Women's Authorship and the Early Gothic: Legacies and Innovations

By Kathleen Hudson

This edited collection examines Gothic works written by women authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a specific focus on the novels and chapbooks produced by less widely commercially and critically popular writers. Bringing these authors to the forefront of contemporary critical examinations of the Gothic, chapters in this collection examine how these works impacted the development of ‘women’s writing’ and Gothic writing during this time. Offering readers an original look at the literary landscape of the period and the roles of the creative women who defined it, the collection argues that such works reflected a female-centred literary subculture defined by creative exchange and innovation, one that still shapes perceptions of the Gothic mode today. This collection, then, presents an alternative understanding of the legacy of women Gothic authors, anchoring this understanding in complex historical and social contexts and providing a new world of Gothic literature for readers to explore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786836120

Book preview

WOMEN’S AUTHORSHIP AND THE EARLY GOTHIC

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

For all titles in the Gothic Literary Studies series

visit www.uwp.co.uk

Women’s Authorship and

the Early Gothic

Legacies and Innovations

edited by

Kathleen Hudson

© The Contributors, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cathays Park, Cardiff, CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-610-6

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-612-0

The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: © Mary Evans Picture Library

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Illustration

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Kathleen Hudson

1The Alternative Genealogies: (Re)tracing the Origins of Women’s Gothic in Sophia Lee’s The Recess and Mrs Carver’s The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey

Anna Shajirat

2Gothic before Gothic: Minerva Press Reviews, Gender and the Evolution of Genre

Hannah Doherty Hudson

3What ‘Poor Mrs Kelly’ Saw: Isabella Kelly Reads The Monk

Yael Shapira

4Mary Robinson’s Gothic and the Prison of Gender

Deborah Russell

5Adopting the ‘Orphan’: Literary Exchange and Appropriation in Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine

Kathleen Hudson

6The Fiction of Mary Julia Young: Female Trade Gothic and Romantic Genre-Mixing

Nicola Lloyd

7Sarah Wilkinson and J. F. Hughes: A Literary Relationship

Franz Potter

8Negotiating Gothic Nationalisms in Ann Radcliffe’s Post-1797 Texts: Gaston de Blondeville (1826) and St. Alban’s Abbey (1808)

Elizabeth Bobbitt

9Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796): Its Literary Life and Afterlife

Christina Morin

10 Self-haunted Heroines: Remapping the Generic ‘I’ back into Romantic Subjectivities

Elizabeth Neiman

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all the contributors to Women’s Authorship and the Early Gothic: Legacies and Innovations for their patience, hard work, outstanding research and personal dedication. Their passion for the subject matter is unparalleled, and without the enthusiasm and deep love of the Gothic they all share this project would never have become what it is now.

I would also like to thank Sarah Lewis, Andy Smith and all of the fine editors at the University of Wales Press for not only helping get this collection off the ground but also for their continued support throughout the publication process. Their feedback and editorial input have been immensely important for this work.

Special thanks to the academic institutions of all respective contributors for providing the necessary materials and support required to complete the research included in this collection.

Thank you to all of our family members, friends, peers and others whose love and support was instrumental in producing this work and bringing the collection together.

ILLUSTRATION

Figure 1:

M. R. Chateaudun’s musical composition ‘Adieu Sweet Girl’ (Philadelphia, PA, 1804?) https://www.loc.gov/item/2014568098/ p. 201.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Elizabeth Bobbitt earned her BA from the University of St Andrews and her Master’s Degree from the University of Salford at MediaCity. She recently completed her PhD at the University of York, where she researched Ann Radcliffe’s posthumously published works.

Hannah Doherty Hudson is an Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University who has published extensively on eighteenth-century and Romantic popular print culture, the Gothic and the Minerva Press novel.

Kathleen Hudson is an Adjunct Instructor of English at the United States Naval Academy and Anne Arundel Community College. She is the author of Servants and the Gothic, 1764–1831: A half-told tale and numerous other works on gender, social class and the Gothic.

