Dance to Your Daddy (1969)
"The situation here is fascinating, macabre, and in many ways incredible. I am living in a world of Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and the Brontés. Imagine—a simple matter for a romantic such as yourself—a house inhabited by a smiling villain, a light-of-love who calls him her uncle, a sinister manservant, two country maidens of unblemished character, and an heiress who is permitted to wear nothing but fancy dress for fear she will elude the villain and his paramour and make her escape from their clutches!"
A respectable example of latter-day Mitchell, and a very good satire on the Victorian melodrama-cum-Gothic. Dame Beatrice is hired by a bogus relation to look into his mad wife's behaviour, consisting of drowning and wandering around in suits of armour, and is plunged into a case of damsels in distress. Later, murder is done—all clues pointing to the "husband". Neat tricks played with assumptions. Ending is, of necessity, unsatisfactory.