General Introduction

In his article “Hauntings,” author Andrew Smith traces 
the changing trajectory of Gothic fictions from the early 
eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, interpreting 
the Gothic motif of ghosts and haunting in terms of two 
critical historical and cultural themes, those of subjec-
tivity and labor. The work of M.E. Braddon perfectly 
embodies both of these themes, and this is particularly 
true of her short story, “The Shadow in the Corner.”  
Smith argues that the motif of ghosts and hauntings in 
the Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century reflected a 
culture grappling with transforming and increasingly 
spectral conceptions of subjectivity. 

The Victorian period inherited a host of ideas from 
the rise of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolu-
tion, which during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies produced a litany of discoveries and philosophies 
that contributed to the development of new models for 
theorizing the self.  The transition from a geocentric to 
a heliocentric model of the universe destabilized subjec-
tivity by disorienting and reordering our understanding 
of the universe and humanity’s place within it. Within 
philosophy, one of the most significant contributions was 
the rise of Materialism. Materialism, in opposition to 
preceding models of idealism and cosmology, put forth 
the idea that the self was entirely constructed by material 
processes and interactions. This philosophy created ten-
sion within idealist and cosmological schools of thought, 

which put emphasis on consciousness and the origins of 
the universe to structure concepts of existence and the 
self. During the Victorian period itself, the development 
of atomic theory, in which scientists discovered that mat-
ter is made up of discrete units that exist separately from 
one another, literally fragmented the formulation of the 
self. Thus, scientific advancement contributed to increas-
ingly spectral concepts of subjectivity, and the “whole” of 
the self became more ghostly.

These models of subjectivity were in tension with oth-
er models that, according to Smith, emerged in the Goth-
ic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth 
century and explored the irrational and the supernatural.  
Because Gothic literature anticipates psychoanalysis, 
Freud’s models are particularly helpful when analyzing 
ghost stories from the Victorian period. Freud’s models 
merge philosophy with scientific practice and reflect a 
concept of the self moving more fully into the realm of 
the mind.  With Freud’s concept of the unconscious, sud-
denly, the self was not only immaterial, but unknowable, 
with parts of it hidden from sight and awareness. Freud’s 
model allows us to see what was ghostly about subjectiv-
ity in the Victorian period.  In Freud, the unconscious, 
the realm of the repressed, was also representative of 
traumatic memory. In this way, psychoanalysis gives us 
important tools for analyzing the ways that Victorian 
subjectivity was further fragmented. Returning to Smith, 
psychoanalysis introduced a “haunted” conception of 

This edition provides a critical examination of M.E. Braddon’s “The Shadow 
in the Corner.” Specifically, the authors explore the ways in which themes of 
haunting in the Victorian period and in M.E. Braddon’s work are informed 
by competing notions of subjectivity and the shadowy presence of female 
working class figures in both the history and fiction of the time.

Shadows and Specters: A Critical Edition of “The 
Shadow in the Corner” by M.E. Braddon

Edited by Rachael Heffner, Elizabeth Palmer, Malorie Palmer, & Esther Wolfe

146

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the self (149). We can now see that Victorian science 
and philosophy continually deferred the concept of the 
self even as it constantly tried to define and “fix” it. The 
ghosts of early Victorian fiction, as literally destabilized 
subjects, represented the destabilization of subjectivity 
that occurred with the development of contradictory 
formulations of the self in the Victorian period.

Further, the Gothic fiction of the late 1800’s and early 
1900’s, according to Smith, referenced the emergence of 
a new industrial capitalist economy. According to Smith, 
during the 18th century, capital became increasingly 
spectral. The emergence of the stock exchange, as well as 
the use of paper money, made “wealth appear intangible, 
subject to seemingly occult fluctuations in the market” 
(150). In addition, the rise of commodity fetishism cre-
ated a sudden dissonance between labor and production. 
As Smith points out, we see the commodity of the table, 
not the labor that produced it (150). In this way, the 
specter of the ghost in late Victorian fiction represented 
the spectral, immaterial relationships between money 
and value, labor and production, that were introduced by 
an industrial capitalist system.

By pushing on the spectral economies introduced by 
Smith, we reveal an additional capitalist haunting. During 
the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of a female work-
ing class created an additional space of spectrality and 
anxiety within an already ghostly capitalist system. Female 
labor was embodied in a threshold space of capitalist para-
dox and temporal anachronism, transgressing and disor-
dering boundaries of gender, race, and class. 

Perhaps the clearest example of the spectrality of the 
female working class is the contradiction of its existence 
within capitalism, and the subsequent politics of its 
visibility. During the Victorian period, women were not 
supposed to work, yet made up a large part of the capital-
ist labor force. As a result of this contradiction, women’s 
labor, including the work of female miners and domestic 
servants, was rendered carefully invisible, relegated to 
underground mineshafts and within the space of the 
home, where it would not be seen. Female domestic ser-
vants were especially subject to this paradoxical politics 
of invisibility. In her book Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, 
and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, author Anne Mc-
Clintock writes (in the aptly titled section, “The Invisible 
Servant”), “The housewife’s labor of leisure found its 
counterpart in the servant’s labor of invisibility. Servants 
were ordered to remain unseen, completing the filthiest 

work before dawn or at night, dodging their employers, 
keeping to the labyrinthine back passages, remaining, 
at all costs, out of sight” (163). It was this relegation of 
women’s labor to realms of between and below, the result 
of its paradoxical existence within the Victorian capitalist 
market, that made women’s labor “suffer one of the most 
successful vanishing acts in modern history” (163).

Female labor in the Victorian period was also spec-
tral in its transgression of boundary. Mining women, by 
performing men’s work in men’s clothing (particularly 
the phallic work of penetrating the earth), threatened 
binaries and hierarchies of gender. Female miners, black-
ened by coal dust, also destabilized racial boundaries, 
and were often referred to as a “race” or “species” apart, 
who were also “half savage” (115). In this way, female 
labor also occupied an alternate, ghostly temporal space, 
relegated via racialization to a “primitive” or “pre-histor-
ic” time. In addition, female domestic servants, by being 
paid for domestic labor, displaced categories of private, 
domestic space and the public space of capital and ex-
change. According to McClintock, by “overtly crossing 
the thresholds of private and public, home and market, 
working and middle class, servants brought into the mid-
dle class home the whiff of the marketplace, the odor of 
cash” which “constantly imperiled the ‘natural’ separation 
of private home and public market” (165). 

The spectrality and ghostliness of the female work-
ing class is also represented in Gothic fictions. In The 
Servant’s Hand, author Bruce Robbins describes the 
depiction of servants in literature as “human blanks” and 
“signs” who “cannot be represented except as displaced or 
deferred” (23). Robbins also identifies the female laborer 
as a site of contradiction in literature, as someone who 
“functions as a sign that carries awareness of the unnat-
uralness and arbitrariness of signs into a social hierarchy 
that would like to present itself as natural, rooted, fixed” 
(23). As in life, the female working class of Victorian fic-
tions embodied a space of paradox, destabilization, and 
transgression within capitalist economies. As Robbins 
notes, Victorian fictions commonly referred to servant 
work as a “situation” or “place,” further emphasizing the 
spectrality of female labor by making linguistic attempts 
to “fix” and orient it.

In many ways, Braddon’s own life and authorship 
embody these spectral movements of subjectivity and 
female labor within the Victorian period. Braddon, who 
published an incredibly prolific 80 works in her lifetime, 

“The Shadow in the Corner” 147



also authored under a gender-neutral pseudonym. Brad-
don’s authorship occupies a ghostly space within capital-
ism, as a female labor that is not supposed to be there, 
rendered invisible by an ungendered name. Braddon also 
lived with her long-term partner without marrying him, 
and bought out his publishing company in order to res-
cue him from debt. In this way, Braddon’s labor was also 
ghostly in its destabilization of boundary. By supporting 
her lover financially, Braddon transgressed hierarchical 
categories of gender and power. 

That the female working class was rendered ghostly 
within the Victorian capitalist system was also reflected 
in Braddon’s personal social reform politics, as well as in 
her choice of genre. According to Eve Lynch, Braddon 
“agitated to experiment with fiction that considered more 
pressing social issues, particularly the problems she saw 
arising out of Victorian reform policies that ignored the 
private domestic trials of women and the poor” (235). 
In the use of the ghost story, Braddon found a vehicle 
for communicating her political criticisms; for Braddon, 
ghosts serve “as emblems of what Victorian society is 
unwilling to ‘see’ in its social condition” (238). Accord-
ing to Lynch, Braddon’s tales “are filled with characters 
culled from the lower orders, especially servants from 
the regions ‘below stairs’ whose social position in the 
house was analogous to the spectral apparition that 
haunted it” (237). Lynch goes on to say that, “like the 
supernatural influence quietly imposing its own order 
on the will of the domestic inhabitants, the servant of the 
house suggested a bilateral, silent estate of discontent and 
dis-ease cohabiting the same physical space as the family 
but imagined by the family as immaterial and invisible” 
(238). In this way, Braddon’s use of ghosts and haunting 
in her body of work commented on the erasure and in-
visibility of female labor, likening it to the ghost, in order 
to “repeatedly expose social inequities” (237). 

Braddon’s works are also centrally concerned with 
issues of subjectivity; as Lynch notes, Braddon contin-
uously satirized the materialist and individualist phi-
losophy of the economic elite (235). Braddon’s works, 
including “The Shadow in the Corner,” are littered with 
affluent, intellectually elitist characters whose materialist 
philosophies are unable to account for the haunting that 
takes place in the narrative, unlike their “superstitious” 
working class counterparts. Using these devices, Braddon 
criticizes the way knowledge and education was central-
ized, often as a strategy for maintaining stratifications 

and divisions of class power. In this way, Braddon’s works 
also illustrate the ways in which competing notions of 
subjectivity were intimately bound up in the spectrality of 
the female working class, informing the structures of class 
power that contributed to women’s invisibility and erasure. 

It is also pertinent to note the historical connections 
between ghost stories and movements of scientific rea-
soning and social reform in the Victorian era. According 
to Lynch, the sudden rise in the popularity of the ghost 
story form coincided with a period of prolific social re-
forms, including the Reform Bill of 1867, which included 
several education reforms as well as reforms for women’s 
labor (238). Perhaps the most explicit representation of 
these entangled categories of ghostliness, subjectivity, 
and capital can be parsed from a popular call to action 
during the Victorian period, which often referenced the 
“spirit of reform.” Here, the word “spirit” invokes both 
ghostliness and constructions of subjectivity and applies 
to the social structures of capital and economy. 

This edition includes several documents that further 
contextualize these themes in Braddon’s work. A diary 
entry from Arthur Munby, written in the 1800’s, illustrates 
the spectrality of the female working class through Mun-
by’s erotic obsession with the transgression of categories of 
race, class, and gender by working class women. In addi-
tion, a diary entry from Munby’s partner Hannah Cull-
wick, herself a member of the female working class, reveals 
the spectral visibility of working class women by pairing 
descriptions of erasure with descriptions of labor. Final-
ly, an excerpt from Lady Audley’s Secret, also written by 
Braddon, explores the ghostliness of women’s labor using 
the prominent theme of live burial, alluding to working 
women’s experiences of confinement and erasure. 

