The Literary Haunting of Lamb House

Philip Howell (University of Cambridge, UK)

Lamb House, in the English south coast town of Rye, is a place of pilgrimage for readers of Henry James, who lived there from 1898 to a couple of months before his death in 1916, and for those interested in the work of E.F. (“Fred”) Benson and Rumer Godden, residents in 1919-1940 and 1968-1973 respectively. This is a writers’ house, then, and the authors who came after Henry James can be considered literary tourists themselves, entirely aware of James’s presence. But it is a writerly house as well, since Lamb House has been successively memorialised in fiction. We can even speculate that the house is a kind of literary muse, an active participant in literary creation.

At first glance, Lamb House is an entirely conventional example of the writer’s house museum, however, with the genre’s familiar faults. Run by the National Trust since 1950, it suffers somewhat as a tourist vehicle: there are few of James’s personal effects, and the most obvious writer’s shrine, the Garden Room annex where James dictated his sentences to a patient typist in the summer months, was obliterated by the Luftwaffe at the height of the Battle of Britain. Visitors to Lamb House can be forgiven for sympathising with the critic Anne Trubek (2011, p. 5) when she writes that “Going to a writer’s house is a fool’s errand.” Virginia Woolf’s criticisms of literary tourism are now canonical, and she half-humorously floated the idea of an entrance exam to the Brontë parsonage at Haworth, to filter the casual callers who must make up most of the visitors. This interest in life rather than literature must surely be the case at Rye. The late novels written there cemented James’s reputation as “the Master,” but they challenge readers with their circumlocutory style, the effect of pacing and dictating his words to an amanuensis poised at the keys of a Remington typewriter. James had become by then a literary lion, the “the idol of an esoteric group” (Edmund Gosse, in Hyde, 1969, p. 287) but he was never a bestseller or a public darling. Chasing popular success in the theatre, and famously failing, was the reason that James retreated from London to Rye. Lamb House is nothing less than a red-brick monument to the Master’s martyrdom in the literary marketplace.

Henry James had anticipated Woolf’s fascination and disdain for literary tourism, larding Lamb House with extra irony. In “The Birthplace” (1903), written at Rye, James minutely anatomises the conscience of the guide and housekeeper of Shakespeare’s Stratford home, though the Bard is never named. The hapless Gedge, keeper of the literary flame, accepts that he is expected to embroider the sparse facts of the playwright’s life, to give tourists what they want (“In spite of the fool it makes of every one?”: “Say because of that. We only ask to believe every one is a fool!”) We might then think that Lamb House is but “an altar to the antithesis of itself” (Harvey, 2007: 76), the quotidian business of a writer’s life cancelling out precisely what it is that makes that life worth recalling.

On the other hand, Lamb House is far more than one more instance of the guilty pleasures of literary tourism. Lamb House cannot be subsumed into the paradoxical figure of “the Author” (Watson, 2020, p. 213), if for no other reason that this is a writers’ house in the plural. E.F. Benson, known for the light comedy of the Mapp and Lucia stories (1920-1939), and Rumer Godden, now best known as the author of Black Narcissus (1939), are almost equal contributors to Lamb House’s literary appeal. Benson and Gooden can be thought of as literary tourists, in fact. They came to a house that was not in “vacant possession,” in the resonantly spectral language of property law. Fred Benson reflected fulsomely on writing in the bulking shadow of the Master. As a family friend and aspirant author, it was “a great honour and something of an adventure to be asked to stay with Henry James in this house at Rye that he had lately bought,” and entering Rye’s “circle of enchantment” (Benson, 1940: 1). The “preordained decrees of fate” (Benson, 1940: 142) caught up with him twenty years later when he came to stay for good, transforming Rye into the “Tilling” of Mapp and Lucia. Benson wrote with the spirit of Henry James at his shoulder, recalling the Garden Room, “once resonant with the booming voice of Henry James and the clack of the responsive typist” (Benson, 1940, p. 142). Nor could Rumer Godden resist the metaphor of haunting in her 1989 autobiography, titling her chapter about her time in Lamb House, “Shades of Henry James.”

