Victorian Ghost Stories by Eminent Women Writers

Summary:

Richard Dalby here selects the very best ghost stories by outstanding 19th and early twentieth century women writers. Since the days of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, women have produced many of the finest ghost stories ever written, bringing to their craft the qualities of their personal experience and their history of living on the margins.

These twenty-one stories neatly spanning Queen Victoria’s reign and including such classic authors as Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Willa Cather take us on a spooky tour of Irish mansions and Boston backstreets. All the tales have their spine-chilling twists, powerful atmospheres and individual brands of wit and humor.

The popular origins of ghost stories with their alliance to the oral tradition could give women a potent way of criticizing the frustrations of their constrained lives. Themes of the supernatural and ghostly happenings were rich elements to express women’s fantasies, desires and images of exile and haunting loneliness. As such, these stories offer rare glimpses of the buried feelings and values that could not otherwise find a welcome reception in the stifling moral climate of the Victorian era.