By Wilkie Collins (1824-89), this novella was first published in serial form in 1878, and then as a book later the same year. Given that he also wrote it in 1878, on his return from a tour of northern Italy, it's fair to comment that these Victorian authors really didn't mess about. Travel, experience, write, publish... Way to go...

I came across it when I was researching Victorian ghost stories earlier in the year.

Its subtitle is A Mystery of Modern Venice, and it was the famous setting that recently conferred upon it an enhanced attractiveness, and bumped it up the list.

Really? Venice? What's with Venice? Well, our upcoming Europe trip will -- we hope -- take us through Venice, and although we're not staying there (not because of the haunted quality of its accommodation but because of its infamous overtourism problem), we'll at least have the opportunity to take a between-train walk, whose route will take us -- we hope -- a little off the beaten track. (We recently had The Aspern Papers, too, of course, but we didn't know we were going to be anywhere near Venice at that point, so that doesn't count.)


Udaipur, 2011. This is one of many, many cities that has found itself dubbed the Venice of the East...

The Haunted Hotel is part murder mystery, part ghost story. It's a little lurid -- there's nothing like a decomposing, disembodied head to put you off your tea -- and there are areas where it doesn't quite stack up. (Kirk Beetz points out that Collins's later work suffers somewhat from the adverse circumstances he found himself in. A debilitating and painful disease forced him to resort to laudanum, a remedy that left him with addiction and severe sleep-disturbance.)

But it's definitely worth a look. Caveat lector: There are multiple spoilers ahead.

We start in 1860, when a mysterious woman consults Doctor Wybrow, a highly regarded London physician, because she fears she is in danger of going mad... Physically, she's very striking, with a "corpse-like pallor" and a "glittering metallic brightness" to her eyes. Finding no evidence of a bodily ailment, the good doctor invites her to tell him her story, which she does, with a smile that seems "at once sad and cruel". She is engaged to be married to a man she met in mainland Europe -- a man who has broken off a former engagement to marry her. She had no prior knowledge of this breach of faith. He didn't tell her until he could produce a letter from the previous fiancee -- generous in tone, with no hint of anger or reproach -- releasing him from his commitment.

So far, so good, you would think. But then she accidentally meets the former fiancee. She encounters no aggression or vindictiveness, and yet she is overcome with a strange sense of destiny: "I turned cold from head to foot, and shuddered, and shivered, and knew what a deadly panic of fear was, for the first time in my life... That woman is destined (without knowing it herself) to be the evil genius of my life."

The destiny theme is an interesting one. Are some of us unwittingly destined to act fatefully on others..?

Whatever the answer to that question, it's now the pale woman who is asking to be released from the engagement. But the prospective bridegroom refuses. His whole family had been against this marriage, speaking all sorts of evil against his new intended: "If you refuse to marry me," he says, "you admit that you are afraid to face society in the character of my wife."

Later, the doctor's investigations (at his club, where all the members are thoroughgoing gossips) allow us to put some names to these characters. The pale woman is the Countess Narona, who is "an adventuress with a European reputation of the blackest possible colour". Her brother (except everyone seems to doubt he is just her brother...) is Baron Rivar. The prospective husband is the 48-year-old Lord Montbarry (full handle: Herbert John Westwick, First Baron Montbarry, King's County, Ireland). And the woman who has been set aside, but is bearing it patiently, and has no desire to become an avenging angel, is Agnes Lockwood.

Significantly, from one of the bridegroom's brothers, Henry, we learn that Baron Rivar made a life insurance policy on Lord Montbarry (worth GBP 10,000) a condition of the marriage. According to the Bank of England, goods and services costing this amount of money in 1860 would cost almost a million pounds today. So it's a significant amount of money we're talking about.



The wedding takes place. And then we meet Agnes, who lives modestly, and is terribly nice, not glittery-eyed or pale or anything. Nothing that we've seen of Lord Montbarry so far allows us to understand why she is so heartbroken to lose him. But there's no accounting for tastes, and maybe she brought out his better side for a while. Henry, meanwhile, is very sweet on Agnes, but she's still pining for the older brother, and so he can't make any inroads.

Then a little ripple brings about a further entanglement between Agnes and the woman who is now Lady Montbarry. Agnes allows her former maid, Emily (who is married to an Italian courier named Ferrari), to use the name Agnes Lockwood in recommending Ferrari's services to some prospective clients -- who turn out to be none other than the Montbarry household, due to head off to the continent.

And the next we know is that Emily is telling Agnes that her husband has disappeared... He was with Lord and Lady Montbarry and Baron Rivar "at one of the old Venetian palaces which they had hired for a term". Now he's missing. From the letters Emily received before his disappearance, we learn that Lord Montbarry is a proud, cold, stingy man, and the Venetian accommodation is "a damp, mouldy, rambling old palace". A foreign speculator has expressed a desire to turn it into a hotel, but for the moment it's a creepy locality, with vaults (formerly dungeons) below the level of the basement.

