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‘The House of Dreams’ was first published in the Sovereign Magazine in January 1926. The story is a revised version of ‘The House of Beauty’, which Christie wrote some time before the First World War and identified in her autobiography as being ‘the first thing I ever wrote that showed any sign of promise’. Whereas the original story was obscure and excessively morbid in tone, ‘The House of Dreams’ comes close to the threatening ghost stories of the Edwardian age, and especially those of E. F. Benson. It is a great deal clearer and less introspective than the original which Christie heavily revised for publication: to develop the characters of the two women she toned down the otherworldliness of Allegra and built up Maisie’s rôle. A similar theme is explored in ‘The Call of Wings’, another early story, collected in The Hound of Death (1933).

In 1938, Christie reflected on ‘The House of Beauty’, recalling that, while she had found ‘the imagining of it pleasant and the writing of it down extremely tedious’, the seed had been sown—‘The pastime grew on me. When I had a blank day—nothing much to do—I would think out a story. They always had sad endings and sometimes very lofty moral sentiments.’ An important spur in these early years was a neighbour on Dartmoor, Eden Phillpotts, a celebrated novelist and a close friend of the family, who advised Christie—Agatha Miller as she was then—on her stories and recommended writers whose style and vocabulary were to provide added inspiration. In later years, when her own fame had long since eclipsed his, Christie described how Phillpotts had provided the tact and sympathy so necessary to sustain the confidence of a young writer—‘I marvel at the understanding with which he doled out only encouragement and refrained from criticism.’ On Phillpotts’ death in 1960, she wrote, ‘For his kindness to me as a young girl just beginning to write, I can never be sufficiently grateful.’