Domestic Hauntings: The Little Stranger (Waters, 2009), Birdcage Walk (Dunmore, 2017), The Stopped Heart (Myerson, 2016)

A place of safety for women in particular, the house and home is also often one of utmost danger because of that alignment with identity, place, security and safety, physical, economic, social and psychological. For many, it is dangerous because of woman’s position within the home, should a controlling abusive or murderous man dominate, own or intend to own both the structure of the house and home, and the woman’s mind and body. The haunted houses in these three novels embody and enact those vulnerabilities, leakages through physical structures, cellars, attics, staircases, locked rooms, sound and water pipes, and the physical and psychological dominance asserted by variously controlling men. Women might well not recognise and admit to this abusive control, veneered over by romance, seduction, marriage, but there are ghostly warnings, hints, in the fabric of the building, from historical or family photographs, from a dead first wife or mother.