Jane-Emily (Patricia Clapp)

[maplemood]

Emily Canfield always got whatever she wanted. When she wanted the moon, her father bought her a reflecting globe and installed it in the family's garden. When she wanted her parents, her father insisted that he and his wife cut their trip to New York short and come home to be with Emily. When Emily wanted to marry her childhood best friend, she wrote up a contract and forced the poor kid to sign it in blood. And when that best friend had had enough of her, Emily drenched herself in water, opened up her bedroom window, and sat until the freezing water and winter weather gave her pneumonia, and she died. 

Years later, Emily's orphaned niece, Jane, and Jane's aunt, Louisa, come to spend the summer at the Canfield's house. Emily's mother Lydia is the only original Canfield still alive; her husband died soon after Emily and her son, Jane's father, was killed in a freak buggy accident. But another presence in the house fixes on Jane, and on moonless nights the old globe in the garden starts to glow...

A short, fun Gothic that seems to have always been marketed for kids, which is interesting since the narrator (Louisa) is eighteen, the book's true main character (Lydia) is "elderly" and "awe-inspiring" (So...fifties? Sixties?), and if I had to sum Jane-Emily up in one sentence it would be "Some kids just suck."

To be fair, "Some kids just suck" is a common theme in children's literature, but I've racked my brain and I cannot remember a single kid character quite as poisonous as Emily. She never appears, either in the flesh or flashbacks; Louisa picks up her story in bits and pieces from Lydia and Emily's childhood friend, Adam Frost, and from Jane's increasingly creepy "Emily-incidents." But Emily's presence is all over the house, from the dark, stuffy attic where her dolls are packed away (including one whose wax face she melted off) to the garden, where her reflecting ball becomes a nexus of all the creepiness. 

Emily also had an especially sinister relationship with her father, who "adored' her more than his own wife. Jane-Emily's final confrontation comes down to Lydia finally standing up to her daughter, something she was never able to do during Emily's life. 

I remember dipping in and out of a couple other Patricia Clapp books as a kid, including Witch's Children, which is historical fiction but, if I'm remembering right, shares some of the same Gothic spookiness as Jane-Emily. Based on how much I enjoyed this one--it didn't scare me the way it probably would have if I'd read it back then, but I ate up the whole thing in just one day--maybe it's time for a reread. 

Comments

[rachelmanija]

This sounds really interesting and I never heard of the author before.

[maplemood]

I'd forgotten all about her until I saw this book in a list of ghost stories published in the 60s, and then it all came rushing back! I think most (or all) of her other books were straight historical fiction--Witch's Children is set during the Salem Witch Trials and I remember she had a book about a Pilgrim girl, too.