- Green Knowe (The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston).
I fell in love with the ‘Green Knowe’ series of books when I was seven years old and obsessed with ghost stories. The novel opens with Tolly, a shy young boy, who goes to stay with his grandmother in an old, moated manor house called Green Knowe. Once there, he befriends three seventeenth century ghosts who, he later discovers, are his ancestors, and travels back in time with them to explore the house, and its stories, through the ages. My novel, The Perfect Life, begins with the murder of a reclusive children’s author whose bestselling Holly Maze House books had enchanted generations of young readers. With its ghostly child protagonists and grand house filled with ancient artefacts, Holly Maze House is my love letter to the magic of Green Knowe.
2. Kilmarth. (The House on the Strand, by Daphne Du Maurier).
A mysterious and remote Cornish house, Kilmarth becomes the temporary home of narrator, Dick Young, when he is invited to stay by an old university friend. However, when he agrees to be used as a guinea pig for a drug his friend is secretly developing, Young finds himself transported to fourteenth century Cornwall where he finds the past to be far more compelling than his present life. His urge to time travel soon becomes an addiction, one with startling consequences. The idea of a house being a portal to the past is something I explore in The Perfect Life through the mysterious Holly Maze House and its time travelling inhabitants.
3. Gatsby’s Mansion. (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald).
Just as Jay Gatsby’s elaborate parties grew from a desire to lure back his lost love, Daisy, so the parties thrown by the reclusive author, Geoffrey Rivers, in The Perfect Life, are an attempt to compensate for lost innocence. Like the enigmatic Gatsby, Geoffrey Rivers observes the revellers, hoping that, like his stories, the party has managed to capture their imaginations and recreate, in some way, the magic of the books. Yet, behind the glittering façade of Gatsby’s mansion and Geoffrey’s Holly Maze House, lie dark secrets that threaten to rip the fairy tale apart.
4. Bly (The Turn of the Screw by Henry James).
The story of a young governess who becomes convinced that the two children in her care are talking to the ghosts of two former employees of Bly, the country house where she resides, is one that has haunted me ever since I first read it. As the young woman slowly unravels, the once idyllic house becomes malevolent and claustrophobic, mirroring her tortured mind. Similarly, in The Perfect Life, the opulent Holly Maze House both blesses and curses those who step inside its dark, panelled walls.
5. Satis House (Great Expectation by Charles Dickens).
The gloriously gothic residence of tragic Miss Havisham in Great Expectations is, for me, one of the most evocative houses in literature. The image of the spectral woman sitting in her old wedding dress amid the dilapidated and crumbling ruins of a once grand house is both heartbreaking and sinister. In The Perfect Life, the inhabitants of Holly Maze House also lament lost dreams and thwarted ambition, and feel as trapped as Miss Havisham amid the detritus of the past.
Nuala Ellwood is the author of two bestselling novels: My Sister’s Bones, for which she was selected as one of the Observer’s ‘New Faces of Fiction 2017’, and Day of the Accident. Nuala lives in York with her young son. The Perfect Life is her latest novel.
