Still, throughout Godden’s tenancy, the ghostly traces of James’s Lamb House seemed to reemerge from within the rooms in which she lived and worked, peeking out from beneath the veneer of the present. The house wasn’t kept in a time-capsule stasis after James’s death-by Godden’s time, many of his old possessions had been sold at auction, to be returned piecemeal by bibliophile donors in the years to come. Besides that, they shepherded special tours-periodic groups of Jamesian scholars and literary pilgrims-around the Master’s old stomping grounds. In exchange for the right to lounge in the Master’s bedroom, they had to open the designated Henry James room and the garden to visitors twice a week. When they agreed to lease Lamb House from the National Trust, Godden and her husband signed on as more than a dead man’s spiritual tenants: they were stewards of his memory, perpetual guests in his home. They even lived their lives around the schedule imposed by the long-dead “ Master ,” as Godden and his other fans called him.

When the aging couple moved in, they took over as the tenants of Lamb House, the way you might say “the phantom of the opera” or “the hunchback of Notre Dame.” Godden and her James might enjoy the place-her, writing in Henry’s Green Study him, convalescing outside (contrary to the doctors’ pronouncements, he was motoring around the continent within a year)-but they were enclosed by Henry’s pale oak panels, warmed by Henry’s marbled hearths. It had once belonged to Henry James.īy the time Godden arrived in 1968, the great Anglo-American novelist had been dead for over half a century, but the house was still very much his. Godden rented Lamb House, an elegant, brick-faced Georgian manse that came equipped with a plush rose garden.

There, cobbled walkways crisscrossed narrow greens, and no one even needed a car. In response, Godden moved her family to the sleepy, saltwater town of Rye, some eight miles southeast of Little Doucegrove. Her husband, the retired civil servant James Haynes-Dixon, suffered a breakdown when the flames engulfed their home-doctors warned them that he’d never plant another rosebush or take another drive. According to Godden’s 1989 autobiography, A House With Four Rooms, the flames spared nothing but walls and drainpipes, leaving behind the ashes of a freshly planted rose garden.Īlready in her sixties, the Sussex-born writer found herself having to start over. Little Doucegrove, a converted farmhouse ringed by a vast expanse of woodland, caught fire when a pan of oil was left on the stove. When Rumer Godden moved to Rye, it was because her house had burned down.

Ghost stories by henry james