Old houses traditionally keep many stories and - ghosts, which, if not physically harm, can harm morally and drive you crazy. So was the boy at Handred's Hall?
My great-aunt used to say that a good house is like a shell: the maids get into it with grains of sand, and after ten years they turn into pearls.
Sarah Waters is best known as the author of books about non-classical characters, often the plots of her stories unfold in the XIX century or early XX, and "Little Stranger" in this sense was no exception. The main character is Mr. Faraday, a forty-year-old doctor; he received a good education, however, probably due to lack of any ambition, he achieved little.
Faraday lives in Warwickshire, a small town where many ancient ancestral estates have survived, most of them already deserted or impoverished. The world around is changing, technology is developing, and the old families are becoming a thing of the past, giving way to small workers, entrepreneurs, enterprising businessmen who are ready to give whole parks for fields, farms and some laboratories.
Fate brings Faraday together with the Ayres family, whose roots go back to the distant past. Now only a mother and daughter and son - Caroline and Roderick - remain from the once big titled family. It just so happens that Faraday is gradually getting closer to his family, and in the meantime, strange things begin to happen in the Handreds Hall estate, which belongs to them.
Until the very end, it is difficult to decide whether mysticism is really happening here, or just changes in the country are breaking the children of the past who are trying to keep up with the changes, but they really won't succeed. Mother does not intend to step into the future, Roderick returned after the war with his problems, and Carolina is simply not enough to change something globally. Faraday, by the way, seems to be trying to help, but it doesn't work out very well.
If you think about it, mysticism is not the most important thing here. It's not about her. This story is mostly (or primarily) about how life changes, how those who have remained at the top of the social pyramid for many centuries become the past. However, before you look back, family doctors are becoming a thing of the past, because the state health program is about to start working, and three-story houses will soon grow on the site of the once magnificent park, in which ordinary workers can settle. Those who cherished titles, those who are accustomed to dinner parties and wonderful balls, to rich dresses and huge mansions - they find themselves on the edge of life, because they can not keep up with rapid changes, and enterprising upstarts easily make money from seemingly, unworthy deeds. But the latter have money,and the former barely make ends meet.
The reader will decide for himself whether mysticism is to blame for what is happening in the house, or simply the human factor, guilt, family pride, unwillingness to face an unknown and terrible future. The book does not give an unambiguous answer whether there was a ghost in reality, or these people, filled with guilt, clinging to the past slipping through their fingers, actually drove themselves crazy, they themselves assured themselves that something otherworldly lives in the old house. After all, as usual, a lot has happened in old mansions, and all this leaves its mark, is absorbed into the walls of the house, luxurious wallpapers, soft carpets. All this remains inside, no matter how subsequent generations try to get rid of this heritage afterwards.
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So was there a ghost?