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:''Disambiguation: "The Little Stranger" is also the title of one of the Color Classics series produced March 13, 1936 in three-strip Technicolor by Fleischer Studios.'' ''The Little Stranger'' is a 2009 gothic novel written by Sarah Waters. It is a ghost story set in a dilapidated mansion in Warwickshire, England in the 1940s. Departing from her earlier themes of lesbian and gay fiction, Waters' fifth novel features a male narrator, a country doctor who makes friends with an old gentry family of declining fortunes who own a very old estate that is crumbling around them. The stress of reconciling the state of their finances with the familial responsibility of keeping the estate coincides with perplexing events which may or may not be of supernatural origin, culminating in tragedy. Reviewers note that the themes in ''The Little Stranger'' are alternately reflections of evil and the social upheaval of the class system in postwar Britain. Waters stated that she did not set out to write a ghost story, but began her writing with an exploration of the rise of socialism in the United Kingdom and how the fading gentry dealt with losing their legacies. A mix of influences is evident to reviewers: Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Wilkie Collins, and Edgar Allan Poe. The novel was mostly well received by critics as Waters' strengths are exhibited in setting of mood and pacing of the story. It is Waters' third novel to be short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.〔(The Little Stranger ), Man Booker Prize website. Retrieved on 15 September 2009.〕 ==Background== Waters' writing was well-received upon the publication of her first novel, ''Tipping the Velvet'', a story set in Victorian London. She began writing in her early 30s while completing a dissertation in English literature about gay and lesbian fiction from the 1870s onward. Not enjoying the expository, she attempted fiction and finding that she liked it, followed ''Tipping the Velvet'' with ''Affinity'', another Victorian-set novel with gothic themes, and ''Fingersmith'', also Victorian yet more a Dickensian crime drama. All three have significant lesbian themes and characters; Waters often labels them as "Victorian lesbo romps".〔Allemang, John (18 May 2009). "Ghost writer: She's known for writing Victorian-era lesbian sex romps, but best-selling author Sarah Waters haunts a new genre in her latest novel, ''The Little Stranger''", ''The Globe and Mail'' (Canada) p. R1.〕 To avoid being pigeonholed as a niche writer, however (asking "Why, oh why, did I ever allow the phrase 'lesbo Victorian romp' to cross my lips?"〔), she followed these with ''The Night Watch'', which also has gay and lesbian characters, but is set in the 1940s.〔"Sarah Waters", ''(Contemporary Authors Online )'', Gale, 2009. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center.〕 For ''The Little Stranger'', Waters diverted from overt lesbian themes, but incorporated other elements from previous books. A character in ''Affinity'' talks to spirits of the dead; the setting of ''Fingersmith'' is a large country estate inhabited by a small family and house staff; ''The Night Watch'' is set in post-WWII Britain with characters who are somewhat at a loss with what to do following the upheaval of war. Barry Didock in ''The Herald'' considers ''The Night Watch'' a companion piece to ''The Little Stranger''.〔Didock, Barry (30 May 2009). "Capturing the spirit of the age: A haunting novel evokes the claustrophobia of postwar Britain", ''The Herald'' (Glasgow), p. 9.〕 Waters states that the change from a conservative to socialist society was her true impetus for writing ''The Little Stranger'': "I didn't set out to write a haunted house novel. I wanted to write about what happened to class in that post-war setting. It was a time of turmoil in exciting ways. Working class people had come out of the war with higher expectations. They had voted in the Labour government. They want change.... So it was a culture in a state of change. But obviously for some people it was a change for the worse."〔Wagner, Vit (16 May 2009). "Post-war Britain ripe for ghost stories; U.K. author moves forward in time with latest historical novel", ''The Toronto Star'', p. E06.〕 She set out, in actuality, to rewrite a version of ''The Franchise Affair'' by Josephine Tey, a courtroom thriller about a middle-class family accused of kidnapping a young girl.〔McCrum, Robert (10 May 2009). "What Lies Beneath: Ghosts, Gothic horror, lesbians, poltergeists, female hysteria... There are hidden depths to Sarah Waters...", ''The Observer'' (England), p. 20.〕 Waters is well known for the immense amount of research she completes for her novels. Researching for ''The Night Watch'' gave her background that she used in ''The Little Stranger'', leading her to call 1947 "a miserable year"; much of her time preparing for this novel was spent in Warwickshire estate homes and local newspaper archives.〔 She told ''The Globe and Mail'' I read a lot of novels from the period. And diaries were a wonderful resource. I also watched films from that period and went to museums and archives to look at ephemera from the period. I like to try to capture the idiom and slang... A writer at that time wouldn't have used profanity in a respectable novel. But if you look at diaries or letters, people were swearing all the time, in very modern-sounding ways. One of the excitements about writing about the past from the present is that you can put in a lot of the details that the mainstream novelists of the time couldn't because of the conventions of the time.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Little Stranger」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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