A Phantom Lover

Description

A Phantom Lover by the 19th century ghost novel author Vernon Lee tells the story of a love that transcends the borders of time and reality, becoming an obsession with destructive effects on the protagonists.

The plot of the novel is set in Kent, at Okehurst, the estate of the protagonist, William Oke, Esq., who hires an artist to paint the portraits of him and his wife Alice. The painter, whose name is not known to the reader, becomes the narrator of the strange events that follow his arrival at the Okes’ palace.

The artist thinks of the squire and his wife as having at least four or five children and living together with some spinster aunt who would bore him to death with stories from her youth. To his great surprise, William Oke and his wife are the only members of the family and they live at Okehurst with just a few servants.

Unlike her husband, who is plain and has nothing interesting, Alice Oke is full of life, very beautiful, extremely intelligent, but also obsessed with a dark story from the family’s past.

She reveals to the narrator that, two centuries before, one of the Okes’ ancestors, Nicholas, killed a poet named Lovelock. This was the lover of his wife, whose name was also Alice and who, surprisingly, helped her husband commit the crime.

The current squire appears to feel really uncomfortable when his wife tells their guest the story, but he does not stop her, and the narrator soon discovers that he acts as if he would be very afraid of her. More than that, the actual Mrs. Oke has a striking physical resemblance with her namesake and she is also obsessed with the ghost of Lovelock, reading his poems and keeping his memory alive.

The narrator starts realizing that nothing good can come from it, but is he right?

[amz_corss_sell asin=”1775421120″]