Reading Braddon’s story, as well as the life of Braddon 
herself, within these intersections of subjectivity and cap-
ital allows us to interpret the cultural “stuff ” that makes 
up “The Shadow in the Corner.”

Introduction to M.E. Braddon’s “The Shadow 
in the Corner”

What is perhaps most striking about M.E. Braddon’s 
ghost story “The Shadow in the Corner” is how little of 
the story’s narrative action is devoted to the haunting 
itself. Although Braddon’s narrative tells the story of the 
“shadow in the corner,” descriptions of the “shadow” 
and its ghostly effects are sparse, scattered and dislocat-

148“The Shadow in the Corner”



ed throughout the text. Rather, what is foregrounded 
are competing Victorian models of subjectivity and the 
spectral presence of women’s labor.  One can therefore 
interpret the “shadow in the corner” both as a motif of 
competing conceptions of subjectivity, and as the ghostly 
existence of the female working class.

Braddon’s story begins not with a description of a 
haunting, but with negotiations between the master of 
Wildheath and his butler Mr. Skeggs over the problem 
of employing a “maid-of-all-work.”  Mrs. Skeggs, he 
says, “must have a girl…a girl to trot about and wash up, 
and help the old lady.” In this opening exchange, Brad-
don’s text emphasizes not only the existence of women’s 
domestic wage labor, but also its extreme difficulty. 
Descriptions of Mrs. Skegg’s labor, including “ruling over 
the kitchen, pantry, and scullery,” as well as cooking, 
dusting, sweeping, and scrubbing, are coupled with the 
sympathetic acknowledgment that she “wore her life out” 
in these tasks. In many ways, by focusing on represen-
tations of female labor, as well as the process of employ-
ing a female servant, Braddon moves the specter of the 
female working class into sudden visibility. However, this 
visibility is often tenuous and contradictory within the 
narrative itself. Descriptions of female labor, that which 
render it visible, are coupled with subtle reinforcements of 
its invisibility. The female servants are remarked upon for 
their quietness and status as individuals with whom the 
master “rarely came in contact.” When the master of the 
house does encounter a female servant who speaks to him, 
he “startles” very much as if he had seen a ghost. Similarly, 
Mrs. Skegg, as the other “maid-of-all-work,” never actually 
speaks; instead, her speech is mediated and translated by 
her husband.  In this way, Braddon’s narrative does not 
simply make women’s domestic labor visible. Rather, Brad-
don’s story constantly moves female servants between the 
realms of seen and unseen, emphasizing their paradoxical, 
ghostly status within Victorian society.

This spectral position is further reinforced by the 
introduction of Maria, who becomes employed at Wild-
heath and is later the unfortunate victim of the “shadow 
in the corner.” The text often mentions that Maria was 
educated “above her station,” emphasizing the potential 
of the female working class to transgress different forms 
of boundary. In addition, it is the presence of Maria, who 
is made to sleep in the haunted attic room, which facil-
itates the ghostly events of the story. In a fundamental 
sense, the narrative thrust of Braddon’s story is moved 

not by the ghost, but by these negotiations over female 
labor and the actions of female servants. Just as the 
female working class acted as a largely invisible force, a 
“secret pressure” influencing the movement of Victorian 
capitalist markets, female laborers in “The Shadow in the 
Corner” are an absent presence that shapes the plot and 
progression of the narrative, embodying a paradoxical 
space that is at once central and peripheral.

Braddon’s tale is also threaded with constant referenc-
es to competing Victorian conceptions of the self. The 
most prominent of these representations can be found in 
descriptions of the master of Wildheath, for whom “the 
universe, with all its inhabitants, was a great machine, 
governed by inexorable laws.”  The master responds to 
the events of the haunting with an inflexible materialist 
philosophy: “to such a man, the idea of a ghost was sim-
ply absurd- as absurd as the assertion that two and two 
make S, or that a circle can be formed of a straight line.” 
The most literal illustration of the master’s formulations 
of the concept of self are imbedded in the following line 
describing his reaction to the ghost: “the subject offered 
an amusing psychological study.” Here, the text subtly 
engages the historical context of Victorian concepts of 
subjectivity; the “subject” has moved to the realm of the 
mind. Similarly, the act of suicide is often referred to as 
“self-destruction,” implying (in reverse) the psychoana-
lytic interpretation of “self ” as something constructed.

The master’s materialist and psychoanalytic concep-
tions of subjectivity are contrasted with descriptions of 
the “folly” and “superstition” of Maria and the “country 
people,” whose “fancies” must be “conquered by rational 
treatment.” However, Braddon often satirizes the mas-
ter’s materialist views, particularly in the portrayal of 
his speech. In addition, the master’s materialism cannot 
accommodate the “shadow,” which resists his universal 
laws and ultimately claims the life of Maria. In this way, 
Braddon puts competing Victorian conceptions of the 
self into play with one another. 

Along with these direct references, descriptions of 
ghostly encounters with the “shadow” are often framed 
using a language of labor and subjectivity.  When the 
master encounters the shadow for the first time, he realiz-
es that “it was not the ghost of the man’s body that returned 
to the spot where he had suffered and perished, but the 
ghost of his mind- his very self.” Here, the description 
of the ghost is situated within a psychoanalytic model of 
subjectivity via the conflation of “mind” and “self.” 

149“The Shadow in the Corner”



The “shadow” is also explained in relation to the 
commodity objects around it. The “shadow” is often 
attributed to “ the angle of the wardrobe” or to a coat 
“flung upon a chair.”  In a description of the haunted attic 
room, a lengthy paragraph is devoted to its objects, in 
which commodities suddenly take on a sinister cast. A 
wardrobe’s brass handles “gleamed out of the darkness 
like a pair of diabolical eyes”; a bed is “misshapen and 
deformed”; a bureau “smelt of secrets.” Similarly, this 
anthropomorphic language is also reversed in passages 
where people are compared to objects. When Mr. Skegg 
first speaks to the master, his sudden “breaking into 
speech” is described as “almost as startling as if the bust 
of Socrates above the bookcase had burst into human 
language.”  This play of anthropomorphic language, 
rendering people as objects and objects as people, implies 
the ghostly dissonance between labor and production. In 
this way, Braddon subtly references the spectral economy 
of Victorian capitalism. 

In many ways, the title of Braddon’s narrative offers 
the most concise representation of its themes of subjec-
tivity and labor. The “shadow in the corner” echoes with 
a psychoanalytic motif of repressed trauma and memory, 
haunting the unconscious “corners” of the mind. “Shad-
ows” also symbolically evoke the dirt of labor, and cor-
ners resonate with economic context. Corners themselves 
are an important part of economic architectures as the 
place of exchange where two points meet. Corners are 
also the spaces of “dirty” capital and labor that is meant 
to be hidden in shadows. Such is the case of prostitution, 
the “dirty” invisible women’s labor, which often takes 
place on the street corner. In these ways, Braddon’s title 
points to spectral and conflicted subjectivity in the Vic-
torian period, and also to an interpretation of the female 
working class as the “shadow in the corner” of 1800’s 
capitalism. 

M.E. Braddon’s “The Shadow in the Corner”1

Wildheath Grange stood a little way back from the 
road, with a barren stretch of heath behind it, and a few 
tall fir-trees, with straggling wind-tossed heads, for its 
only shelter. It was a lonely house on a lonely road, little 
better than a lane, leading across a desolate waste of san-

dy fields to the sea-shore; and it was a house that bore a bad 
name among the natives of the village of Holcroft, which 
was the nearest place where humanity might be found.

It was a good old house, nevertheless, substantially 
built in the days when there was no stint of stone and 
timber—a good old grey stone house with many gables, 
deep window-seats, and a wide staircase, long dark pas-
sages, hidden doors in queer corners, closets as large as 
some modern rooms, and cellars in which a company of 
soldiers might have lain perdu.2

This spacious old mansion was given over to rats and 
mice, loneliness, echoes, and the occupation of three 
elderly people: Michael Bascom, whose forebears had been 
landowners of importance in the neighbourhood, and his 
two servants, Daniel Skegg and his wife, who had served 
the owner of that grim old house ever since he left the 
university, where he had lived fifteen years of his life—five 
as student, and ten as professor of natural science.

At three-and-thirty Michael Bascom had seemed a 
middle-aged man; at fifty-six he looked and moved and 
spoke like an old man. During that interval of twen-
ty-three years he had lived alone in Wildheath Grange, 
and the country people told each other that the house 
had made him what he was. This was a fanciful and 
superstitious notion on their part, doubtless, yet it would 
not have been difficult to have traced a certain affinity 
between the dull grey building and the man who lived in 
it. Both seemed alike remote from the common cares and 
interests of humanity; both had an air of settled melan-
choly, engendered by perpetual solitude; both had the 
same faded complexion, the same look of slow decay.

Yet lonely as Michael Bascom’s life was at Wildheath 
Grange, he would not on any account have altered its 
tenor. He had been glad to exchange the comparative 
seclusion of college rooms for the unbroken solitude 
of Wildheath. He was a fanatic in his love of scientific 
research, and his quiet days were filled to the brim with 
labours that seldom failed to interest and satisfy him. 
There were periods of depression, occasional moments 
of doubt, when the goal towards which he strove seemed 
unattainable, and his spirit fainted within him. Happily 
such times were rare with him. He had a dogged power 
of continuity which ought to have carried him to the 
highest pinnacle of achievement, and which perhaps 

Notes
1. M.E. Braddon. “The Shadow in the Corner.” All the Year Round.  Vol. 23. Extra Summer Number.  (London, 1879) 1-11.
2. Perdu, meaning hidden or concealed. In Latin, perdere means to lose. Although it is important to note the now obsolete use of the word as a military 
phrase that referred to a soldier set on an especially hazardous mission.

150“The Shadow in the Corner”



might ultimately have won for him a grand name and a 
world-wide renown, but for a catastrophe which bur-
dened the declining years of his harmless life with an 
unconquerable remorse.

One autumn morning—when he had lived just three-
and-twenty years at Wildheath, and had only lately begun 
to perceive that his faithful butler and body servant, who 
was middle-aged when he first employed him, was actu-
ally getting old—Mr. Bascom’s breakfast meditations over 
the latest treatise on the atomic theory3  were interrupted 
by an abrupt demand from that very Daniel Skegg. The 
man was accustomed to wait upon his master in the most 
absolute silence, and his sudden breaking out into speech 
was almost as startling as if the bust of Socrates above the 
bookcase had burst into human language.

“It’s no use,” said Daniel; “my missus must have a girl!”
“A what?” demanded Mr. Bascom, without taking his 

eyes from the line he had been reading.
“A girl—a girl to trot about and wash up, and help the 

old lady. She’s getting weak on her legs, poor soul. We’ve 
none of us grown younger in the last twenty years.”

