In 1894 Henry James’ friend Constance Fenimore Woolson committed suicide, purportedly prompting James to dispose of her dresses in the Venetian lagoon, but the phantom-like dresses would not drown. While critics consider the tale of the “drowned dresses” unlikely, many writers of contemporary fiction include this symbolic scene in their works. Dove’s chapter examines Colm Tóibín’s re-imagining of this moment in his neo-Victorian novel The Master and argues that the dresses’ return from the lagoon might be read in light of agentic materiality. Drawing on the theoretical concept of new materialism, Dove explores clothes as haunted sites that disturb the central narrative and proposes that the animation of garments in this novel highlights the potential of material objects to narrate the stories of the past.