A reader named Cian Flaherty (at least I think it’s Cian – the handwriting is ambiguous) has requested the Diary’s help with an unusual problem.
It’s a sort of mercy mission on behalf a friend who has been haunted for half a century by a book she started reading in 1971, when aged eight, but was unable to finish.
She was staying in Brussels at the time and had to go home before learning how the story ended. The problem now is that she can remember neither the book’s title nor the author’s name.
All she can recall is that “the story concerned a girl named Anastasia or Esmerelda or something like that, who was kept in a castle surrounded by a moat at the behest of alleged relatives who fed her sweets or chocolate which (I hope I’m not ruining it for anyone) turned out to be poisoned”.
Arsenic and Old Books – Frank McNally on a reader’s literary cry for help
Physician, soldier, explorer and naturalist – Marc McMenamin on Maj Richard WG Hingston
The beat goes on – Alison Healy on Holocaust survivor and musician Saul Dreier
Pointed reference – Frank McNally on the importance of being salient
The book was in English, probably hardback, and “could well have been decades old at the time.” Apart from that, all details are lost to memory.
Cian adds: “My friend was naturally concerned about the fate of the protagonist [and] has remained in suspense for over half a century.”
He hopes the Diary or its readers will end the speculation: “It’s a long shot perhaps, but maybe someone out there can help.”
Well yes, Cian, it is a long shot. And I for one am reluctant to hazard guesses on the matter, lest this only add to your friend’s sufferings.
On the other hand, if you were to put a gun to my head, I’d say that the book is We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a gothic mystery novel by Shirley Jackson, first published in1962, in a hardback edition of 214 pages, from Viking Press).
That is not set in a castle, really – more a big house with a sprawling garden. Nor is there any moat: only a fence to separate it from the local village and hostile villagers. And sweets or chocolate are not central to the plot. But poison certainly is, sprinkled on blackberries in a sugar bowl.
The narrator/chief protagonist is known as Merricat – a contraction of her actual names. That’s not quite Anastasia or Esmerelda, but might occupy the same Gothic corner of an eight-year-old’s mind.
And no, none of this is giving the plot away. As the novel begins, the heroine has already lost most of her family, except one sibling and a disabled uncle, who oversees their paranoid seclusion.
Here’s the opening paragraph:
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”
And here, as we learn soon afterwards, are the rhymes the cruel local children chant: “Father, father, quick, quick, quick/Call the doctor, I feel sick. Mother dear, we’re up the creek/Constance fed us arsenic.”
Then there is the part – we’re still barely into the book, I swear – where Uncle Julian describes a dream in which he converses with the children’s dead parents:
“When I saw them, I ran to them across the lawn, calling: ‘Tell, tell me, who put the arsenic in the sugar bowl? And your father looked at your mother and your mother looked at my wife and they all stood up with the children clinging to your mother’s skirt and your father said: ‘You want to know who murdered us? Shall I tell you who murdered us? Shall I tell you who put the arsenic in the sugar bowl? It was . . . !’ And then before he could finish the sentence, they all turned into owls and flew hooting away.”
We Have Always Lived in the Castle was the last and, most critics agree, greatest work of its author, whose too-short life (1916–1965) had its own gothic qualities.
Jackson was born in Burlingame, a town near San Francisco, to a mother who resented her early arrival in a marriage that she had hoped would have more time for romance before maternity set in.
Jackson’s own marriage suffered from a philandering husband – a critic and lecturer who had many affairs with his students – and from the frustrations of being a “faculty wife” in North Bennington, Vermont, their home. This was the model for the village in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
The last of her six novels, the book was written during a period of increasing ill health, caused in part by chain smoking, chronic asthma, and alcohol.
Like the fictional Constance, Jackson also suffered from agoraphobia and severe anxiety in general. This was treated with barbiturates, standard practice then, which along with the amphetamines she used for weight loss, may also have combined in the heart condition that killed her, at 48. A 2016 biography, by Ruth Franklin, was entitled A Rather Haunted Life.