Jane-Emily

Jane-Emily is a ghost story by the American writer Patricia Clapp, published in 1969 and written for younger readers.

Jane is nine years old and an orphan, and the summer she spends at her grandmother's house in Massachusetts with her young aunt Louisa is supposed to be a holiday. The house is large and old, and it holds the memory of Emily, a child who died before her thirteenth birthday and who was, by every account the family gives, a selfish and cruel girl. What Jane finds in the garden is a silver reflecting ball, and the face she sees in it belongs to somebody else, which is the beginning of a haunting that becomes more personal as the weeks go on. The house and the reflecting ball are the whole of the book's machinery, and its horror is domestic rather than spectacular. Clapp wrote the story as a quiet novel about a child and a house, and it has stayed in print as one of the standard ghost stories for younger readers.