The Anatomy of Ghosts

Name: The Anatomy of Ghosts
Rating: 4.3 (962 reviews)

by Andrew Taylor

First published 2010

Amazon

4.3(962)

Cambridge, 1786. Bookseller John Holdsworth has lost his son, wife and business, and has written a rational attack on belief in ghosts. Lady Anne Oldershaw hires him to investigate her son Frank, a student at Jerusalem College who has been confined after claiming to see the spirit of a dead woman.

Holdsworth enters a closed academic world governed by privilege, debt and secret clubs. A student’s unexplained death and the college’s determination to avoid scandal force him to test his scepticism against manipulation, grief and the possibility that the supposed haunting conceals a deliberate crime.

The university setting gives Holdsworth’s scepticism a social as well as intellectual target. Colleges protect their reputations through closed networks of fellows, patrons and wealthy students, while Enlightenment arguments about reason do not automatically displace older beliefs about spirits and providence. The supposed haunting therefore becomes a test of how easily privilege can exploit both superstition and rational respectability.