“Twenty years!” echoed Michael Bascom scornfully. 
“What is twenty years in the formation of a strata—what 
even in the growth of an oak—the cooling of a volcano!”

“Not much, perhaps, but it’s apt to tell upon the bones 
of a human being.”

“The manganese4 staining to be seen upon some skulls 
would certainly indicate—” began the scientist dreamily.

“I wish my bones were only as free from rheumatics 
as they were twenty years ago,” pursued Daniel testily; 
“and then, perhaps, I should make light of twenty years. 
Howsoever, the long and the short of it is, my missus 
must have a girl. She can’t go on trotting up and down 
these everlasting passages, and standing in that stone 
scullery year after year, just as if she was a young woman. 
She must have a girl to help.”

“Let her have twenty girls,” said Mr. Bascom, going 
back to his book.

“What’s the use of talking like that, sir. Twenty girls, 
indeed! We shall have rare work to get one.”

“Because the neighbourhood is sparsely populated?” 
interrogated Mr. Bascom, still reading.

“No, sir. Because this house is known to be haunted.”

Michael Bascom laid down his book, and turned a 
look of grave reproach upon his servant.

“Skegg,” he said in a severe voice, “I thought you had 
lived long enough with me to be superior to any folly of 
that kind.”

“I don’t say that I believe in ghosts,” answered Daniel 
with a semi-apologetic air; “but the country people do. 
There’s not a mortal among ‘em that will venture across 
our threshold after nightfall.”

“Merely because Anthony Bascom, who led a wild 
life in London, and lost his money and land, came home 
here broken-hearted, and is supposed to have destroyed 
himself in this house—the only remnant of property that 
was left him out of a fine estate.”

“Supposed to have destroyed himself!” cried Skegg; 
“why the fact is as well known as the death of Queen 
Elizabeth, or the great fire of London. Why, wasn’t he 
buried at the cross-roads5 between here and Holcroft?”

“An idle tradition, for which you could produce no 
substantial proof,” retorted Mr. Bascom.

“I don’t know about proof; but the country people 
believe it as firmly as they believe their Gospel.”

“If their faith in the Gospel was a little stronger they 
need not trouble themselves about Anthony Bascom.”

“Well,” grumbled Daniel, as he began to clear the table, 
“a girl of some kind we must get, but she’ll have to be a 
foreigner, or a girl that’s hard driven for a place.”

When Daniel Skegg said a foreigner, he did not mean 
the native of some distant clime, but a girl who had not 
been born and bred at Holcroft. Daniel had been raised 
and reared in that insignificant hamlet, and, small and dull 
as it was, he considered the world beyond it only margin.

Michael Bascom was too deep in the atomic theo-
ry to give a second thought to the necessities of an old 
servant. Mrs. Skegg was an individual with whom he 
rarely came in contact. She lived for the most part in a 
gloomy region at the north end of the house, where she 
ruled over the solitude of a kitchen, that looked like a 
cathedral, and numerous offices of the sculler, larder, and 
pantry class, where she carried on a perpetual warfare 
with spiders and beetles, and wore her old life out in the 
labour of sweeping and scrubbing. She was a woman of 
severe aspect, dogmatic piety, and a bitter tongue. She 

Notes
3. Atomic theory at this time had advanced only so far as discovering the properties of cathode rays. Only ten years earlier, Dmitri Mendeleev had arranged 
the elements into seven groups based on their similar properties, a discovery which became known as Periodic Law.
4. Manganese is a natural element discovered in 1774. It is used for industrial alloys, and its ions are used for pigmentation.
5. Historically, criminals and those who committed suicide were buried at cross-roads as the “cross” was seen as the next best burial site to consecrated ground.

151“The Shadow in the Corner”



was a good plain cook, and ministered diligently to her 
master’s wants. He was not an epicure, but liked his life 
to be smooth and easy, and the equilibrium of his mental 
power would have been disturbed by a bad dinner.

He heard no more about the proposed addition to his 
household for a space of ten days, when Daniel Skegg 
again startled him amidst his studious repose by the 
abrupt announcement:

“I’ve got a girl!”
“Oh,” said Michael Bascom; “have you?” and he went 

on with his book.
This time he was reading an essay on phosphorus and 

its functions in relation to the human brain.
“Yes,” pursued Daniel in his usual grumbling tone; 

“she was a waif and stray, or I shouldn’t have got her. If 
she’d been a native she’d never have come to us.”

“I hope she’s respectable,” said Michael.
“Respectable! That’s the only fault she has, poor thing. 

She’s too good for the place. She’s never been in service 
before, but she says she’s willing to work, and I daresay 
my old woman will be able to break her in. Her father was 
a small tradesman at Yarmouth. He died a month ago, and 
left this poor thing homeless. Mrs. Midge, at Holcroft, is 
her aunt, and she said to the girl, Come and stay with me 
till you get a place; and the girl has been staying with Mrs. 
Midge for the last three weeks, trying to hear of a place. 
When Mrs. Midge heard that my missus wanted a girl to 
help, she thought it would be the very thing for her niece 
Maria. Luckily Maria had heard nothing about this house, 
so the poor innocent dropped me a curtsey, and said she’d 
be thankful to come, and would do her best to learn her 
duty. She’d had an easy time of it with her father, who 
had educated her above her station, like a fool as he was,” 
growled Daniel.

“By your own account I’m afraid you’ve made a bad 
bargain,” said Michael. “You don’t want a young lady to 
clean kettles and pans.”

“If she was a young duchess my old woman would 
make her work,” retorted Skegg decisively.

“And pray where are you going to put this girl?” asked 
Mr. Bascom, rather irritably; “I can’t have a strange young 
woman tramping up and down the passages outside my 
room. You know what a wretched sleeper I am, Skegg. A 
mouse behind the wainscot is enough to wake me.”

“I’ve thought of that,” answered the butler, with his 

look of ineffable wisdom. “I’m not going to put her on 
your floor. She’s to sleep in the attics.”

“Which room?”
“The big one at the north end of the house. That’s the 

only ceiling that doesn’t let water. She might as well sleep 
in a shower-bath as in any of the other attics.”

“The room at the north end,” repeated Mr. Bascom 
thoughtfully; “isn’t that—?”

“Of course it is,” snapped Skegg; “but she doesn’t know 
anything about it.”

Mr. Bascom went back to his books, and forgot all 
about the orphan from Yarmouth, until one morning on 
entering his study he was startled by the appearance of a 
strange girl, in a neat black and white cotton gown, busy 
dusting the volumes which were stacked in blocks upon 
his spacious writing-table—and doing it with such deft 
and careful hands that he had no inclination to be angry 
at this unwonted liberty. Old Mrs. Skegg had religiously 
refrained from all such dusting, on the plea that she did 
not wish to interfere with the master’s ways. One of the 
master’s ways, therefore, had been to inhale a good deal 
of dust in the course of his studies.

The girl was a slim little thing, with a pale and some-
what old-fashioned face, flaxen hair, braided under a neat 
muslin cap, a very fair complexion, and light blue eyes. 
They were the lightest blue eyes Michael Bascom had 
ever seen, but there was a sweetness and gentleness in 
their expression which atoned for their insipid colour.

“I hope you do not object to my dusting your books, sir,” 
she said, dropping a curtsey.

She spoke with a quaint precision which struck Michael 
Bascom as a pretty thing in its way.

“No; I don’t object to cleanliness, so long as my books 
and papers are not disturbed. If you take a volume off my 
desk, replace it on the spot you took it from. That’s all I ask.”

“I will be very careful, sir.”
“When did you come here?”
“Only this morning, sir.”
The student seated himself at his desk, and the girl 

withdrew, drifting out of the room as noiselessly as a 
flower blown across the threshold.6 Michael Bascom 
looked after her curiously. He had seen very little of 
youthful womanhood in his dry-as-dust career, and he 
wondered at this girl as at a creature of a species hither-
to unknown to him. How fairly and delicately she was 

152“The Shadow in the Corner”

Notes
6. Servants at the time were expected to be both silent and unseen. This idea even helped mold the construction of houses so that they were built with secret 
passageways and corridors for the servants to use for the purpose of remaining out of sight.



fashioned; what a translucent skin; what soft and pleasing 
accents issued from those rose-tinted lips. A pretty thing, 
assuredly, this kitchen wench! A pity that in all this busy 
world there could be no better work found for her than 
the scouring of pots and pans.

Absorbed in considerations about dry bones, Mr. 
Bascom thought no more of the pale-faced handmaiden. 
He saw her no more about his rooms. Whatever work 
she did there was done early in the morning, before the 
scholar’s breakfast.

She had been a week in the house, when he met her 
one day in the hall. He was struck by the change in her 
appearance.

The girlish lips had lost their rose-bud hue; the pale 
blue eyes had a frightened look, and there were dark 
rings round them, as in one whose nights had been sleep-
less, or troubled by evil dreams.

Michael Bascom was so startled by an undefinable look 
in the girl’s face that, reserved as he was by habit and na-
ture, he expanded so far as to ask her what ailed her.

“There is something amiss, I am sure,” he said. “What 
is it?”

“Nothing, sir,” she faltered, looking still more scared 
at his question. “Indeed, it is nothing; or nothing worth 
troubling you about.”

“Nonsense. Do you suppose, because I live among 
books, I have no sympathy with my fellow-creatures? Tell 
me what is wrong with you, child. You have been griev-
ing about the father you have lately lost, I suppose.”

“No, sir; it is not that. I shall never leave off being sor-
ry for that. It is a grief which will last me all my life.”

“What, there is something else then?” asked Michael 
impatiently. “I see; you are not happy here. Hard work 
does not suit you. I thought as much.”

“Oh, sir, please don’t think that,” cried the girl, very 
earnestly. “Indeed, I am glad to work—glad to be in ser-
vice; it is only—”

She faltered and broke down, the tears rolling slowly 
from her sorrowful eyes, despite her effort to keep them 
back.

“Only what?” cried Michael, growing angry. “The 
girl is full of secrets and mysteries. What do you mean, 
wench?”

 “I—I know it is very foolish, sir; but I am afraid of the 
room where I sleep.”

“Afraid! Why?”
“Shall I tell you the truth, sir? Will you promise not to 

be angry?”
“I will not be angry if you will only speak plainly; but 

you provoke me by these hesitations and suppressions.”
“And please, sir, do not tell Mrs. Skegg that I have told 

you. She would scold me; or perhaps even send me away.”
“Mrs. Skegg shall not scold you. Go on, child.”
“You may not know the room where I sleep, sir; it is a 

large room at one end of the house, looking towards the 
sea. I can see the dark line of water from the window, and 
I wonder sometimes to think that it is the same ocean 
I used to see when I was a child at Yarmouth. It is very 
lonely, sir, at the top of the house. Mr. and Mrs. Skegg 
sleep in a little room near the kitchen, you know, sir, and 
I am quite alone on the top floor.”

