nerd.”
Waters was a "completely tomboyish child", but "got into" femininity in her teenage years. She had always been attracted to boys, and it was not until university that she first fell in love with a woman.
After Milford Haven Grammar School, Waters attended university, and earned degrees in English literature. She received a BA from the University of Kent, an MA from Lancaster University, and a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. The work for her PhD dissertation, ('Wolfskins and togas : lesbian and gay historical fictions, 1870 to the present' i(available as a free download from the British Library's ETHOS service) served as inspiration and material for future books. As part of her research, she read 19th-century pornography, in which she came across the title of her first book, Tipping the Velvet.
Waters lives in a top-floor Victorian flat in Kennington, south-west London. The rooms, which have very high ceilings, used to be servant quarters. Waters lives with her two cats.
Writing
Before writing novels, Waters worked as an academic, earning a doctorate and teaching. Waters went directly from her doctoral thesis to her first novel. It was during the process of writing her thesis that she thought she would write a novel; she began as soon as the thesis was complete. Her work is very research-intensive, which is an aspect she enjoys. Waters was a member of the long-running London North Writers circle, whose members have included the novelists Charles Palliser and Neil Blackmore, among others.
With the exception of her most recent book, The Little Stranger, all of her books contain lesbian themes, and she does not mind being labeled a lesbian writer. She said, "I'm writing with a clear lesbian agenda in the novels. It's right there at the heart of the books." She calls it "incidental," because of her own sexual orientation. "That's how it is in my life, and that's how it is, really, for most lesbian and gay people, isn't it? It's sort of just there in your life."
Waters' novels include: Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), Fingersmith (2002), The Night Watch (2006), The Little Stranger (2009), and The Paying Guests (2014).
Awards
Sarah Waters was named as one of Granta's 20 Best of Young British Writers in January 2003. The same year, she received the South Bank Award for Literature. She was named Author of the Year at the 2003 British Book Awards. In both 2006 and 2009 she won "Writer of the Year" at the annual Stonewall Awards. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009. She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times and Orange Prize twice. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Sarah Waters is an excellent, evocative writer, and this is an incredibly gripping and readable novel.
Scarlett Thomas - New York Times
Sarah Waters ain't afraid of no ghost. Her new novel, a deliciously creepy tale called The Little Stranger, is haunted by the spirits of Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe. Waters is just one turn of the screw away from The Fall of the House of Usher…What saves The Little Stranger from sinking into a fetid swamp of cliche is the author's restraint, her ability, like James's, to excite our imagination through subtle suggestion alone. The supernatural creaks and groans that reverberate through this tale are accompanied by malignant strains of class envy and sexual repression that infect every perfectly reasonable explanation we hear. The result is a ghost story as intelligent as it is stylish.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Waters (The Night Watch) reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a stunning haunted house tale whose ghosts are as horrifying as any in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Doctor Faraday, a lonely bachelor, first visited Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked as a parlor maid, at age 10 in 1919. When Faraday returns 30 years later to treat a servant, he becomes obsessed with Hundreds's elegant owner, Mrs. Ayres; her 24-year-old son, Roderick, an RAF airman wounded during the war who now oversees the family farm; and her slightly older daughter, Caroline, considered a "natural spinster" by the locals, for whom the doctor develops a particular fondness. Supernatural trouble kicks in after Caroline's mild-mannered black Lab, Gyp, attacks a visiting child. A damaging fire, a suicide and worse follow. Faraday, one of literature's more unreliable narrators, carries the reader swiftly along to the devastating conclusion.
Publishers Weekly
Few authors do dread as well as Waters (The Night Watch). Her latest novel is a ghost story with elements of both The Fall of the House of Usher and Brideshead Revisited. In post-World War II Britain, the financially struggling Dr. Faraday is called to Hundreds Hall, home of the upper-class Ayreses, now fallen on hard times. Ostensibly there to treat Roderick Ayres for a war injury, Faraday soon sees signs of mental decline-first in Roderick and later in his mother, Mrs. Ayres. Waters builds the suspense slowly, with the skeptical Faraday refusing to accept the explanations of Roderick or of the maid Betty, who believe that there is a supernatural presence in the house. Meanwhile, Faraday becomes enamored of Roderick's sister Caroline and begins to dream of building a family within the confines of the ruined Hundreds Hall. This spooky, satisfying read has the added pleasure of effectively detailing postwar village life, with its rationing, social strictures, and gossip, all on the edge of Britain's massive change to a social state.
