A Phantom Lover

Vernon Lee's A Phantom Lover begins as a painter's uneasy confession, recalling the strange, unforgettable Alice Oke of Okehurst and the unfinished portrait that drew him into her world. Summoned to paint Mr. and Mrs. Oke after his reputation has been attacked, he travels in pouring rain through a bleak Kentish landscape, expecting a dull country stay and instead entering a house heavy with history, silence, and unease. Okehurst proves to be a vast Jacobean manor, its portraits, dim halls, and cluttered rooms creating an atmosphere both beautiful and oppressive. Mr. Oke is shy, strained, and subdued, while Mrs. Oke emerges as a woman of extraordinary, almost unearthly beauty—tall, slender, self-contained, and impossible to describe fully in ordinary terms. The painter becomes increasingly absorbed by her mystery, not as a lover but as a subject to be understood and painted. His fascination deepens when he notices her deliberate resemblance to an ancestor, the seventeenth-century Alice Oke, whose legend of passion, violence, and haunting presence still shadows the house. As Mrs. Oke invokes that story with dreamy certainty, the novel's gothic tension sharpens into a study of obsession, memory, and the unsettling power of the past. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.