“Skegg told me you had been educated in advance of 
your position in life, Maria. I should have thought the 
first effect of a good education would have been to make 
you superior to any foolish fancies about empty rooms.”

“Oh, pray, sir, do not think it is any fault in my educa-
tion. Father took such pains with me; he spared no ex-
pense in giving me as good an education as a tradesman’s 
daughter need wish for. And he was a religious man, sir. 
He did not believe”—here she paused, with a suppressed 
shudder—“in the spirits of the dead appearing to the liv-
ing, since the days of miracles, when the ghost of Samuel 
appeared to Saul.7

He never put any foolish ideas into my head, sir. I 
hadn’t a thought of fear when I first lay down to rest in 
the big lonely room upstairs.”

“Well, what then?”
“But on the very first night,” the girl went on breath-

lessly, “I felt weighed down in my sleep as if there were 
some heavy burden laid upon my chest. It was not a bad 
dream, but it was a sense of trouble that followed me 
all through my sleep; and just at daybreak—it begins to 
be light a little after six—I woke suddenly, with the cold 
perspiration pouring down my face, and knew that there 
was something dreadful in the room.”

“What do you mean by something dreadful? Did you 
see anything?”

“Not much, sir; but it froze the blood in my veins, and 
I knew it was this that had been following me and weigh-
ing upon me all through my sleep. In the corner, between 

Notes
7. In the 1 Samuel 28, King Saul seeks out a woman who can speak to the spirits of the dead. The woman allows him to speak with Samuel, who warns him 
that the Lord will allow Saul’s army to be defeated and that he and his sons will die.

153“The Shadow in the Corner”



the fire-place and the wardrobe, I saw a shadow—a dim, 
shapeless shadow—”

“Produced by an angle of the wardrobe, I daresay.”
“No, sir; I could see the shadow of the wardrobe, dis-

tinct and sharp, as if it had been painted on the wall. This 
shadow was in the corner—a strange, shapeless mass; or, 
if it had any shape at all, it seemed—”

“What?” asked Michael eagerly.
“The shape of a dead body hanging against the wall!”
Michael Bascom grew strangely pale, yet he affected 

utter incredulity.
“Poor child,” he said kindly; “you have been fretting 

about your father until your nerves are in a weak state, 
and you are full of fancies. A shadow in the corner, 
indeed; why, at daybreak, every corner is full of shadows. 
My old coat, flung upon a chair, will make you as good a 
ghost as you need care to see.”

“Oh, sir, I have tried to think it is my fancy. But I have 
had the same burden weighing me down every night. I 
have seen the same shadow every morning.”

“But when broad daylight comes, can you not see what 
stuff your shadow is made of?”

“No, sir: the shadow goes before it is broad daylight.”
“Of course, just like other shadows. Come, come, get 

these silly notions out of your head, or you will never do 
for the work-a-day world. I could easily speak to Mrs. 
Skegg, and make her give you another room, if I wanted 
to encourage you in your folly. But that would be about 
the worst thing I could do for you. Besides, she tells me 
that all the other rooms on that floor are damp; and, no 
doubt, if she shifted you into one of them, you would 
discover another shadow in another corner, and get rheu-
matism into the bargain. No, my good girl, you must try 
to prove yourself the better for a superior education.”

“I will do my best, sir,” Maria answered meekly, drop-
ping a curtsey.

Maria went back to the kitchen sorely depressed. It 
was a dreary life she led at Wildheath Grange—dreary 
by day, awful by night; for the vague burden and the 
shapeless shadow, which seemed so slight a matter to the 
elderly scholar, were unspeakably terrible to her. Nobody 
had told her that the house was haunted, yet she walked 
about those echoing passages wrapped round with a 
cloud of fear. She had no pity from Daniel Skegg and his 
wife. Those two pious souls had made up their minds 

that the character of the house should be upheld, so far 
as Maria went. To her, as a foreigner, the Grange should 
be maintained to be an immaculate dwelling, tainted by 
no sulphurous blast8 from the under world. A willing, 
biddable girl had become a necessary element in the ex-
istence of Mrs. Skegg. That girl had been found, and that 
girl must be kept. Any fancies of a supernatural character 
must be put down with a high hand.

“Ghosts, indeed!” cried the amiable Skegg. “Read your 
Bible, Maria, and don’t talk no more about ghosts.”

“There are ghosts in the Bible,” said Maria, with a 
shiver at the recollection of certain awful passages in the 
Scripture she knew so well.

“Ah, they was in their right place, or they wouldn’t ha’ 
been there,” retorted Mrs. Skegg. “You ain’t agoin’ to pick 
holes in your Bible, I hope, Maria, at your time of life.”

Maria sat down quietly in her corner by the kitchen 
fire, and turned over the leaves of her dead father’s Bible 
till she came to the chapters they two had loved best and 
oftenest read together. He had been a simple-minded, 
straightforward man, the Yarmouth cabinet-maker—a 
man full of aspirations after good, innately refined, in-
stinctively religious. He and his motherless girl had spent 
their lives alone together, in the neat little home which 
Maria had so soon learnt to cherish and beautify; and 
they had loved each other with an almost romantic love. 
They had had the same tastes, the same ideas. Very little 
had sufficed to make them happy. But inexorable death 
parted father and daughter, in one of those sharp, sudden 
partings which are like the shock of an earthquake—in-
stantaneous ruin, desolation, and despair.

Maria’s fragile form had bent before the tempest. She 
had lived through a trouble that might have crushed a 
stronger nature. Her deep religious convictions, and her 
belief that this cruel parting would not be for ever, had 
sustained her. She faced life, and its cares and duties, with 
a gentle patience which was the noblest form of courage.

Michael Bascom told himself that the servant-girl’s 
foolish fancy about the room that had been given her was 
not a matter of serious consideration. Yet the idea dwelt in 
his mind unpleasantly, and disturbed him at his labours. 
The exact sciences require the complete power of a man’s 
brain, his utmost attention; and on this particular evening 
Michael found that he was only giving his work a part of 
his attention. The girl’s pale face, the girl’s tremulous tones, 

Notes
8. In Revelation 21:8, Hell is described as a lake of fire and burning sulfur or brimstone which will be the “second death” for those who are cowards or 
disbelievers, murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and liars.

154“The Shadow in the Corner”



thrust themselves into the foreground of his thoughts.
He closed his book with a fretful sigh, wheeled his 

large arm-chair round to the fire, and gave himself up to 
contemplation. To attempt study with so disturbed a mind 
was useless. It was a dull grey evening, early in November; 
the student’s reading-lamp was lighted, but the shutters 
were not yet shut, nor the curtains drawn. He could see the 
leaden sky outside his windows, the fir-tree tops tossing in 
the angry wind. He could hear the wintry blast whistling 
amidst the gables, before it rushed off seaward with a sav-
age howl that sounded like a war-whoop.

Michael Bascom shivered, and drew nearer the fire.
“It’s childish, foolish nonsense,” he said to himself, “yet 

it’s strange she should have that fancy about the shadow, 
for they say Anthony Bascom destroyed himself in that 
room. I remember hearing it when I was a boy, from an 
old servant whose mother was housekeeper at the great 
house in Anthony’s time. I never heard how he died, poor 
fellow—whether he poisoned himself, or shot himself, or 
cut his throat; but I’ve been told that was the room. Old 
Skegg has heard it too. I could see that by his manner 
when he told me the girl was to sleep there.”

He sat for a long time, till the grey of evening outside 
his study windows changed to the black of night, and the 
war-whoop of the wind died away to a low complain-
ing murmur. He sat looking into the fire, and letting his 
thoughts wander back to the past and the traditions he 
had heard in his boyhood.

That was a sad, foolish story of his great-uncle, An-
thony Bascom: the pitiful story of a wasted fortune and 
a wasted life. A riotous collegiate career at Cambridge, a 
racing-stable at Newmarket, an imprudent marriage, a 
dissipated life in London, a runaway wife; an estate for-
feited to Jew money-lenders,9 and then the fatal end.

Michael had often heard that dismal story: how, when 
Anthony Bascom’s fair false wife had left him, when his 
credit was exhausted, and his friends had grown tired of 
him, and all was gone except Wildheath Grange, Antho-
ny, the broken-down man of fashion, had come to that 
lonely house unexpectedly one night, and had ordered 
his bed to be got ready for him in the room where he 
used to sleep when he came to the place for the wild 
duck shooting, in his boyhood. His old blunderbuss was 
still hanging over the mantelpiece, where he had left it 
when he came into the property, and could afford to buy 

the newest thing in fowling-pieces. He had not been to 
Wildheath for fifteen years; nay, for a good many of those 
years he had almost forgotten that the dreary old house 
belonged to him.

The woman who had been housekeeper at Bascom 
Park, till house and lands had passed into the hands of 
the Jews, was at this time the sole occupant of Wild-
heath. She cooked some supper for her master, and made 
him as comfortable as she could in the long untenanted 
dining-room; but she was distressed to find, when she 
cleared the table after he had gone upstairs to bed, that he 
had eaten hardly anything.

Next morning she got his breakfast ready in the same 
room, which she managed to make brighter and cheerier 
than it had looked overnight. Brooms, dusting-brushes, 
and a good fire did much to improve the aspect of things. 
But the morning wore on to noon, and the old house-
keeper listened in vain for her master’s footfall on the 
stairs. Noon waned to late afternoon. She had made no 
attempt to disturb him, thinking that he had worn him-
self out by a tedious journey on horseback, and that he 
was sleeping the sleep of exhaustion. But when the brief 
November day clouded with the first shadows of twilight, 
the old woman grew seriously alarmed, and went upstairs 
to her master’s door, where she waited in vain for any 
reply to her repeated calls and knockings.

The door was locked on the inside, and the house-
keeper was not strong enough to break it open. She 
rushed downstairs again full of fear, and ran bare-headed 
out into the lonely road. There was no habitation nearer 
than the turnpike on the old coach road, from which 
this side road branched off to the sea. There was scanty 
hope of a chance passer-by. The old woman ran along the 
road, hardly knowing whither she was going or what she 
was going to do, but with a vague idea that she must get 
somebody to help her.

Chance favoured her. A cart, laden with sea-weed, 
came lumbering slowly along from the level line of sands 
yonder where the land melted into water. A heavy lum-
bering farm-labourer walked beside the cart.

“For God’s sake, come in and burst open my master’s 
door!” she entreated, seizing the man by the arm. “He’s 
lying dead, or in a fit, and I can’t get to help him.”

“All right, missus,” answered the man, as if such an 
invitation were a matter of daily occurrence. “Whoa, 

Notes
9. Author M. E. Braddon held anti-Semitic prejudices, like much of Europe at that time. Many Jewish people experienced prejudice in both secular and 
religious arenas.

155“The Shadow in the Corner”



Dobbin; stond still, horse, and be donged to thee.”
Dobbin was glad enough to be brought to anchor on 

the patch of waste grass in front of the Grange garden. 
His master followed the housekeeper upstairs, and shat-
tered the old-fashioned box-lock with one blow of his 
ponderous fist.

