The Autumn People

Romilly Williams had always felt a strong connection to her maternal grandmother, and through her, to her great-grandmother Romilly Graham, for whom she had been named. But it wasn't until her fifteenth summer, when she went to spend her holiday on the northern Scottish island of Karasay, long-time summer retreat of the Graham family, that Romilly realized just how deep that connection was. The first Romilly, known as Millie, had also come to stay at Karasay House as a young woman, arriving in the summer of 1901. Although she was warmly embraced by the younger Grahams, and by neighbor Jocelyn Parsons, with whom she fell in love, Millie found herself threatened and dominated by the malignant Rodger - eldest son of the Graham family, and show more a practitioner of black magic. Despite the sudden disappearance of Rodger, Millie continued to feel herself bound in some ineffable way to him, and her romance with Jocelyn did not endure.

The second Romilly knew nothing of this when she came to stay at Karasay House with her Gran and Cousin Derwent. Content to roam the island and spend a quiet holiday, Romilly quickly discovered that a malevolent presence - unsuspected by those around her - was haunting the house, manifesting itself as a terrible coldness, and then as the image of a dark and handsome young man. Like her predecessor, Romilly took refuge at Tallows, the summer house of the Parsons family, slipping into a sort of ghostly limbo-land, where she encountered the Autumn People - the ghosts of those long-ago Parsons and Grahams from the summer of 1901. When she eventually stumbled upon Rodger's secret lair, she set in motion a series of events that freed Karasay House from Rodger's ghost...

Ruth M. Arthur delivers another compelling story, exploring the links between the past, present and future, and the ways in which patterns formed in one generation may be completed in the next. She revisits another of her great themes - the exorcising of an unquiet presence and/or ghost by a descendant (also seen in the characters of Perdita and Alys in The Saracen Lamp). This novel is in many ways counter-cultural for the time of its publication (1973), in that it treats Romilly's longing for order and fondness for patterns as natural, and depicts her less as a rebel against the past than a continuation of it.

Illustrated by Margery Gill. show less

Romilly, a 15-year-old girl from Wales, travels to Karasay island, off the coast of Scotland with her grandma. They travel to the family home, where for generations her family has spent their summers. She discovers an old mystery and runs into an evil presence that has ties to her great-grandmother, Millie, for whom she is named, as well as meeting the benevolent but ghostly autumn people.

One thing I have always liked about Ruth M Arthur's books is that when she writes of the supernatural, it truly is the supernatural. She doesn't end the book by trying to come to some logical or rational explanation of the event that renders it tame and safe. In her books evil exists, ghosts are ghosts, and the struggles that her characters have end show more up having real consequences. I like that she doesn't pull her punches and treats young adult readers as worthy of real conflict.

This book was totally engaging and I found the dreamy, artistic Romilly likable and entertaining. Her encounter with evil, and her struggle with it ended up with her gaining more self-knowledge and self-confidence, and marked her entry into the adult world. I loved this book and finished the 166 pages all too soon. show less

What Romilly Williams doesn't know -- but the reader, through a lengthy flashback, does -- is that she's fated to live out the spell placed on her great grandmother and namesake by handsome, evil Rodger Graham before his sudden disappearance.
On her summer vacation on the Scottish island of Karasay, Romilly falls in love with the ghost of the earlier Romilly's beau Jocelyn Parsons and is haunted by the long-dead Rodger, until she finds his skeleton in the cave where he practiced black magic and completes the exorcism with the help of eccentric old Miss Minnie.

I'm beginning to think that I only truly love 3 or 4 of Arthur's books, and the residual glow has wrapped around the others in hindsight. This story of Romilly, granddaughter of Romilly known as Millie, can only be described as slight. There's just not a lot of flesh for these oh so spooky bones. The flashbacks are powerful but I found the evil curiously unexplored. Perhaps that gives it some power- the reader can fill out the ugliness, I suppose, but for me, reading it at this terrible remove from adolescence, I simply couldn't be bothered to do so.

I'm not trying to damn this book with faint praise- not at all. It's simply slighter than I remembered, less weighty. It's still a ripping good yarn.

The book that introduced me to William Morris when I was 8 and therefore will ever have a place in my heart.