Lamb House is a direct source of inspiration to these writers. So we can also think of it as a writerly house. In the first novel that James produced after his relocation to Rye, The Awkward Age (1899), Lamb House becomes the home of Mr Longdon, the elderly American who rescues the vulnerable Nanda from the corrupting associations of English high society. Lamb House is Longdon’s “charming serious house” exactly, “old, square, red-roofed, well assured of its right to the place it took up in the world,” its “look of possession” enhanced by “the long confirmation of time,” where “Everything in the place is such good company” (James, 1987, p. 204, 197, 198). The house is fairy-enchanted: as Vanderbank, Nanda’s likeliest suitor, puts it: “face to face with this dear old house, in this jolly old nook, one is too contented to move, lest raising a finger even should break the spell” (James, 1987, p. 197). It is a “temple of peace” (James, 1987, p. 137), albeit poor Nanda is symbolically entombed, doomed to be “much more like the dead than like the living” (James, 1987, p. 31).

In a much sunnier mood, as “Mallards,” the house rented by one half of the forever feuding Mapp and Lucia, Lamb House is a place of charm and acid wit. Such was the popularity of the stories that literary tourists at one time came not for the Master but for the fictional Lucia: “Mallards, where Lucia lived, was a faithful delineation of Lamb House where I lived. Visitors to Rye quite often asked which was Lucia’s house, and which Miss Mapp’s” (Benson, 1940, p. 271). Less well known is the uncanny appearance of Lamb House in Benson’s ghost stories, driven by his lifelong interest in the supernatural. Lamb House appears at least twice, firstly in “Machaon” (1923), where a medium receives from her “control,” the eponymous ancient Greek physician, prescient impressions of the narrator’s house, the description of the garden annex being the clinching detail. And in “Roderick’s Story” (1923), the narrator offers his house to a dying friend, Roderick wanting to die in the room where his lost love breathed her last. Roderick’s memory of “a big garden-room, full of books, with a bow-window looking down the cobbled street” (Benson, 2012, p. 357) confirms a spiritual connection with the house that reaches beyond the grave.

Chasing ghosts is the business model of literary tourism, of course. In the “homes and haunts” tradition, the visitor becomes “a vicarious guest” (Booth, 2016, pp. 28-29) in the writer’s house, both hunting and haunting the shade of the author. But at Lamb House, the literary tourist is haunted as much by the house as by the writer or writers. Writers’ houses are surely more than “tools to stimulate one’s imagination” (Hendrix, 2008, p. 239). Following the lead of Henry James (“Mr Longdon had not made his house, he had simply lived it”: James, 1987, p. 204), we can venture that bricks and mortar impress themselves on writers as well as their characters and their readers. This is not merely the “imprinting” of lives upon domestic interiors – the old idea, familiar from ghost stories, that houses remember events, responsible for the clichéd association of writers’ houses with haunting, “the invisible pulsating within the visible” (see Watson, 2020, pp. 15-16). Moving from personification to full-blown prosopopoeia, we might instead conceive of the house as an active presence, a literary muse, and maybe more. For all houses have voices, as Virginia Woolf writes in her 1932 essay “Great Men’s Houses.” This is the thesis of Joan Aitken’s The Haunting of Lamb House (1991), where Lamb House “had not waited in passivity” for Henry James’s approach (Aitken, 2022, p. 117) but summoned him to Rye. Fred Benson’s tenure is similarly presented as affirming the power of the house to “invite” its residents, and specifically to select writers: “Evidently it likes writers; literary men” (Aiken, 2022, p. 179). Godden (2013, p. 1) is more straightforward still, though she had not (yet) been called to Rye: “The house, it seems, is more important than the characters. ‘In me you exist,’ says the house.”

If houses speak, Lamb House is much more than a writer’s house museum. It is an inspiration to writers, a literary muse, a hauntedly storied house.

How to cite this dictionary entry: Howell, P. (2026). The literary haunting of Lamb House. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Aiken, J. (2022). The haunting of Lamb House. Gateway.

Benson, E. F. (1940). Final edition: Informal autobiography. Longmans, Green & Co.

Booth, A. (2016). Homes and haunts: Touring writers’ shrines and countries. Oxford University Press.

Godden, R. ([1945] 2013). A fugue in time. Virago.

Harvey, J. (2007). Lessons of the Master: The Henry James novel. The Yearbook of English Studies, 37, 75-88. https://doi.org.10.1353/yes.2007.0010

Hendrix, H. (2008). Epilogue: the appeal of writers’ houses, in H. Hendrix (Ed.), Writers’ homes and the making of memory (pp. 235-243). Routledge.

Hyde, H. M. (1969). Henry James at home. Methuen.

James, H. (1987). The awkward age. Penguin.

Trubek, A. (2011). A skeptic’s guide to writers’ houses. University of Philadelphia Press.

Watson, N. J. (2020). The author’s effects: On writers’ house museums. Oxford University Press.