(1900), by Lucas Malet (Mary St Leger Kingsley Harrison), is both a love story and a ghost story. The writer Laurence Rivers inherits a family mansion from his ominous cousin Montagu. He discovers a locked “yellow drawing-room”, left intact with its early-nineteenth-century feminine trifles (embroidery, letters, music). The room is haunted by a lovely ghost, Agnes, and Laurence is the reborn version of her original lover. Although Laurence tempts Agnes to return to the world of the living, in the end she vanishes, leaving him possessed by unfulfillable yearning. In this novel it is the ghostly woman who haunts the house of fiction. Agnes's creative work overwhelms Laurence's essays and the decadent connoisseurship of Montagu. Malet's friend Henry James later wrote
145 words
Citation: Schaffer, Talia. "The Gateless Barrier". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 January 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=762, accessed 26 November 2024.]
