Room Beneath the Stairs

Room Beneath the Stairs is a gothic romance by Jennifer Wilde, published in 1975 and set on an island off the Cornish coast.

Carolyn Dawson first visited Greycliff as a child, when the island and its great house belonged to the wealthy Brandon family, and she met Grey Brandon there and never quite forgot him. He does not remember her. Years later he asks her to marry him and to become mistress of Greycliff Manor, which is a magnificent house and an eerie one, and she accepts. Once installed she finds that the household does not want her: Grey's aunt is coldly contemptuous, his brother is taciturn and unwelcoming, and the staff are guarded in ways that are hard to interpret. Carolyn becomes convinced that something is being kept from her, and the novel follows her attempts to understand the house, its history and her husband, who is charming, secretive and not forthcoming. The title refers to a room she has been told not to enter.

Wilde wrote gothic romances in which a young woman marries into a family with a secret, and this one keeps its menace inside the house rather than outside it.