Ensor House

Ensor House is the central setting for the novel’s events, serving both as a physical space and a symbolic stage on which the darkly comic satire of Victorian culture is enacted. Architecturally, it is a sprawling country house in the fictional Yorkshire village of Grim Wolds, complete with hidden garrets, extensive grounds, stables, and multiple bedrooms for staff and guests. Its size and complexity allow for a constant interplay of concealment and revelation, with Winifred able to move unseen, spy on residents, and hide bodies, while the upper-class characters remain oblivious. The house embodies the hierarchies and compartmentalization of Victorian society: family, guests, and servants occupy strictly delineated spaces, but these boundaries are repeatedly transgressed by Winifred, generating dramatic and comic tension. The novel situates Ensor House within a recognizable Victorian tradition, drawing on the country-house settings of works by Dickens and Brontë, while subverting these...