Ghosts of the Vanished 
 First things first: Aislinn Hunter can write. One of the characters in her novel, a neglected Victorian wife, decides to devote a day to compiling what she calls a catalogue of touch. 
 In the end, Charlotte wrote, the catalogue was a disappointment. She'd noted the unexpected warmth of the keys taken from the maid, the cool brass of the library doorknob, the viscous quality of the honey clumped by Thomas into his younger brother's hair after a row at lunch. There was the constant swish of her skirts against her stockings, the side of her hand inching across a letter to her mother, the repeated smoothing of the raw silk of her dress. And then, almost miraculously, the bell of a purple foxglove lifted from where it had fallen to the carpet, her finger slipping gently into the satin of its cup.If she calls that a disappointment, what more can she have been expecting? It is an amazing diversity of sensations, set down simply but precisely, with no attempt at the exotic but speaking volumes about the everyday life of a lady of her period and class. 
 Or again, here is the principal character, Jane Standen, recalling a memory as she goes up the steps to the London museum where she works: 
 Once she saw a boy of nine or ten standing on the steps and nervously glancing around, his hands twisting the straps of his backpack. When his mother came out and found him she went to hug him, but he pushed her away, wanting, Jane imagined, to have outgrown her concerns, or ashamed of his own.Again, a clear image well described. But what makes the passage special is the stabbing acuteness of Jane's observation at the end. Oh yes, Hunter certainly can write. 
 I wanted to get these in as an ante, so to speak, because there is so much in this marvelous novel that I did not want to get lost in concentrating, as I feel I have to, on only one aspect of it. This will probably be the crucial element for many readers: the degree to which it is a ghost story, or some kind of fantasy. 
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 Apparently, Aislinn Hunter, a Canadian writer and poet, spent a year or more in England working on a PhD topic about private museums in the Victorian era. You can imagine her looking into dusty archives and forgotten artifacts. It would surely be boring work until something strikes her: something so unusual or exquisite in itself, perhaps, that it suggests a story; or an unexpected connection between a name mentioned in one place and a yellowing photograph found at another. Suddenly, these are not merely names and dates, but real people who had real lives, loves, hopes, and fears. She cannot see them clearly as yet, perhaps, but they exist as potent possibilities. She has their scent in her nostrils. 
 Hunter's novel, The World Before Us, reflects all three elements of her real-life experience: the researcher, her research, and these shadowy figures. There is Jane Standen, thirty-four, working as an archivist in a private museum in London, preserved as a testament to its founder, a Victorian collector of curiosities from around the world. There is the research work that she is doing, tangentially connected to the museum, but really for her own interest: a study of what may have happened in the summer of 1877 when a group of two men and a girl absconded from the "Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics" in the Yorkshire Dales; the men turned up at the woodland home of a local botanist (and eventual donor to the museum) many hours later; the girl was never seen again. Hence Jane's obsessive interest. For when she was fifteen, she lost sight of a small girl that she herself was supposed to have been minding on an excursion to those same woods, and she too was never seen again. And then there are the other unseen beings: the spirits of the long-dead uncovered by Jane in her research, but whom she cannot see clearly as yet. 
 Novels that link two periods a century or more apart have been fairly common since A. S. Byatt's Possession. There has been at least one novel about 19th-century mental care: 
 The Quickening Maze 
 by Adam Foulds, which was probably inspired by the same incident involving Lord Tennyson that Hunter notes as a source of her own novel. I found the research side of Hunter's book absolutely fascinating, the way that a complex web of human interaction may be spun partly from fact and partly surmise. But what makes this unique is the presence of the cloud of ghostly witnesses, who serve almost as the principal narrators. They have, at first, no names, because they are still trying to recover their identities. "This, after all, is what we have been after--bits and pieces of stories we've lived, images that sail back to us as well enter a room." Hence the way they congregate around Jane in the museum, as she seems on the verge of restoring to them at least part of the identity they have lost. I'll give one more longish quotation, partly to define these ghostly characters, partly to demonstrate how effective they are at physical description. And now, in retrospect, to acknowledge how almost all the images noted here on page 27 will return as structural elements in the remaining 325 pages of the novel: 
 Ask us what shape certainty takes and we will all point to a different corner of the museum: to the pendulum of the long-case clock, to the black stones of the birds' eyes, to the teacups in the upper gallery, to books, locks of hair, dress silk, to the computer in Jane's office, or the cabinet of milk-weed and wild strawberry glass models made in a factory between wars. We do not know how to recover our histories, to identify what or whom we loved. We cannot see ourselves except as loose human forms--like those caught moving down the street in the museum's early Victorian photographs, figures whose blurred shapes become clearer the longer you look at them. We only know that we are drawn to certain objects, places and people, and that we are bound to Jane like the Thale butterflies in the natural history hall--pinned to the boards in their long glass cases.So does it all come together? I would have to say, almost but not quite. As an intellectual idea, absolutely. Strongly, too, in the character of Jane, who breaks out from the passive archivist mold and actually makes things happen around her. The gradual emergence of the Victorian story is also interesting, with its twists of adultery, sexual deviance, and death, although I never quite felt I was in the same room with those characters. I was a little disappointed that while Jane ties up the loose ends of the old mystery very neatly, she never quite manages to solve her own. But those are small matters compared to Hunter's marvelous writing throughout and unusual choice of setting and plot. 
 For most readers, I think, it will come down to how you respond to the ghosts. Fantasy is not a literary genre that I am drawn to, and there were times, I admit, when I was waiting for Hunter to get back to her flesh-and-blood characters. But when I think of the ghostly world as a metaphor for both historical research and fiction, I am considerably impressed. And there were moments towards the end that became quite moving as the ghosts recapture pieces of their real identity. I am in awe at the quality of so many female Canadian novelists, and this book made me think of some of the earlier work of Jane Urquhart, such as The Whirlpool, which is haunted by the spirit of John Keats, or Changing Heaven, in which the ghost of Charlotte Bronte appears as a major character. And that is intended as a high compliment--to both writers.