The old woman’s worst fear was realised. Anthony 
Bascom was dead. But the mode and manner of his death 
Michael had never been able to learn. The housekeeper’s 
daughter, who told him the story, was an old woman 
when he was a boy. She had only shaken her head, and 
looked unutterable things, when he questioned her too 
closely. She had never even admitted that the old squire 
had committed suicide. Yet the tradition of his self-de-
struction was rooted in the minds of the natives of 
Holcroft: and there was a settled belief that his ghost, at 
certain times and seasons, haunted Wildheath Grange.

Now Michael Bascom was a stern materialist. For him 
the universe with all its inhabitants, was a great machine, 
governed by inexorable laws. To such a man the idea of a 
ghost was simply absurd--as absurd as the assertion that 
two and two make five, or that a circle can be formed of a 
straight line. Yet he had a kind of dilettante interest in the 
idea of a mind which could believe in ghosts. The subject 
offered an amusing psychological study. This poor little 
pale girl, now, had evidently got some supernatural terror 
into her head, which could only be conquered by rational 
treatment.

“I know what I ought to do,” Michael Bascom said to 
himself suddenly. “I’ll occupy that room myself tonight, 
and demonstrate to this foolish girl that her notion about 
the shadow is nothing more than a silly fancy, bred of ti-
midity and low spirits. An ounce of proof is better than a 
pound of argument. If I can prove to her that I have spent 
a night in the room, and seen no such shadow, she will 
understand what an idle thing superstition is.”

Daniel came in presently to shut the shutters.
“Tell your wife to make up my bed in the room where 

Maria has been sleeping, and to put her into one of the 
rooms on the first floor for to-night, Skegg,” said Mr. 
Bascom.

“Sir?”
Mr. Bascom repeated his order.
“That silly wench has been complaining to you about 

her room,” Skegg exclaimed indignantly. “She doesn’t de-
serve to be well fed and cared for in a comfortable home. 
She ought to go to the workhouse.”

“Don’t be angry with the poor girl, Skegg. She has tak-
en a foolish fancy into her head, and I want to show her 
how silly she is,” said Mr. Bascom.

“And you want to sleep in his—in that room yourself,” 
said the butler.

“Precisely.”
“Well,” mused Skegg, “if he does walk—which I don’t 

believe—he was your own flesh and blood; and I don’t 
suppose he’ll do you any hurt.”

When Daniel Skegg went back to the kitchen he railed 
mercilessly at poor Maria, who sat pale and silent in 
her corner by the hearth, darning old Mrs. Skegg’s grey 
worsted stockings, which were the roughest and harshest 
armour that ever human foot clothed itself withal. “Was 
there ever such a whimsical, fine, lady-like miss,” de-
manded Daniel, “to come into a gentleman’s house, and 
drive him out of his own bedroom to sleep in an attic, 
with her nonsenses and vagaries.” If this was the result of 
being educated above one’s station, Daniel declared that 
he was thankful he had never got so far in his schooling 
as to read words of two syllables without spelling. Educa-
tion might be hanged for him, if this was all it led to.

“I am very sorry,” faltered Maria, weeping silently over her 
work. “Indeed, Mr. Skegg, I made no complaint. My master 
questioned me, and I told him the truth. That was all.”

“All!” exclaimed Mr. Skegg irately; “all, indeed! I 
should think it was enough.”

Poor Maria held her peace. Her mind, fluttered by 
Daniel’s unkindness, had wandered away from that bleak 
big kitchen to the lost home of the past—the snug little 
parlour where she and her father had sat beside the cosy 
hearth on such a night as this; she with her smart work-
box and her plain sewing, he with the newspaper he 
loved to read; the petted cat purring on the rug, the kettle 
singing on the bright brass trivet, the tea-tray pleasantly 
suggestive of the most comfortable meal in the day.

Oh, those happy nights, that dear companionship! 
Were they really gone for ever, leaving nothing behind 
them but unkindness and servitude?

Michael Bascom retired later than usual that night. He 
was in the habit of sitting at his books long after every 
other lamp but his own had been extinguished. The 
Skeggs had subsided into silence and darkness in their 
drear ground-floor bed-chamber. Tonight his studies 
were of a peculiarly interesting kind, and belonged to 
the order of recreative reading rather than of hard work. 
He was deep in the history of that mysterious people 

156“The Shadow in the Corner”



who had their dwelling-place in the Swiss lakes, and was 
much exercised by certain speculations and theories 
about them.

The old eight-day clock10 on the stairs was striking 
two as Michael slowly ascended, candle in hand, to the 
hitherto unknown region of the attics. At the top of the 
staircase he found himself facing a dark narrow passage 
which led northwards, a passage that was in itself suffi-
cient to strike terror to a superstitious mind, so black and 
uncanny did it look.

“Poor child,” mused Mr. Bascom, thinking of Maria; 
“this attic floor is rather dreary, and for a young mind 
prone to fancies—”

He had opened the door of the north room by this 
time, and stood looking about him.

It was a large room, with a ceiling that sloped on one 
side, but was fairly lofty upon the other; an old-fashioned 
room, full of old-fashioned furniture—big, ponderous, 
clumsy—associated with a day that was gone and people 
that were dead. A walnut-wood wardrobe stared him in 
the face—a wardrobe with brass handles, which gleamed 
out of the darkness like diabolical eyes. There was a tall 
four-post bedstead, which had been cut down on one 
side to accommodate the slope of the ceiling, and which 
had a misshapen and deformed aspect in consequence. 
There was an old mahogany bureau, that smelt of secrets. 
There were some heavy old chairs with rush bottoms, 
mouldy with age, and much worn. There was a corner 
washstand, with a big basin and a small jug—the odds 
and ends of past years. Carpet there was none, save a 
narrow strip beside the bed.

“It is a dismal room,” mused Michael, with the same 
touch of pity for Maria’s weakness which he had felt on 
the landing just now.

To him it mattered nothing where he slept; but having 
let himself down to a lower level by his interest in the 
Swiss lake-people, he was in a manner humanised by the 
lightness of his evening’s reading, and was even inclined 
to compassionate the weaknesses of a foolish girl.

He went to bed, determined to sleep his soundest. 
The bed was comfortable, well supplied with blankets, 
rather luxurious than otherwise, and the scholar had that 
agreeable sense of fatigue which promises profound and 
restful slumber.

He dropped off to sleep quickly, but woke with a start 

ten minutes afterwards. What was this consciousness of 
a burden of care that had awakened him—this sense of 
all-pervading trouble that weighed upon his spirits and 
oppressed his heart—this icy horror of some terrible cri-
sis in life through which he must inevitably pass? To him 
these feelings were as novel as they were painful. His life 
had flowed on with smooth and sluggish tide, unbroken 
by so much as a ripple of sorrow. Yet to-night he felt all 
the pangs of unavailing remorse; the agonising memory 
of a life wasted; the stings of humiliation and disgrace, 
shame, ruin; a hideous death, which he had doomed 
himself to die by his own hand. These were the horrors 
that pressed him round and weighed him down as he lay 
in Anthony Bascom’s room.

Yes, even he, the man who could recognise nothing in 
nature, or in nature’s God, better or higher than an irre-
sponsible and invariable machine governed by mechan-
ical laws, was fain to admit that here he found himself 
face to face with a psychological mystery. This trouble, 
which came between him and sleep, was the trouble that 
had pursued Anthony Bascom on the last night of his 
life. So had the suicide felt as he lay in that lonely room, 
perhaps striving to rest his wearied brain with one last 
earthly sleep before he passed to the unknown interme-
diate land where all is darkness and slumber. And that 
troubled mind had haunted the room ever since. It was 
not the ghost of the man’s body that returned to the spot 
where he had suffered and perished, but the ghost of his 
mind—his very self; no meaningless simulacrum of the 
clothes he were, and the figure that filled them.

Michael Bascom was not the man to abandon his high 
ground of sceptical philosophy without a struggle. He 
tried his hardest to conquer this oppression that weighed 
upon mind and sense. Again and again he succeeded in 
composing himself to sleep, but only to wake again and 
again to the same torturing thoughts, the same remorse, 
the same despair. So the night passed in unutterable 
weariness; for though he told himself that the trouble was 
not his trouble, that there was no reality in the burden, 
no reason for the remorse, these vivid fancies were as 
painful as realities, and took as strong a hold upon him.

The first streak of light crept in at the window—dim, 
and cold, and grey; then came twilight, and he looked at 
the corner between the wardrobe and the door.

Yes; there was the shadow: not the shadow of the 

Notes
10. To work properly, most clocks had to be wound by hand before electricity was available. Eight-day clocks only had to be wound every eight days.

157“The Shadow in the Corner”



wardrobe only—that was clear enough, but a vague and 
shapeless something which darkened the dull brown 
wall; so faint, so shadow, that he could form no conjec-
ture as to its nature, or the thing it represented. He deter-
mined to watch this shadow till broad daylight; but the 
weariness of the night had exhausted him, and before the 
first dimness of dawn had passed away he had fallen fast 
asleep, and was tasting the blessed balm of undisturbed 
slumber. When he woke the winter sun was shining in 
at the lattice, and the room had lost its gloomy aspect. It 
looked old-fashioned, and grey, and brown, and shabby; 
but the depth of its gloom had fled with the shadows and 
the darkness of night.

Mr. Bascom rose refreshed by a sound sleep, which 
had lasted nearly three hours. He remembered the 
wretched feelings which had gone before that renovating 
slumber; but he recalled his strange sensations only to 
despise them, and he despised himself for having at-
tached any importance to them.

“Indigestion very likely,” he told himself; “or perhaps 
mere fancy, engendered of that foolish girl’s story. The 
wisest of us is more under the dominion of imagination 
than he would care to confess. Well, Maria shall not sleep 
in this room any more. There is no particular reason why 
she should, and she shall not be made unhappy to please 
old Skegg and his wife.”

When he had dressed himself in his usual leisurely 
way, Mr. Bascom walked up to the corner where he had 
seen or imagined the shadow, and examined the spot 
carefully.

At first sight he could discover nothing of a mysteri-
ous character. There was no door in the papered wall, no 
trace of a door that had been there in the past. There was 
no trap-door in the worm-eaten boards. There was no 
dark ineradicable stain to hint at murder. There was not 
the faintest suggestion of a secret or a mystery.

He looked up at the ceiling. That was sound enough, 
save for a dirty patch here and there where the rain had 
blistered it.

Yes; there was something--an insignificant thing, yet 
with a suggestion of grimness which startled him.

About a foot below the ceiling he saw a large iron 
hook projecting from the wall, just above the spot where 
he had seen the shadow of a vaguely defined form. He 
mounted on a chair the better to examine this hook, and 
to understand, if he could, the purpose for which it had 
been put there.

It was old and rusty. It must have been there for many 
years. Who could have placed it there, and why? It was 
not the kind of hook upon which one would hang a 
picture or one’s garments. It was placed in an obscure 
corner. Had Anthony Bascom put it there on the night he 
died; or did he find it there ready for a fatal use?

