Betrayal between women is the backstory to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), considered by many the best ghost story of the twentieth century. The house’s spinster mistress, we learn, “took a girl from the village to live from her, as a kind of companion,” but died neglected while the girl was dallying in the garden with a man. Inheriting the house brought the girl no happiness because of accusations that that she had tricked her doting benefactor, so she killed herself. Hill House is already throbbing with lesbian unhappiness, then, by the time an investigator brings along a group of psychic sensitives. It is no surprise that the ensuing psychodrama focuses on the turbulent relationship of two of the sensitives, timid Eleanor and cocky Theo (Theodora).Theo has arrived fresh from a row with the “flatmate” who ripped up “the volume of Alfred de Musset” Theo gave her for her birthday–no doubt a wink-wink reference to the murderous tribade in Musset’s Gamiani (1833). One of the book’s scariest moments comes when Eleanor and Theo are gripping each other’s hands in the dark, listening to ghosts babble outside the door–but when the lights come back on, Eleanor realizes she is alone. “Good God–whose hand was I holding?” Desire and revulsion, the live and the dead, touch here to produce a delicious shudder; what if the true monster is not outside but right beside you, pretending to be your friend?