The Old Ladies was published by Macmillan in 1924, and it is Walpole’s most tightly constructed novel — a psychological thriller compressed into a single house and a handful of weeks. Three elderly women live in the upper rooms of a decaying house in Polchester: Mrs. Doolittle Amorest (gentle, poor, frightened), Mrs. Doolittle Payne (vigorous, predatory, hungry for possession), and Agatha Brand (rich, dying, and the owner of a piece of amber that Mrs. Payne covets with an intensity that becomes murderous).
The novel’s power lies in its claustrophobia and its psychological acuity. Mrs. Payne is not evil in any conventional sense — she is simply a personality of overwhelming force, a woman whose desire for possession extends beyond objects to people, and whose will can crush a weaker person as casually as a hand crushes an insect. Mrs. Amorest, trapped in the house with her, feels the pressure of that will bearing down on her and can neither escape nor resist.
Walpole handles the escalation with the precision of a thriller writer: each encounter between the women ratchets the tension higher, each small victory for Mrs. Payne makes the final catastrophe more inevitable. The novel was successfully adapted for the stage by Rodney Ackland in 1935, with Edith Evans as Mrs. Payne — a casting that emphasizes the character’s terrifying combination of charm and menace.
Collecting The Old Ladies
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1924): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Without jacket: $8–$20