“If I were a superstitious man,” thought Michael, “I 
should be inclined to believe that Anthony Bascom hung 
himself from that rusty old hook.”

“Sleep well, sir?” asked Daniel, as he waited upon his 
master at breakfast.

“Admirably,” answered Michael, determined not to 
gratify the man’s curiosity.

He had always resented the idea that Wildheath 
Grange was haunted.

“Oh, indeed, sir. You were so late that I fancied—”
“Late, yes! I slept so well that I overshot my usual 

hour for waking. But, by-the-way, Skegg, as that poor girl 
objects to the room, let her sleep somewhere else. It can’t 
make any difference to us, and it may make some differ-
ence to her.”

“Humph!” muttered Daniel in his grumpy way; “you 
didn’t see anything queer up there, did you?”

“See anything? Of course not.”
“Well, then, why should she see things? It’s all her silly 

fiddle-faddle.”
“Never mind, let her sleep in another room.”
“There ain’t another room on the top floor that’s dry.”
“Then let her sleep on the floor below. She creeps 

about quietly enough, poor little timid thing. She won’t 
disturb me.”

Daniel grunted, and his master understood the grunt 
to mean obedient assent; but here Mr. Bascom was 
unhappily mistaken. The proverbial obstinacy of the pig 
family is as nothing compared with the obstinacy of a 
cross-grained old man, whose narrow mind has never 
been illuminated by education. Daniel was beginning to 
feel jealous of his master’s compassionate interest in the 
orphan girl. She was a sort of gentle clinging thing that 
might creep into an elderly bachelor’s heart unawares, 
and make herself a comfortable nest there.

“We shall have fine carryings-on, and me and my old 
woman will be nowhere, if I don’t put down my heel 
pretty strong upon this nonsense,” Daniel muttered to 
himself, as he carried the breakfast-tray to the pantry.

Maria met him in the passage.
“Well, Mr. Skegg, what did my master say?” she asked 

158“The Shadow in the Corner”



breathlessly.
“Did he see anything strange in the room?”
“No, girl. What should he see? He said you were a fool.”
“Nothing disturbed him? And he slept there peaceful-

ly?” faltered Maria.
“Never slept better in his life. Now don’t you begin to 

feel ashamed of yourself?”
“Yes,” she answered meekly; “I am ashamed of being 

so full of fancies. I will go back to my room tonight, Mr. 
Skegg, if you like, and I will never complain of it again.”

“I hope you won’t,” snapped Skegg; “you’ve given us 
trouble enough already.”

Maria sighed, and went about her work in saddest 
silence. The day wore slowly on, like all other days in 
that lifeless old house. The scholar sat in his study; Maria 
moved softly from room to room, sweeping and dusting 
in the cheerless solitude. The mid-day sun faded into the 
grey of afternoon, and evening came down like a blight 
upon the dull old house.

Throughout that day Maria and her master never met. 
Anyone who had been so far interested in the girl as to 
observe her appearance would have seen that she was 
unusually pale, and that her eyes had a resolute look, as 
of one who was resolved to face a painful ordeal. She ate 
hardly anything all day. She was curiously silent. Skegg 
and his wife put down both these symptoms to temper.

“She won’t eat and she won’t talk,” said Daniel to the 
partner of his joys. “That means sulkiness, and I never 
allowed sulkiness to master me when I was a young man, 
and you tried it on as a young woman, and I’m not going 
to be conquered by sulkiness in my old age.”

Bed-time came, and Maria bade the Skeggs a civil good-
night, and went up to her lonely garret without a murmur.

The next morning came, and Mrs. Skegg looked in 
vain for her patient hand-maiden, when she wanted Ma-
ria’s services in preparing the breakfast.

“The wench sleeps sound enough this morning,” said 
the old woman. “Go and call her, Daniel. My poor legs 
can’t stand them stairs.”

“Your poor legs are getting uncommon useless,” mut-
tered Daniel testily, as he went to do his wife’s behest.

He knocked at the door, and called Maria—once, 
twice, thrice, many times; but there was no reply. He 
tried the door, and found it locked. He shook the door 
violently, cold with fear.

Then he told himself that the girl had played him a 

trick. She had stolen away before daybreak, and left the 
door locked to frighten him. But, no; this could not be, 
for he could see the key in the lock when he knelt down 
and put his eye to the keyhole. The key prevented his 
seeing into the room.

“She’s in there, laughing in her sleeve at me,” he told 
himself; “but I’ll soon be even with her.”

There was a heavy bar on the staircase, which was in-
tended to secure the shutters of the window that lighted 
the stairs. It was a detached bar, and always stood in a 
corner near the window, which it was but rarely em-
ployed to fasten. Daniel ran down to the landing, and 
seized upon this massive iron bar, and then ran back to 
the garret door.

One blow from the heavy bar shattered the old lock, 
which was the same lock the carter had broken with his 
strong fist seventy years before. The door flew open, and 
Daniel went into the attic which he had chosen for the 
stranger’s bed-chamber.

Maria was hanging from the hook in the wall. She had 
contrived to cover her face decently with her handker-
chief. She had hanged herself deliberately about an hour 
before Daniel found her, in the early grey of morning. 
The doctor, who was summoned from Holcroft, was able 
to declare the time at which she had slain herself, but 
there was no one who could say what sudden access of 
terror had impelled her to the desperate act, or under 
what slow torture of nervous apprehension her mind had 
given way. The coroner’s jury returned the customary 
merciful verdict of “temporary insanity.”

The girl’s melancholy fate darkened the rest of Michael 
Bascom’s life. He fled from Wildheath Grange as from an 
accursed spot, and from the Skeggs as from the mur-
derers of a harmless innocent girl. He ended his days at 
Oxford, where he found the society of congenial minds, 
and the books he loved. But the memory of Maria’s sad 
face, and sadder death, was his abiding sorrow. Out of 
that deep shadow his soul was never lifted.

Contextual Documents

A Journal Entry from Arthur Munby11

Arthur Munby was born in York in 1828. He was edu-
cated at Trinity College, in Cambridge, graduating with a 

Notes
11. Hudson, Derek. Munby: Man of Two Worlds; The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby. (Boston: Gambit, 1972) 99.

159“The Shadow in the Corner”



Bachelor’s of the Arts in 1851. He worked as a lawyer, like 
his father, for some years before becoming a civil servant 
for the Ecclesiastical Commissioner’s office from 1858-
1888. During this time, Munby was known for his poetry 
Benoni and Verses New and Old. In 1854, he met his fu-
ture wife while wandering the streets, Hannah Cullwick. 
In 1873, Munby wed Cullwick, though their relationship 
was anything but normal. With her working class status 
in society, she remained a domestic servant while at the 
same time being married to Munby. Even though they’d 
been married for many years, she was still kept in the 
shadows. No one knew of this intricate relationship until 
his will was released to his family. In 1877, Munby and 
Cullwick separated, but didn’t stop seeing one another 
until Cullwick’s death in 1909.

Arthur Munby became known for his fetishistic 
obsession with working-class women, particularly those 
who did hard physical labor. Munby’s favorite pastime 
was to wander the streets, looking for working women 
to interview and photograph. He asked them about their 
lives and the details of their work, all the while noting 
their appearance, such as clothing and dialects.  He 
entered these observations into his journals, in which he 
was known to describe the women and then draw them.  
He often depicted them as big, black blobs with coats and 
trousers, along with large hands (referenced in this entry) 
and large feet.

In this journal entry, we read about Munby’s eye for 
detail as he describes a young milkwoman that is in the 
market square. He describes her with large hands and 
glowing red skin. Is this Munby’s way of saying that these 
women who do the work of a man are more sexual than 
those of a woman who stays at home? His obsession with 
fetishism and dirt carried over into his relationship with 
Cullwick, with whom he had a love affair—but a slight-
ly different love affair for the time. Munby is known to 
have had Cullwick as a “domestic servant,” rather than a 
wife, once they finally married in secret. The two became 
known for their age-play and infantilism (the sexual role 
play of a person who acts or is treated like an infant). 
This entry goes on to speak about a woman that Munby 
is observing, wondering about the reason that she takes 
such pride in the work she does. He firstly refers to the 
woman as a wench, who is a woman of the “dirty” work-
ing class. The word “wench” refers to the fact that this 
woman might be doing other work such as sexual favors, 
besides going to the market for groceries. This references 

Munby’s life because at that same time Munby was hav-
ing Cullwick serve him sexually. Thus, Munby’s use of the 
word “wench” reflects his sexualization of women’s labor. 
This obsession with the working class drove Munby to 
study and, thus, to assert power in multiple ways over the 
working class women that he sought out and coerced. 
We see in “A Shadow in the Corner,” a young woman 
working as a maid in the house of the Master. By refer-
encing this journal entry, we see Munby’s sexualization of 
working class women helps us contextualize Braddon be-
cause his sexualization is fixated on the ghostliness of the 
female working class—his journal entry is obsessed with 
the way working class women transgress different forms 
of category and boundary-like race, class, and gender.

Tuesday, 11 June . . . in Trafalgar Square, I noticed a 
young milkwoman who was just commencing her career 
under the auspices of an old one, probably her mother. 
The débutante was standing by the railings of the Union 
Club. She was a ruddy blooming wench of eighteen or 
so, scarcely formed yet, but clean-limbed and muscular. 
Her large hands were in colour a glowing red; the skin 
coarse and rugged without, showing no vein or dimple, 
and tough & leathery in the palms, hardening into yellow 
callosities—corns, she would call them—at the roots of 
the fingers. Can a girl of eighteen possess such hands 
and have a lover? I should think so! She wore the usual 
plain straw bonnet, woolen shawl, and clean cotton frock: 
but her bonnet wanted the thick white cap, her boots 
were effeminately thin—hardly so strong as a shooting 
boot—and her frock came down to her ankles! Can it be 
that fashion is infecting the London milkwomen, no-
blest of conservative caryatides? So she stood, awkward 
and happy, a picture of ungainly strength. A lady came 
mincing past at the moment, with tiny hands cased in 
lavender kid: the contrast was delicious. Then her mother 
returned, and the daughter, with her help, adjusted the 
yoke upon her own square shoulders. It was a brand-
new yoke, with her master’s name in large letters upon 
it; whereby as she walks all the world may know that she 
belongs to ‘Sims, 122 Jermyn St.’ She walked thus away 
between her heavy cans, the old mentor keeping at her 
side and guiding her to the next customer’s on the milk 
walk. Doubtless, when she first walked along the streets 
this afternoon, she felt proud of wearing a new yoke 
with big letters on it, and clean brown straps and bright 

160“The Shadow in the Corner”



hooks and buckles; as proud as a cart horse in his May-
day harness. Long may she feel such pride! She will work 
in that year out of doors six hours a day, in all weathers, 
with never a holiday from year’s end to year’s end: she 
will nevertheless be as merry as a lark, yet stronger and 
healthier every year, and marry and breed us sons strong 
and fullblooded like herself.

