British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness

This book explores women’s short supernatural fiction between the emergence of first wave feminism and the post-suffrage period, arguing that while literary ghosts provided women a form through which to negotiate their changing circumstances, they could have both subversive and conservative implications. Stories by Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant become troubled by uncanny reminders of the origins of British wealth in domestic and foreign exploitation. Corpse-like revenants are deployed by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Edith Nesbit to interrogate masculine aestheticisation of female death. In the culturally-hybrid supernaturalism of Alice Perrin, the ‘Marriage Question’ migrates to colonial India. And innovative Gothic stories by May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt interrogate just how far gender relations have progressed in the post-First World War period. Study of these writers’ fictions productively problematizes literary histories about the “golden age” of the ghost story, and about the transition from Victorianism to modernism.