By Cat Barbour ’24
Books Editor
Photo of author Emily Arsenault ‘98, courtesy of Rose Grant.
Content warning: this article mentions suicide.
“This is what it means to be a ghost. To watch all the other girls live — laugh, talk, sleep, eat, dance, study, scream — while you flicker and fade into the shadows,” an unnamed narrator declares, opening “When All the Girls Are Sleeping,” published July 13, 2021, the latest novel by Mount Holyoke alumna Emily Arsenault ’98. Arsenault was greatly inspired by Mount Holyoke College in writing this book. While the story may revolve around teenaged characters, the setting is heavily influenced by the school’s mythology and campus.
“When All the Girls Are Sleeping” takes readers to Windham-Farnswood Academy, a high school divided into two campuses: the girl’s only Windham and the co-ed Farnswood. Haley just wants to make it through her senior year in one piece, but as the anniversary of her ex-friend Taylor’s death comes around the corner, questions once again arise about whether or not her death was a suicide. After an ominous video makes Haley believe Taylor was murdered, Haley begins an investigation of her own, starting with the campus’ legend of the Winter Girl. Her search takes her from the archives of Windham, to a secret Facebook group of alums who have reported being haunted and the door of a paranormal investigator. What started as one girl’s untimely death is unveiled to be so much more.
The Winter Girl, the ghost who is said to have haunted the fictitious Dearborn residence hall for over a century, is seen wearing either a white or black nightgown. She has melancholically roamed the fourth floor ever since her mysterious and early death, causing extreme stress to a handful of Dearborn residents.
If this sounds similar to a few of Mount Holyoke’s ghost stories, it should.
Taylor’s empty and locked room on the fourth floor after her death is inspired by the fourth floor room in Wilder that remains locked due to the room’s supposed haunting. Sarah Dearborn’s portrait, a figure of unspecified importance to the school, and its mysterious destruction mirrors the fate of Mary Mandelle’s portrait. Mandelle is the namesake of the North and South Mandelle Hall after donating $500,000 in 1930. The Winter Girl’s Victorian nightgown was inspired by a story that circulated in Brigham during Arsenault’s first year, of a girl wearing a white nightgown, pacing in the basement and asking, “Have you seen my father?”
“Ghost stories were a big part of my experience as a very new student,” Arsenault said. “I was in Pearsons [Hall first year]; I thought it was a creepy place. I mean, I liked it. I just got this creepy feeling from it … that kind of stuck in my mind as one of my very early experiences of the campus.” Arsenault also folds into the narrative other Mount Holyoke-esque imagery: the old, stately buildings looking slightly ominous in the morning fog, squirrels who are just a little too used to people for their own good and theology texts that lurk in a forgotten corner of the fourth floor of the library.
Unavoidably, COVID-19 had an impact on the writing process of this novel. During the spring of 2020, Arsenault recounted, “it felt like what I [was] doing [wa]sn’t that important. I’d rather watch the news and, I don’t know, make beans for my family.” However, by summer, the work became a welcome escape. “I felt very lucky that I had something started, that I had a pretty good draft that I could play with rather than starting something new. I love revising.”
Arsenault had always wanted to be an author. Her first book came out in 2009 after she spent a few years as a high school English teacher. It was a winding road to that first published work. “You know, I wrote that one book that didn’t get published,” she said. “For a while, I just kept revising it, and it took having a new idea and pursuing that instead.” Still, she expressed that these first attempts were an important experience as a young writer. “I think that is a really difficult step to take as a writer sometimes is to realize this one project that I worked hard on probably isn’t going to be published and to force yourself to step into a new project and have a new page one.”
After having several new ideas and page ones, “When All the Girls are Sleeping” is Arsenault’s ninth book and her second YA novel.
Emily Arsenault will be having a masked and outdoor book talk sponsored by The Odyssey Bookshop at Pearsons Hall on Oct. 28 at 7 p.m.