A Journal Entry from Hannah Cullwick12

The following contextual document helps provide 
insight into the true nature of domestic servitude and 
the many tasks one was expected to accomplish in a day’s 
work. While Braddon’s narrative does not give much 
insight into the specific activities Maria would have been 
working on each day in the story itself, this diary entry 
allows us to understand the nature of the daily chores of 
a woman in her position. Hannah Cullwick wrote this 
entry on her birthday; she details her daily activities, 
which would be similar to those that Maria, the girl in 
“The Shadow in the Corner,” would have been expected 
to complete as well.          

Hannah Cullwick was born and raised into a life of do-
mestic servitude. From an early age, she contributed to the 
family’s income. Orphaned by the age of fourteen, along 
with her four siblings, Cullwick had no choice but to carry 
on in her duties as a housemaid for well-known families of 
the time. Through her service to such a family, she came 
in contact with Arthur Munby in 1854, a meeting that 
would impact her life and aid her in finding her own 
place in history. Their meeting would later lead not only 
to a relationship but a secret marriage between the two. 

This relationship was chronicled through her diary, 
in which she calls him her “Massa” and states that she is 
able to carry him “as if he was a child,” a strength we are 
told he admired in working-class women. She, though 
his wife, acted as housemaid of their home, often writing 
him letters about the details of the work she had done 
throughout the day. Such a letter is provided below. The 
nature of their relationship also brings to light that Cull-
wick’s position in life kept her in the shadows. Though 
the two married, they did so in secret, and they divorced 
in 1877 but remained in contact while she continued 
working as a domestic servant until shortly before Han-
nah’s death in 1909 at the age of 71.

Friday 26 May My birthday, & it was a fine morning. 
I got up early & lighted the fire after I’d brush’d the grate. 
Swept the kitchen floor & shook the carpets. Did the 
dining room grate up & laid the fire. Swept the carpet. 
Clean’d the front steps on my knees. Shook the mats. 
Wash’d me & got our breakfast. Receiv’d letters from my 
two sisters, & two little books as presents. I was just a 
little disappointed at getting no letter from Massa as he’d 
promised me one, but I thought it’d come early in the day 
so I wasn’t vex’d & I made myself quite happy – wi’ giving 
the kitchen an extra scrub on my knees, after I’d clean’d 
the tables & dresser down, & clean’d the cupboards out. 
Got the dinner by ½ pas 1 & clear’d away after.

Wash’d up in the scullery, & had our tea at 5 with some 
seedcake I’d made for my birthday – not so much for my-
self, but the other servants like cake & puddings so much. 
They wish’d me the usual wish of many happy returns o’ 
the day. There was no letter from M, & I couldn’t rest to 
write or sew, for I was afraid he’d gone to the Derby & 
perhaps something had happen’d. If he’d not promised 
me a ltter I shd just o’ thought he’d forgot the day, so as 
I couldn’t sit down I set on & clean’d the kitchen win-
down outside & in. I had my striped apron & cap on & 
my cotton frock, & while I was standing up outside I’ the 
window cleaning it, a lad went by  & says, ‘Come down, 
you young hussy.’ I was rather pleas’d at him saying it tho’ 
he was rude, & I thought, ‘Ah, lad, you wouldn’t say that 
if you knew I’m 38 years old today.’ I was enjoying the 
work & it was pleasnt out in the air, but a bit draughty 
being in the ear & one’s apt to catch cold. Still I liked it, & 
I’d no better way to enjoy myself.

When the window was done I wash’d my red stuff 
frock after I picked the body from the skirt, & then it 
was supper time. I got the beer from the corner public 
house & laid the cloth. At 9 o’clock a letter came from M., 
kind but short. It was such a relief, for I’d nearly made 
my mind up to set off by the train, just there & back in 
a hurry to see if M. was in or no. After prayers I wrote a 
short letter to him & posted it by twelve o’clock & to bed 
soon after. 

I am 38 years old today, but I don’t feel so old, nor look 
it – folks generally take me for 28 or 9 – and I’m as strong 
as ever. I can heave my Master easy & carry him as if he 
was a child nearly, & he’s 11 stone7 lbs. I am thankful 
to God for my health & strength & the rest of the bless-

Notes
12. Stanley, Liz. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984) 166-67.

161“The Shadow in the Corner”



ings I have. I feel that I am better servant now nor ever 
I was, ‘cause I’ve had more experience, & seem to have 
more sense to see what one is born for, & to be satisfied, 
& thankful for a home, & pleas’d to have work to do for 
a living, & of more patience to bear with the different 
tempers & little things one continually has in life to try 
one. So when I went to bed I knelt down & prayed that I 
might go on improving till I was perfect, as far as it’s pos-
sible to be perfect, & especially that I may be a comfort to 
Massa, & love him always as I do now, with all my heart 
- & in loving him I should the more love God who made 
me for him. So I laid me down at rest & felt quite happy.

An Excerpt From the “Buried Alive” Chapter of “Lady 
Audley’s Secret”13

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a praised writer in the 
mid-to-late 1800’s in England. As her writing career 
grew, Braddon met publisher and editor John Maxwell. 
Though Maxwell was married, Braddon and he had a 
more than professional relationship. With his wife in 
an asylum, Maxwell allowed his relationship with Brad-
don to grow. After Maxwell’s wife died, he and Braddon 
married (Tromp, Gilber, Haynie xxiii). It was through her 
skills and publications that Braddon helped her husband 
save his floundering publishing company. Together, Max-
well and Braddon published many works, including Lady 
Audley’s Secret, which was released in parts in Maxwell’s 
Sixpenny Magazine (Tromp, Gilber, Haynie xxv).

Much of Braddon’s work explored her feminist ideas—
specifically the oppression of domestic labor females 
and married women, sometimes veiled by supernatural 
themes, as seen in “The Shadow in the Corner.” One 
subject Braddon was drawn to in particular was that of 
live burial. According to Holly Furneaux, Braddon was 
inspired by Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, and Wilkie 
Collins who wrote of live burial before her (426). The 
social obsession with live burial stemmed from the 
burial reforms in the 1850s, laws that were “intended 
not only to protect the living from the unhealthy effects 
of exposure to dead bodies, but also to protect the dead 
from desecration” (Thorsheim 42). This fear of prema-
ture burial resulted in petitions for “waiting mortuaries” 
who some called “an asylum for doubtful life” (Furneaux 
426-27). Consequently, the fears manifested in multiple 

literary works of the era. In 1850, Edgar Allen Poe even 
wrote a short story titled “The Premature Burial.” 

While many live burial works were literal, Braddon 
often used the idea and fear in a more metaphorical sense 
to illustrate the confining and sometimes traumatizing 
aspects of becoming an invisible specter of a woman in 
the domestic and working class of the Victorian Era. In 
her novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, Braddon has an entire 
chapter titled “Buried Alive,” yet no burial actually oc-
curs. Furneaux argues, “Braddon recruits resonant imag-
es of live burial to explore and realign relations of gender 
and power in her society…[S]he draws upon and sub-
verts a long cultural genealogy of live burial narratives in 
which the victim is invariably gendered female” (427). In 
many instances in Lady Audley’s Secret, Braddon utilizes 
horrific live burial images to describe the legal coffin 
of marriage and women’s domestic labor. Through this 
imagery, “Braddon rejects the institutionalized expecta-
tion that a married woman should suffer the complete 
obliteration of her individual identity” (Furneaux 431). 
Braddon’s writing throughout Lady Audley’s Secret acts 
as a feminist commentary on marriage and divorce in 
19th century England. Marriage stripped a woman of her 
identity and placed blame on her for adultery, and there 
was no escape from her matrimonial coffin unless she 
could prove physical harm.

Braddon’s attraction to the buried alive motif often 
played a role in other works. In a more abstract, meta-
phorical sense, “The Shadow in the Corner” can arguably 
be labeled as a buried alive story. Throughout the story, 
we see Mr. and Mrs. Skeggs stuck in a home that they 
have been maintaining for years. Mrs. Skeggs has spent 
the last twenty years in her premature grave. When Mr. 
Skeggs asks Michael for help in maintain the house, he 
says, they need “‘a girl to trot about and wash up, and 
help the old lady. She’s getting weak on her legs, poor 
soul. We’ve none of us grown younger in the last twenty 
years… my missus must have a girl. She can’t go on trot-
ting up and down these everlasting passages, and stand-
ing in that stone scullery year after year, just as if she was 
a young woman’.” Clearly, within the last two decades, 
Mrs. Skeggs has become too old to take the stairs of her 
coffin—the walls of the mansion confining her to her 
“grave” of domestic duties.

In the chapter excerpt from Lady Audley’s Secret that 

Notes
13. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret. (London: Tinsley Bros., 1862).

162“The Shadow in the Corner”



follows, Braddon equates the institutionalization of Lady 
Audley to a live burial punishment for her crimes. In the 
earlier events of the novel, Lady Audley is discovered to 
actually be a woman named Helen Talboys—the sup-
posed dead wife of Sir Audley’s friend George who, upon 
visiting England and meeting Lady Audley, mysteriously 
disappears. Lady Audley, when she was still known as 
Helen, had previously been “buried alive” under the 
domestic duties and anxiety of debt when George left her 
for three years in hopes of returning with gold. A captive 
in her coffin of life as Helen Talboys, she felt her only 
escape was to fake her death and find a new husband 
who could financially support her. The feminist themes 
and fear of premature burial provide a prime example 
of Braddon’s personal ideals and beliefs. Throughout all 
of her writing, Braddon’s commentary is prevalent, and 
through the veil of horror and supernatural, readers can 
undeniably see Braddon herself.

My lady had not spoken during the journey, except 
to decline some refreshments which Robert had offered 
her at a halting place upon the road. Her heart sunk 
when they left Brussels behind, for she had hoped that 
city might have been the end of her journey, and she had 
turned with a feeling of sickness and despair from the 
dull Belgian landscape.

She looked up at last as the vehicle jolted into a great 
stony quadrangle, which had been the approach to a 
monastery once, but which was now the court yard of a 
dismal hotel, in whose cellars legions of rats skirmished 
and squeaked even while the broad sunshine was bright 
in the chambers above.

Lady Audley shuddered as she alighted from the dili-
gence, and found herself in that dreary court yard. Robert 
was surrounded by chattering porters, who clamored for 
his “baggages,” and disputed among themselves as to the 
hotel at which he was to rest. One of these men ran away 
to fetch a hackney-coach at Mr. Audley’s behest, and reap-
peared presently, urging on a pair of horses—which were 
so small as to suggest the idea that they had been made 
out of one ordinary-sized animal—with wild shrieks and 
whoops that had a demoniac sound in the darkness.

Mr. Audley left my lady in a dreary coffee-room in the 
care of a drowsy attendant while he drove away to some 
distant part of the quiet city. There was official business 
to be gone through before Sir Michael’s wife could be 

quietly put away in the place suggested by Dr. Mosgrave. 
Robert had to see all manner of important personages; 
and to take numerous oaths; and to exhibit the English 
physician’s letter; and to go through much ceremony of 
signing and countersigning before he could take his lost 
friend’s cruel wife to the home which was to be her last 
upon earth. Upward of two hours elapsed before all this 
was arranged, and the young man was free to return to 
the hotel, where he found his charge staring absently at a 
pair of wax-candles, with a cup of untasted coffee stand-
ing cold and stagnant before her.

