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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf was published in 1925. Set in post-WWI London, the story follows a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class English socialite. The stream-of-consciousness narrative jumps back and forth in time and between the internal thoughts of its characters. The story also shows post-WWI London and the scars the war left on people’s psyches, including that of Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran who suffers from PTSD. [72]
“Annabel Lee,” Edgar Allan Poe
Published in 1849, after Poe’s death, “Annabel Lee” centers around the loss of the beautiful young woman named in the title. The speaker, her bereaved lover, is haunted by her memory and the great, pure love they had. Unlike the husband in “A Haunted House,” the speaker doesn’t need to travel, searching; he knows his heart lies in a “sepulchre there by the sea.” He continues to visit her tomb, sleeping in it at night, so they can be together. [66]
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Henry James first published his horror novella The Turn of the Screw in 1898. This modernist ghost story possesses many of the hallmarks of the genre that Woolf in turn subverts in “A Haunted House." The text tells of a sensitive and repressed young governess who is hired to care for two orphaned children in a remote, English estate. She discovers two restless spirits haunting the mansion and potentially influencing the children. But are the supernatural figures real, or are they the figments of the governess’s mind?
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House is a psychological ghost story. In it, four guests arrive at Hill House to investigate rumors of its being haunted. Like the house in Woolf’s short story, Hill House seems alive and its narrator feels a certain affinity for it, a connection she can’t explain. Unlike Woolf’s house, however, this house may hold the malevolent intent to take one of the guests and make her its own. The story’s chilling events may be supernatural, or they may be the result of the unbalanced mind of the story’s narrator.
First published in 1987, Toni Morrison’s Beloved follows the story of Sethe, an escaped enslaved woman living in post-Civil War Ohio. Although Sethe is physically free, her body and mind still bear the scars of her traumatic past. The house Sethe has paid for through hard work is haunted by the ghost of her daughter, Beloved. The novel's exploration of slavery’s brutal legacy and generational trauma sets it quite apart from “The Haunted House,” but it’s worth comparing the various ways both texts employ stream-of-consciousness and lyrical prose.