When Emily receives a cheque for GBP 1000, accompanied by a note saying the money is "to console you for the loss of your husband", she thinks he must be dead. Shortly afterwards, we hear that Lord Montbarry is dead. The insurance people are suspicious (when are they not?), but they investigate, and find nothing amiss.



When the widowed Lady Montbarry, now back in London, hears from Emily that Agnes had a connection with Ferrari's appointment, she visits Agnes, to hear this from the horse's mouth: "Did you permit Ferrari to make sure of being chosen for our courier by using your name?" she asks. Hearing that this is indeed the case, she replies: "I have received my Sentence." She continues to tell Agnes about her ideas about destiny: "Have you ever heard of such a thing as the fascination of terror? I am drawn to you by a fascination of terror... On the day when I took your hero from you and blighted your life... you were made the instrument of the retribution that my sins of many years had deserved... You have still to bring me to the day of discovery, and to the punishment that is my doom. We shall meet again -- here in England, or there in Venice where my husband died -- and meet for the last time." Cue the fateful music...

Fast forward a year. Henry has invested in the Palace Hotel (the renovated version of the old place in Venice); Agnes is established as governess with the new Lord Montbarry and his family in Ireland; and another family marriage provides the impetus for a big family get-together in -- yes! -- Venice.

The members of the whanau don't all rock up at once. Which means that a succession of three of them have terrible experiences when they sleep in the room that was the former Lord Montbarry's... Francis, another of the Montbarry brothers, and a theatre manager, is gung-ho about the first two dramas, when they're recounted to him, and thinks they would make great material for a ghostly play, which he would call The Haunted Hotel: "Post that in red letters six feet high, on a black ground, all over London -- and trust the excitable public to crowd into the theatre!" But Francis finds he can't linger in the room either, on account of "a mysteriously offensive odour".

He encounters the glittery-eyed Countess, who is even more convinced she has been drawn to Venice by fate. She offers to write a play for Francis. She is clearly starting to exhibit characteristics of mental illness, but Francis encourages her to do as she has suggested.



The rest of the family arrives. The eldest Montbarry daughter is taken to the famous room, which she is supposed to share with Agnes, but she claims to see a spot of blood on the ceiling, and refuses to stay a minute longer. Agnes sleeps badly, and then wakes to find the Countess in her room, asleep in an armchair... Then Alice sees a severed head, descending mysteriously from the ceiling... People won't believe her in the morning -- except Henry. He accompanies Agnes on a visit to the Countess, who is busy writing her play... She really does seem pretty disturbed by now. But she tells them about a secret hiding-place between the rooms, dating back to the days of the Inquisition, and that's where Henry and the hotel manager really do find an actual severed head. Henry thinks it must be Ferrari's. Agnes suspects there's another explanation.

We can't look to the Countess to provide the truth, though, because she dies.

We never know for absolute sure whether the events she describes in her unfinished play actually happened. In her introduction, she swears it's fiction, and there's a nice little sarcastic aside to Francis: "I scorn to borrow from actual events; and, what is more extraordinary still, I have not stolen one of my ideas from the Modern French drama. As the manager of an English theatre, you will naturally refuse to believe this." Nevertheless, the characters and events all sound very recognizable to the family members who read it, and the plot would explain why a head has turned up in the compartment between the walls...

In the play, Baron Rivar is even nastier than we thought. Needing ever more money to fund his chemical experiments (he's attempting to find the fabled "philosopher's stone"), he forces the Countess to wed the besotted Lord Montbarry. Any marital happiness is short-lived, however, as his lordship increasingly doubts her fidelity. And the money is short-lived, too, as the new husband increasingly reveals a very mean streak. He ends up being so nasty to her that she starts to look for revenge, and cooks up a plan whereby they swap the identities of Lord Montbarry and Ferrari (who is genuinely ill, and at death's door), claim the insurance money off the back of doctors' reports on Ferrari, and spirit the luckless lord down to the vaults, "to live or die as future necessity may determine". The courier, knowing his number is up anyway, agrees to the deception on condition his widow gets some compensation. Eventually, Lord Montbarry is poisoned. Chemical Rivar dissolves most of the body (this is all pretty macabre), but burns his hands before he can deal with the head, which they hide in the secret space.

Now you've got to remember this is all, ostensibly, just a play... And as the action proceeds, its author's mental derangement becomes ever more evident. So there is a sort of plausible deniability here.

In any case, the new lord burns the script. He simply won't entertain the idea that it reflects the truth: "So Lord Montbarry disposed of the mystery of The Haunted Hotel." But Henry confirms, via the gold teeth that fell out of the ghastly head, that it did indeed belong to the former Lord Montbarry... "Henry never revealed the existence of this last link in the chain of discovery to any living creature, his brother Stephen included. He carried his terrible secret with him to the grave." Henry eventually goes on to marry Agnes, but he doesn't tell her either. And Mrs Ferrari never knows that her husband was an accomplice not a victim.

