K. Boullosa 2008-02-28

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It is a great pity that modern audiences are so unfamiliar with Dorothy Macardle's first-class 1942 ghost novel, "The Uninvited." The 1944 film based on the novel, with Ray Milland and Gail Russell, is probably more well-known, which is too bad, because, although the film adaptation was good, Macardle's book is far better.

What sets this story apart from so many others of the same genre is expressive writing, well-developed characters, a romantic atmosphere, and the touching nature of the relationships underlying the haunting. The novel brings up themes of loss, anger, cultural prejudice, and, albeit very obliquely, homosexuality, as it uncovers the reasons for the disturbances that have made a house on the Cornish coast uninhabitable for fifteen years.

London critic Roderick ("Roddy") Fitzgerald and his younger sister, Pamela, decide to join forces and buy a house outside London. Roddy feels burnt out and is exiting an unhappy love affair, and Pamela has been drifting aimlessly after years of caring for their ill and bitter father until his death. At the end of a weekend looking at properties, all of which are too expensive, Roddy and Pamela discover Cliff End, on the Cornish coast, built on a cliff facing the sea. They fall in love with it, and find, to their amazement, that its price is within their means. The reason, of course, is that no occupants have been able to remain in it for more than a few months at a time.

The owner of the house is a frosty formal naval officer, Commander Brooke, whose aristocratic blonde daughter, Mary, once lived in the house with her husband, a Welsh artist named Llywellyn Meredith. Mary and her husband are both dead, and Commander Brooke is the guardian of their beautiful, 18-year-old daughter, Stella Meredith, who is the real owner of the house, but who has not been inside it since she was three years old. The Commander has never approved of Stella's Welsh blood, and has tried to stamp its "influence" out of her with a strict, no-nonsense upbringing, keeping Stella at boarding schools and away from the tragedies that unfolded at Cliff End, and that led to her mother's death. Stella, however, is greatly attached to the idea of Cliff End, because the only memories she has of her beloved mother took place there. Although the Commander reveals, out of honesty, that other owners have left the house due to "disturbrances" there, he gives Roddy and Pamela no background on the events that might account for the disturbances.

As Roddy and Pamela begin refurbishing the house, they are determined to make friends with Stella, despite her grandfather's disapproval, and invite her to visit them and to their first dinner parties. However, Roddy and Pamela soon find their joy in Cliff End dwindling as it becomes apparent that something IS wrong with the house, something that becomes worse whenever Stella visits. The room that had been Stella's nursery will not get warm and causes depression and tortuous self-doubt in all who sleep in it; a woman's heartbeaking sobs can be heard at odd hours of the night; the housekeeper's cat, Whiskey, will not go near the stairs to the second floor; and, occasionally, the overpowering scent of mimosa (a flower not native to Cornwall) fills the house.

Slowly, from local townspeople, storekeepers, and servants, as well as their neighbor, Dr. Scott, Roddy and Pamela begin to piece together the background of the house that Commander Brooke withheld from them - the story of Mary and Llywellyn Meredith's strange marriage; the presence in the house of Carmel, Llywellen's Spanish gypsy model, and his sometime lover; the influence of Mary's dearest "friend", the obsessive, cold, Miss Holloway; and how these four lives came to intersect in tragedy.

At first, the story seems a quite plausible explanation for the unpleasant haunting: a philandering husband, a betrayed wife, a loyal friend, and a foreign gypsy hussy who was no better than she ought to be. But, as Roddy and Pamela and Dr. Scott soon perceive, some of the pieces do not align so neatly with the the small village's popular view of the story, at least not in a way that offers a solution to the hauntings. If Mary Meredith was so virtuous and good, and she is longing for her daughter, why does her ghost cause such coldness and terror when Stella is near - and if Mary's spirit is so cold and terrifying, whence comes the occasionally overpowering, yet not frightening, scent of mimosa in the house?

One night, the little group attempts a seance in the house, using a Ouija board, and its terrifying consequences make clear to all that something in the house poses a real danger to Stella, and that she must be kept away for her own safety. But Stella is angry and griefstricken at the expulsion from nearness to her adored, but little-known mother.

At last, Roddy, Pamela, and Dr. Scott, with some help from the unseen, discover the missing piece of knowledge that completes the picture and clarifies the nature of the struggle going on within the house, and especially inside the old nursery. The revelation of the truth, in a touchingly written scene, brings Stella's mother peace, allows Stella to express her love for the mother she has missed and longed for all her young life, and gives Roddy and Pamela back their home.

This story is filled with charm, beautifully written, with vivid portraits of life in a small Cornish village more than 50 years ago. The ghostly scenes are frighteningly rendered, and, at the last, the story is genuinely moving. Perhaps a refilming would resurrect interest in this lovely novel, which certainly merits renewed attention.