The Ghosts of Versailles by Lucille IREMONGER
IREMONGER, Lucille. The Ghosts of Versailles. Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain and Their Adventure: A Critical Study. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.
First edition. 313 pp; b/w photos. 8vo, original cloth; partial browning to endpapers. Very good in dust jacket (slight edge-wear; not price-clipped). A very attractive copy.
On a visit to Versailles in the summer of 1901, Charlotte Moberly (1846–1937), the first principal of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924), the school’s vice-principal, shared a strange experience that gave rise to one of the best-known of all ghost stories, when they saw what they later surmised to be the ghost of Marie Antoinette. In 1911, in an effort to “help the science of the future”, Moberly and Jourdain published An Adventure, their account of how on their visit to the Petit Trianon they both experienced the landscape and buildings as they had been in late 18th-century and encountered the ghosts of Marie Antoinette and members of her court.
The book created a sensation, and it remained in print for most of the 20th century, attracting a number of critical works, including the present book, which promises to be a ‘as gripping as a detective story and will captivate and interest not only of those who have read An Adventure, but of all who enjoy a clever and penetrating study of an intricate subject that has a fascinating human aspect as well as broader philosophical implications.’ (from the blurb)
A former student of Moberly and Jourdain at St Hugh’s, Iremonger takes a skeptical view of the incident, revealing that the two women were lesbian lovers, and the incident was a follie a deux.