Where It All Goes Down
An affluent neighborhood in 1920s England
While the year is never specified, references to World War I and actual racing horses of the time tell us that the story takes place in 1920s England.
Like a classic ghost story, most of the action in the story takes place in a spooky house: The home where Hester lives with her husband and children. It's located in a nice-ish neighborhood, but it's got a major inferiority complex about not being in an even nicer one. Instead of being a domestic space where the family is sheltered from the rest of the world, the house is infiltrated with the shallow, material values of society. The walls literally whisper, "There must be more money, there must be more money."
The home is also a carefully ordered space where the children spend their time in the nursery with the governess, and Hester and her husband eat their meals and conduct their adult lives separately, in a different part of the house. When Hester finally goes up the stairs to her son's room, way up at the top of the house, the tone is so suspenseful that we'd think she was breaking a major taboo, or something. Not just climbing the stairs in her house.