𝓜.

“The haunted house is precisely that which should be homey, should be welcoming—the place one lives inside—but which has somehow become emptied out of its true function. It is terrifying because it has lost its purpose yet stubbornly persists. Neither alive nor dead but undead, the haunted house is the thing in between.”

Mallory: So I heard you like bad girls...

“The basic elements of a proper Gothic romance require a heroine of pure heart that must travel, often across the world, guided by her love for a dark, brooding gentleman of aristocratic origins. They will often take residence in a haunted building in which a deep secret is stored (often involving wealth, treasure, or ancestral secrets) only to be revealed by our heroine’s journey. Often the characters represent sides of a single self. Almost as if the edifice was the mind, the self and its deepest catacombs, the id - with the festering horrors of the past. Historically, the Romantic movement was a rebellious tide crashing against the dry, uncaring shores of reason. A movement that was sparked by the poetry of ruins and decay and the inexorable attraction of human emotion at its basest.“

“Ghosts and hauntings are related, but not exactly the same thing. Ghosts are specters of the past—people who have lived before and cannot quite leave this mortal realm behind. But hauntings are more broadly defined. People can be haunted by ideas, by the past, by an obsession. Inanimate objects can be haunted as well, holding on to some nameless evil or trauma that won’t dissipate. Vernon Lee’s brand of supernatural fiction fits this latter category: less about ghosts resolving their mortal issues and more about people who can’t escape their own psychology. Lee’s characters are women obsessed with strange ancestors, or men who are artistically—and sometimes sexually—frustrated. And they’re all dangerously preoccupied with, and almost possessed by, the past.”