Robert handed my lady into the hired vehicle, and 
took his seat opposite to her once more.

“Where are you going to take me?” she asked, at last. 
“I am tired of being treated like some naughty child, who 
is put into a dark cellar as a punishment for its offenses. 
Where are you taking me?”

“To a place in which you will have ample leisure to 
repent the past, Mrs. Talboys,” Robert answered, gravely.

They had left the paved streets behind them, and had 
emerged out of a great gaunt square, in which there 
appeared to be about half a dozen cathedrals, into a small 
boulevard, a broad lamp-lit road, on which the shadows 
of the leafless branches went and came tremblingly, like 
the shadows of a paralytic skeleton. There were houses 
here and there upon this boulevard; stately houses, entre 
cour et jardin, and with plaster vases of geraniums on the 
stone pillars of the ponderous gateways. The rumbling 
hackney-carriage drove upward of three-quarters of a 
mile along this smooth roadway before it drew up against 
a gateway, older and more ponderous than any of those 
they had passed.

My lady gave a little scream as she looked out of the 
coach-window. The gaunt gateway was lighted by an 
enormous lamp; a great structure of iron and glass, in 
which one poor little shivering flame struggled with the 
March wind.

The coachman rang the bell, and a little wooden door 
at the side of the gate was opened by a gray-haired man, 
who looked out at the carriage, and then retired. He reap-
peared three minutes afterward behind the folding iron 
gates, which he unlocked and threw back to their full ex-
tent, revealing a dreary desert of stone-paved courtyard.

The coachman led his wretched horses into the court-
yard, and piloted the vehicle to the principal doorway 
of the house, a great mansion of gray stone, with several 
long ranges of windows, many of which were dimly light-

163“The Shadow in the Corner”



ed, and looked out like the pale eyes of weary watchers 
upon the darkness of the night.

My lady, watchful and quiet as the cold stars in the 
wintry sky, looked up at these casements with an ear-
nest and scrutinizing gaze. One of the windows was 
shrouded by a scanty curtain of faded red; and upon this 
curtain there went and came a dark shadow, the shadow 
of a woman with a fantastic head dress, the shadow of a 
restless creature, who paced perpetually backward and 
forward before the window.

Sir Michael Audley’s wicked wife laid her hand sud-
denly upon Robert’s arm, and pointed with the other 
hand to this curtained window.

“I know where you have brought me,” she said. “This is 
a MAD-HOUSE.”

Mr. Audley did not answer her. He had been stand-
ing at the door of the coach when she addressed him, 
and he quietly assisted her to alight, and led her up a 
couple of shallow stone steps, and into the entrance-hall 
of the mansion. He handed Dr. Mosgrave’s letter to a 
neatly-dressed, cheerful-looking, middle-aged woman, 
who came tripping out of a little chamber which opened 
out of the hall, and was very much like the bureau of an 
hotel. This person smilingly welcome Robert and his 
charge: and after dispatching a servant with the letter, in-
vited them into her pleasant little apartment, which was 
gayly furnished with bright amber curtains and heated by 
a tiny stove.

“Madam finds herself very much fatigued?” the 
Frenchwoman said, interrogatively, with a look of intense 
sympathy, as she placed an arm-chair for my lady.

“Madam” shrugged her shoulders wearily, and looked 
round the little chamber with a sharp glance of scrutiny 
that betokened no very great favor.

“WHAT is this place, Robert Audley?” she cried fiercely. 
“Do you think I am a baby, that you may juggle with and 
deceive me—what is it? It is what I said just now, is it not?”

“It is a maison de santé, my lady,” the young man 
answered, gravely. “I have no wish to juggle with or to 
deceive you.”

My lady paused for a few moments, looking reflective-
ly at Robert.

“A maison de santé,” she repeated. “Yes, they manage 
these things better in France. In England we should call 
it a madhouse. This is a house for mad people, this, is 
it not, madam?” she said in French, turning upon the 
woman, and tapping the polished floor with her foot.

“Ah, but no, madam,” the woman answered with a 
shrill scream of protest. “It is an establishment of the 
most agreeable, where one amuses one’s self—”

She was interrupted by the entrance of the principal of 
this agreeable establishment, who came beaming into the 
room with a radiant smile illuminating his countenance, 
and with Dr. Mosgrave’s letter open in his hand.

It was impossible to say how enchanted he was to 
make the acquaintance of M’sieu. There was nothing 
upon earth which he was not ready to do for M’sieu in his 
own person, and nothing under heaven which he would 
not strive to accomplish for him, as the friend of his ac-
quaintance, so very much distinguished, the English doc-
tor. Dr. Mosgrave’s letter had given him a brief synopsis 
of the case, he informed Robert, in an undertone, and he 
was quite prepared to undertake the care of the charming 
and very interesting “Madam—Madam—”

He rubbed his hands politely, and looked at Robert. 
Mr. Audley remembered, for the first time, that he had 
been recommended to introduce his wretched charge 
under a feigned name.

He affected not to hear the proprietor’s question. It 
might seem a very easy matter to have hit upon a heap of 
names, any one of which would have answered his pur-
pose; but Mr. Audley appeared suddenly to have forgot-
ten that he had ever heard any mortal appellation except 
that of himself and of his lost friend.

Perhaps the proprietor perceived and understood 
his embarrassment. He at any rate relieved it by turning 
to the woman who had received them, and muttering 
something about No. 14, Bis. The woman took a key from 
a long range of others, that hung over the mantel-piece, 
and a wax candle from a bracket in a corner of the room, 
and having lighted the candle, led the way across the 
stone-paved hall, and up a broad, slippery staircase of 
polished wood.

The English physician had informed his Belgian 
colleague that money would be of minor consequence in 
any arrangements made for the comfort of the English 
lady who was to be committed to his care. Acting upon 
this hint, Monsieur Val opened the outer door of a stately 
suite of apartments, which included a lobby, paved with 
alternate diamonds of black and white marble, but of a 
dismal and cellar-like darkness; a saloon furnished with 
gloomy velvet draperies, and with a certain funereal 
splendor which is not peculiarly conducive to the eleva-
tion of the spirits; and a bed-chamber, containing a bed 

164“The Shadow in the Corner”



so wondrously made, as to appear to have no opening 
whatever in its coverings, unless the counterpane had 
been split asunder with a pen-knife.

My lady stared dismally round at the range of rooms, 
which looked dreary enough in the wan light of a single 
wax-candle. This solitary flame, pale and ghost-like in 
itself, was multiplied by paler phantoms of its ghostliness, 
which glimmered everywhere about the rooms; in the 
shadowy depths of the polished floors and wainscot, or 
the window-panes, in the looking-glasses, or in those 
great expanses of glimmering something which adorned 
the rooms, and which my lady mistook for costly mir-
rors, but which were in reality wretched mockeries of 
burnished tin.

Amid all the faded splendor of shabby velvet, and tar-
nished gilding, and polished wood, the woman dropped 
into an arm-chair, and covered her face with her hands. 
The whiteness of them, and the starry light of diamonds 
trembling about them, glittered in the dimly-lighted 
chamber. She sat silent, motionless, despairing, sullen, 
and angry, while Robert and the French doctor retired to 
an outer chamber, and talked together in undertones. Mr. 
Audley had very little to say that had not been already 
said for him, with a far better grace than he himself could 
have expressed it, by the English physician. He had, after 
great trouble of mind, hit upon the name of Taylor, as a 
safe and simple substitute for that other name, to which 
alone my lady had a right. He told the Frenchman that 
this Mrs. Taylor was distantly related to him—that she 
had inherited the seeds of madness from her mother, as 
indeed Dr. Mosgrave had informed Monsieur Val; and 
that she had shown some fearful tokens of the lurking 
taint that was latent in her mind; but that she was not 
to be called “mad.” He begged that she might be treat-
ed with all tenderness and compassion; that she might 
receive all reasonable indulgences; but he impressed 
upon Monsieur Val, that under no circumstances was she 
to be permitted to leave the house and grounds without 
the protection of some reliable person, who should be 
answerable for her safe-keeping. He had only one other 
point to urge, and that was, that Monsieur Val, who, as 
he had understood, was himself a Protestant—the doctor 
bowed—would make arrangements with some kind and 
benevolent Protestant clergyman, through whom spiritu-
al advice and consolation might be secured for the inval-
id lady; who had especial need, Robert added, gravely, of 
such advantages.

This—with all necessary arrangements as to pecuniary 
matters, which were to be settled from time to time be-
tween Mr. Audley and the doctor, unassisted by any agents 
whatever—was the extent of the conversation between the 
two men, and occupied about a quarter of an hour.

My lady sat in the same attitude when they re-entered 
the bedchamber in which they had left her, with her 
ringed hands still clasped over her face.

Robert bent over to whisper in her ear.
“Your name is Madam Taylor here,” he said. “I do not 

think you would wish to be known by your real name.”
She only shook her head in answer to him, and did not 

even remove her hands from over her face.
“Madam will have an attendant entirely devoted to her 

service,” said Monsieur Val. “Madam will have all her wishes 
obeyed; her reasonable wishes, but that goes without say-
ing,” monsieur adds, with a quaint shrug. “Every effort will 
be made to render madam’s sojourn at Villebrumeuse agree-
able. The inmates dine together when it is wished. I dine 
with the inmates sometimes; my subordinate, a clever and a 
worthy man always. I reside with my wife and children in a 
little pavilion in the grounds; my subordinate resides in the 
establishment. Madam may rely upon our utmost efforts 
being exerted to insure her comfort.”

Monsieur is saying a great deal more to the same 
effect, rubbing his hands and beaming radiantly upon 
Robert and his charge, when madam rises suddenly, 
erect and furious, and dropping her jeweled fingers from 
before her face, tells him to hold his tongue.

“Leave me alone with the man who has brought me 
here,” she cried, between her set teeth. “Leave me!”

She points to the door with a sharp, imperious gesture; 
so rapid that the silken drapery about her arm makes a 
swooping sound as she lifts her hand. The sibilant French 
syllables hiss through her teeth as she utters them, and 
seem better fitted to her mood and to herself than the 
familiar English she has spoken hitherto.

The French doctor shrugs his shoulders as he goes out 
into the lobby, and mutters something about a “beauti-
ful devil,” and a gesture worthy of “the Mars.” My lady 
walked with a rapid footstep to the door between the 
bed-chamber and the saloon; closed it, and with the 
handle of the door still in her hand, turned and looked at 
Robert Audley.

“You have brought me to my grave, Mr. Audley,” she 
cried; “you have used your power basely and cruelly, and 
have brought me to a living grave.”

165“The Shadow in the Corner”



“The Shadow in the Corner”

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