The haunted houseHilaire BellocOmniClassics · Literature
The haunted house
Hilaire BellocA Sussex house and its manufactured past become the setting for Belloc's satire of money, ancestry, and credulity.
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About the book
Rackham has passed through families whose claims to distinction conceal practical dealings in trade and property. When the scholarly Henry Maple can no longer sustain the estate, his prosperous brother William and ambitious sister-in-law Hilda take a growing interest in it. Hilda's taste for ancestral grandeur extends to purchasing a supposed family portrait and attaching a ghost story to its invented history. Henry's son John, meanwhile, must find a livelihood beyond the house that shaped his childhood. Belloc connects these fortunes through a comic narrative in which financial arrangements and social pretensions matter as much as supernatural appearances. The narrator repeatedly interrupts to expose a comfortable falsehood or question a respectable motive, making the haunted house a meeting place for several kinds of imposture.
- Property and social aspiration
- Invented ancestry
- Credulity and imposture
Why read it
The contrast between Hilda's purchased history and the narrator's irreverent explanations gives the comedy a precise social target.
Harper & Brothers 1928 edition, with illustrations by G. K. Chesterton