The novella ends like this:

"Is that all?
"That is all.
"Is there no explanation of the mystery of The Haunted Hotel?
"Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death. Farewell."

Which I quite like. I don't mind open endings. And this ending is almost postmodern.



Most present-day casual reviewers are underwhelmed by this tale. And -- it's true -- it's morbid, melodramatic, and OTT Gothic. But there are a couple of points that are worthy of attention.

1. The Countess

While most of the women characters are pretty much caricatures (Agnes is too good; there's an ugly maid, who is mocked; and Mrs Ferrari is demonstrated to be not too bright), the Countess is really quite intriguing. Surely an against-the-grain reading is possible here? After all, her hand is forced -- by men -- all along the way.

She's ruthlessly exploited by her brother (and the issue of whether he is her brother, or whether he is JUST her brother, is left to our imagination). In the play, we learn that the Countess has long been funding the Baron, first with her fortune, next with her jewels. He presents her with an ultimatum with regard to Lord Montbarry: "Take your choice, between marrying my Lord's income, in the interest of my grand discovery -- or leave me to sell myself and my title to the first rich woman of low degree who is ready to buy me." Now, for myself, I'd have said: "Option 2 will do fine." But the rich woman the Baron has in his sights is Jewish -- yes, the old prejudice, loud and clear -- so the Countess goes all martyrlike: "Sacrifice me on the altar of your glory! Take as stepping-stones on the way to your triumph my love, my liberty, and my life!" She's clearly being manipulated on both a psychological and social level.

As if all that weren't bad enough, she's calumniated by every male in the book. And then she's humiliated by her husband. I'm not saying anything excuses behaviour that makes you an accessory to poisoning and dissolving, but it's pretty clear why the balance of her mind might have been disturbed...

You can also imagine a Wide Sargasso Sea-type rehabilitation aimed at correcting the overt anti-European prejudice of the original. As Newton and Leeuwen point out, anything connected with "the continent casts a shade of suspiciousness over a person". Ferrari is deceitful; Baron Rivar is execrable; even the physician in Venice is acceptable only because he comes "with the additional recommendation of having resided in England, and having made himself acquainted with English forms of medical practice". And the Countess Narona -- well, she positively "embodies European dubiety". You can't rely on a word she says... "The presence of the supernatural," according to Newton and Leeuwen, "mirrors the instability that gathers around the person of this scarred, intense, demonic European woman... The continental darkness suggests a gloom from which the upright British woman [Agnes] should be protected. There's a fear of the past, of the pagan at work in the tale... The British woman must be kept ignorant, while the continental female turns into a writer, either inventing horrors, or recalling them... In being European, in being corrupt, a woman of the world, the Countess becomes both the subject of and the bearer of a story... [and] finds herself inside a story that she cannot conclude."



2. A commentary on modernity

This point derives entirely from the anonymous essay here, which I found very interesting. The commentator notes that the Victorians were torn between celebrating modernity and progress, and harking back to a past that presented itself now as a lost ideal of beauty, now as a spectral figure out to endanger the forward march of modernization: "In the latter case, the return of the old was conceived and represented in terms of haunting: by refashioning Gothic paradigms (ie, spectral figures, rotting corpses, decaying objects) Victorian writers expressed circulating anxieties about the resurgence of pre-industrial forces which posed a threat to contemporary notions of making and innovation." Collins, says this writer, frequently uses "Gothic tropes of degeneration" to illustrate these conflicting impetuses of past and present, and in The Haunted Hotel, we not only have "a Gothic building that embodies the obscurantism of the past" but also "the presence of corporeal images of decomposition".

S/he continues: "Once again, Collins associates revolting anatomical parts with a building that incarnates the horrors of a past dominated by the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. The decomposing head concealed in the niche comes to symbolize these horrors. Explicitly linked with the Inquisition, it also evokes the degeneracy of the Borgias and the sinister practices of alchemists who, like Baron Rivar, were suspected of committing unnameable crimes in their pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone... Montbarry’s entrapment in the rotting palace is symptomatic of the decline of those members of his class who perpetuate a legacy of violence, dissolution and greed... His brutal death is a form of punishment for his arrogant alignment with a dying tradition, exemplified by the corrupted nobility into which he marries... While showing how fictional investors commodify and vulgarize a symbol of history, Collins also suggests that the Gothic past they so significantly alter is no idealized age."

In sum, this little work is a far cry from The Moonstone, The Woman in White, and No Name, all of which I read with admiring enthusiasm (quite a while ago). But it still has a lot to say about the ethos of Collins's age.