Houses of Stone by Barbara Michaels
Pseudonyme for Barbara Mertz but she also writes under the name Elizabeth Peters
Karen Holloway, an ambitious assistant professor at an unnamed women's college in the Northeast, learns of a previously unpublished novel by a 19th-century author known only as Ismene. Since she herself made Ismene famous in the academic world by publishing a volume of her verse, Karen knows her reputation will skyrocket if she can buy the manuscript from the bookseller who found it and issue it with her commentary. She and her colleague Peggy Finneyfrock travel to a dilapidated estate in Virginia's Tidewater region in search of clues to Ismene's identity. But other academics are also in hot pursuit, and Karen finds herself haunted by nightmares brought on by the claustrophobic themes in Ismene's work ("houses of stone" is a phrase from one of the pseudonymous author's poems).

While this did not appeal to me as much as I thought it would, it was still interesting. The main character, Karen, was rather flat but her friends, Peggy and others were much more fun to read about.