Devon Thomas - Library Journal
A sinister ancestral hoe in an advanced state of decay, a family terrorized by its own history, and a narrator drawn into these orbits dominate this creepy novel from Waters (The Night Watch, 2006, etc.). Shortly after the end of World War II, and nearly 30 years after first seeing magnificent Hundreds Hall as an awestruck ten-year-old, hardworking Doctor Faraday is summoned to the now-shabby Warwickshire estate to treat a young housemaid's illness. Widowed Mrs. Ayres, her son Roderick, crippled and traumatized by injuries sustained during his wartime tenure as a RAF pilot, and bluff, pleasant daughter Caroline quickly accept Faraday as a friend, and he is initially enchanted by the family's stoical perseverance as Hundreds Hall falls into ruin and farmlands are sold to pay off mounting debts. But worse awaits: The family's gentle dog Gyp unaccountably and severely bites a visiting young girl, and neither Faraday's continuing professional ministrations nor his growing love for plucky Caroline can save these reclusive prewar relics from the supernatural presences seemingly arisen from their past. Waters' scrupulously engineered plot builds efficiently to a truly scary highpoint halfway through her long narrative. But tensions relax perilously, as the doctor's repeated emergency visits to Hundreds Hall become almost risibly indistinguishable, and even crucial dramatic moments are muffled by fervent conversations among the four major characters. Furthermore, too many crucial pieces of information are relayed secondhand, as Faraday summarizes accounts of other people's experiences. Still, Waters has extended her range agreeably, working in traditions established by Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan, and Wilkie Collins, expertly teasing us with suggestive allusions to the classics of supernatural fiction. A subtle clue planted in one character's given name neatly foreshadows, then explains, the Ayres family's self-destructive insularity. Flawed but nevertheless often gripping thriller from one of the most interesting novelists at work today.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Faraday describes Hundreds Hall early in the novel as “blurred and slightly uncertain—like an ice...just beginning to melt in the sun” [1]. How does this description set the tone for the story to come? How is the physical structure of Hundreds Hall reminiscent of an age past?
2. Faraday’s friend Seeley presents the reader with two theories, the first being that Hundreds was “defeated by history, destroyed by its own failure to keep pace with a rapidly changing world,” with the Ayreses “opting for retreat;” the other that Hundreds was “consumed by some dark germ, some ravenous shadow-creature, some ‘little stranger,’ spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself”[463]. Do you think the author leads us toward one of these more strongly than the other? To both? To neither?
3. “Do you really think this family’s worth saving?” Roderick asks at one point [182]. What is the role of family in The Little Stranger? Does pride and shame with regard to family influence decisions made by the main characters—including Faraday? How does his relationship to the ideal as well as the reality of family differ from Caroline’s and Roddie’s?
4. Mrs. Ayres says of Gillian Baker-Hyde: “The child will be horribly disfigured. It’s a frightful thing to happen to any parent” [105]. Discuss the motif of disfigurement in the novel.
5. In reference to Roderick’s difficulties, Faraday says, “What a punishing business it is, simply being alive” [144]. Discuss this idea: Is Faraday speaking only from observation, do you think? Or is he expressing a deep conviction?
6. Faraday says, “We family doctors are like priests. People tell us their secrets, because they know we won’t judge them.... Some doctors don’t like it. I’ve known one or two who’ve seen so much weakness they’ve developed a sort of contempt for mankind” [144]. How much truth do you think there is to this statement—are doctors and other professionals who hold confidences likely to develop either particular contempt or particular compassion for mankind? How would you characterize Faraday’s own position on the human race in general? Does it change over the course of the novel?
7. “Love isn’t a thing that can be weighed or measured,” Faraday says [204]. Do you agree?
8. Is Faraday a reliable narrator? Why or why not? Discuss other narrators about whom this question could be asked. A few examples might be Humbert Humbert, in Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; Tarquin Winot, in The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester; and Antonio Salieri, in Peter Shaffer’s play (later a film) Amadeus—you will probably be able to think of others.
9. How does the “Baker-Hyde polish” [82] compare to the impression the Ayreses make on others? Why do the Ayreses find the fact that the Baker-Hydes are ripping out the panelling at Standish so offensive? What does the author have to say about “new money” versus “old money?”
10. Despite the strange happenings at Hundreds Hall that he relates throughout the novel, Dr. Faraday remains a voice of reason as narrator. Compare his attitude to that of each of the Ayreses with regard to these happenings. What do you think the author is suggesting about rationality, the supernatural, delusion, even madness? Are reason and the supernatural incompatible?
11. Memory and history are powerful forces attracting the characters to the house. How does Faraday’s history with Hundreds affect his feelings about it? About the Ayreses? How does Mrs. Ayres’s personal history affect her feelings about Hundreds?
12. Do you find Caroline and Dr. Faraday’s romance a strange one? Do you think Caroline was ever invested in the relationship? Was Faraday? Do you think their marriage could have been a success, for one or both parties?
13. England has just come out of a bloody world-wide war that has changed so much for everyone. How did WWII specifically affect Faraday? Caroline? Discuss how the post-war world might have looked for Caroline if she had never had to come home to care for Roddie.
14. How has the war changed society generally and how has it shaken up the British class system? Do you think Faraday will “fit” more comfortably in the coming years than he seems to have thus far in his life? Why or why not? What do you think about Hilary Mantel’s description of The Little Stranger as “a perverse hymn to decay, to the corrosive power of class resentment as well as the damage wrought by the war.”
15. The gothic literary tradition is often associated with horror, romance and melodrama. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious, or violent incidents.” In what ways does The Little Stranger fit into this tradition? How does it compare to other gothic texts—from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries—that you may have read? In what ways is The Little Stranger not like them?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page