👀 First impressions:
I will be completely upfront: I went into The Ladie Upstairs with a healthy dose of scepticism. Jessie Elland is best known as an actress from the North East of England, famous for playing Chloe Harris in Emmerdale, and celebrity novels do not always land well. But Elland has been open about her literary influences, citing Shirley Jackson, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Angela Carter among her inspirations, and that reading list alone told me she was not aiming for something safe or commercial. She was swinging for something strange. And strange is exactly what she delivered.
The novel follows Ann, a scullery maid toiling away in the dank kitchens of a grand country house called Ropner Hall. Ann loathes her life downstairs. She despises the other servants, finds the men repulsive, and is consumed by a burning desire to become a lady’s maid. When a chance encounter with Lady Charlotte, the mysterious woman who lives above stairs, opens the door to that opportunity, Ann is convinced she has finally clawed her way out of hell. But the higher she climbs in Ropner Hall, the more disturbing things become. The book has been described as femgore, a subgenre that channels horror through the lens of female rage, bodily disgust, and desire. That label fits, but it only tells part of the story. This is also a fever dream about obsession, class, isolation, and the terrifying gap between who we believe ourselves to be and what we actually are.
✅ What I Liked:
The writing. I have to start there because Elland’s prose is the beating, bloody heart of this novel. She writes with a sensory intensity that is almost overwhelming. You can smell the damp stone of the kitchens, feel the grime under Ann’s fingernails, taste the foul food the servants choke down. The descriptions of Ropner Hall itself are extraordinary. The house is not just a setting. It is practically a character, a living thing with eyes and moods and a suffocating gravitational pull. There are echoes of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House in the way the building seems to watch and breathe and trap, and Elland earns that comparison honestly.
Ann is a brilliantly unsettling narrator. She is obsessive, unreliable, seething with contempt for everyone around her, and utterly convinced of her own superiority. Her disgust is relentless. She is revolted by the bodies and habits of her fellow servants, by the men who leer and grab, by the filth and crudeness of life below stairs. But she is also deeply fixated on Lady Charlotte in a way that blurs the line between admiration, desire, and something far more unhinged. That tension keeps you gripped because you never quite trust what Ann is telling you, and as the story progresses, the ground shifts beneath your feet in ways that are genuinely unsettling.
I also loved the atmosphere Elland builds. The novel exists in an intentionally unspecified historical period, which gives the whole thing a timeless, dreamlike quality. You feel trapped inside Ropner Hall the same way Ann does, cut off from the outside world, unsure of how you got there or how to leave. That claustrophobia is relentless and effective. When the narrative starts to unravel in the second half and Ann’s grip on reality loosens, the book becomes genuinely difficult to put down. There is a slow burn quality to the horror here that rewards patience.
❎ What I didn’t Like:
This is a polarising book, and I can understand why. The first half is slow. Elland takes her time establishing Ann’s world and her seething inner life, and while I appreciate the deliberate pacing, there were stretches where I felt the story was circling rather than progressing. The plot is thin by conventional standards. This is far more a novel of voice and atmosphere than it is a tightly plotted narrative, and if you go in expecting twists and revelations at a steady clip, you may find yourself frustrated.
The prose style, while stunning in places, can also tip into excess. There are moments where the writing feels like it is trying too hard to be literary, where the metaphorical language becomes so thick that it obscures what is actually happening in the scene. A few readers have compared this to wading through beautiful mud, and I think that is fair. When Elland relaxes into her natural voice, the sentences sing. When she pushes too hard, they can become opaque.
I also think the secondary characters suffer from the intensity of Ann’s perspective. Because Ann views everyone around her with such contempt, the other servants and even Lady Charlotte to some extent can feel more like projections of Ann’s psychology than fully realised people. That is clearly an intentional choice, and it serves the unreliable narrator device well, but it does mean the emotional stakes feel somewhat limited. It is hard to care about what happens to people when the narrator herself barely sees them as human.
Finally, there has been some discussion around the marketing of this book, particularly regarding sapphic romance elements that some readers felt were overpromised. There is desire and obsession between women here, absolutely, but calling this a sapphic romance would be misleading. It is much darker and more ambiguous than that framing suggests, and I would encourage readers to go in expecting gothic horror with queer undertones rather than a love story.
📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you love gothic fiction that makes you feel uneasy in your own skin, this is for you. Fans of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and the darker end of Sarah Waters will find a lot to admire here. If you enjoyed the feral, class-obsessed energy of the film Saltburn, this book scratches a very similar itch. It has also been compared to Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, and if you loved that unhinged energy, The Ladie Upstairs belongs on your radar.
This is a brilliant pick for readers who prioritise voice and atmosphere over plot, who enjoy unreliable narrators, and who are not squeamish about visceral, body-horror-adjacent imagery. It is also a strong choice for anyone interested in the femgore subgenre, which centres female rage and bodily experience within horror and literary fiction. If you like your gothic fiction weird, unsettling, and dripping with contempt, Jessie Elland has written your next favourite book.
I would add a content warning, though. The novel includes scenes of sexual violence and some readers have noted descriptions that could be uncomfortable regarding bodies and disgust. Go in prepared.
💭 Final Thoughts:
The Ladie Upstairs is a genuinely bold debut. Jessie Elland has written something strange, ambitious, and completely her own, and that alone deserves respect. The prose is frequently beautiful in the most grotesque possible way, the atmosphere is suffocating, and Ann is one of the most memorably unpleasant narrators I have encountered in a long time. This is not a book that wants to be liked. It wants to get under your skin, and it succeeds.
It is not without its flaws. The pacing in the first half asks for patience, the density of the writing occasionally works against clarity, and the thin characterisation of everyone who is not Ann can make the world of the novel feel narrow. But the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses, and when this book works, it really works. Elland has announced herself as a writer with a distinctive, fearless voice, and I will absolutely be picking up whatever she writes next. For a debut from someone best known for a soap opera, this is a remarkably assured and literary piece of work that should silence any doubters.
🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE
Final Rating ★★★★★ –
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