The Haunted Woman

Engaged to a decent but unexceptional man, Isbel Lomont leads an empty life, moving with her aunt from hotel to hotel. She is perverse and prickly with untapped resources of character and sensibility. They explore by chance a strange house and there Isbel meets Judge, its owner; a profoundly disturbing relationship develops and it is from this that the drama unfolds. The conventional code of manners and morality on the surface of this book contrasts dramatically with its daring insight and intuition almost as if it had been written by two men, just as two woman inhabit Isbel.

David Lindsay was born the youngest of three children in Blackheath, of a Scottish father and an English mother. Brought up in London and with relatives in Jedburgh, Lindsay had to abandon his hopes of taking up a scholarship at university when his father deserted the family. Instead, Lindsay pursued a successful career as an insurance broker for twenty years, though he always nursed hopes of becoming a writer. During the First World War, Lindsay married his wife, eighteen years his junior, and subsequently resigned his city career and moved to Cornwall to fulfil his ambitions as a full-time novelist. Over the next twenty years, Lindsay produced five books and left two unpublished. His first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), has become a classic of imaginative fiction. The Haunted Woman, like Lindsay's subsequent books, carried a disturbing metaphysical vision into the (apparently) conventional world of middle-class society. Eventually Lindsay became a recluse, and died in 1945 from an abscess of the jaw for which he refused medical treatment.