Nicola Lloyd is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Bath Spa University. She is one of the authors of The Palgrave Guide to Gothic Publishing: The Business of Gothic Fiction, 1764–1835 and is currently preparing a scholarly edition of Mary Julia Young’s Donalda; or, the Witches of Glenshiel (1805).

Christina Morin is Lecturer of English at the University of Limerick. Her publications include foundational research in Irish and Gothic studies such as The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c.1760–1829 and Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Elizabeth Neiman is an Assistant Professor in both English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maine. She is the author of Minerva’s Gothics: The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1780–1820.

Franz Potter is an Associate Professor and Director of the MA in Gothic Studies programme at National University in Southern California. He is the author of The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835 and has edited and republished numerous Gothic chap-books individually and in collections.

Deborah Russell is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and has published numerous articles and book chapters on Gothic fiction and women’s writing.

Anna Shajirat is an Assistant Professor of English at Quincy University. Her forthcoming research focuses on literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, particularly women’s Gothic writing on gender and race.

Yael Shapira is a Lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She is the author of Inventing the Gothic Corpse: The Thrill of Human Remains in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.

Introduction

KATHLEEN HUDSON

What I mean by Female Gothic is easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic. But what I mean – or anyone else means – by ‘the Gothic’ is not so easily stated except that it has to do with fear.

Ellen Moers, Literary Women, 1976¹

‘Valancourt, and who was he?’ cry the young people. Valancourt, my dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made your young grandmammas’ gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy. He and his glory have passed away. Ah, woe is me that the glory of novels should ever decay …

William Makepeace Thackeray, Roundabout Papers, 1860²

‘… But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?’

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 1817³

There is an interlude in Regina Maria Roche’s 1798 Minerva Press novel Clermont during which the heroine, Madeline, finds temporary refuge from her ongoing adventures in a crumbling domestic structure, a space she shares with two female servants. As the women sit by the fire and listen to the storm raging outside, the looming threat of unspoken horrors becomes more and more apparent. Their solution to the resulting mental and emotional strain is as recognisable a strategy as it is a seemingly paradoxical one – in the following chapters Agatha and Floretta, the servants, perform three tales of terror for their own entertainment and that of their audience, Madeline. These stories are a patchwork of original invention, half-remembered gossip and a kind of unconscious genre literacy, employing recurring tropes of the Gothic, such as haunted buildings and spectral forces, while encouraging the audience’s emotional investment. The female narrators therein become metonymic Gothic authors, and the broader narrative purview is reflected in a mirrored version of itself.

Perhaps most notably, these stories are created, curated and critically evaluated by women who occupy a relatively vulnerable socio-economic position, and are presented to the middle-class heroine for her entertainment and edification. While no money changes hands in this scene there is an element of creative competitiveness and salesmanship in the way the two maidservants strive to tell the most affecting story. Women are writers, editors, readers, critics and consumers in this instance, and as such they construct a literary community, an ongoing exchange highlighting modular concerns. There is, moreover, something rather familiar about this setting, as the stormy night, roaring fire and second-hand narrative depicted therein have been enshrined in the popular consciousness as seemingly crucial requirements when telling ghost stories, regardless of whether one is an amateur storyteller or professional author. This scene is in no way unique in Gothic literature, and in fact it serves as a mirror- darkly reflection of the mode itself. Therein, these characters engage with a recognisable literary legacy examined in Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination: A poem (1744), which is referenced by Roche and in which Akenside identifies the ‘Village matron’ telling her ‘witching rhymes’ as the quintessential image associated with tales of terror.⁴

Where do these frightening, eerie and unmistakably Gothic tales originate? Who creates them and who shares them? Who enjoys them and determines their merit? An examination of the terms ‘winter’s tale’ and ‘old wives tale’ and literary depictions of those who, as Jonathan Swift describes, ‘Tell the Children Stories of spirits, when they offer to cry’ suggests a popular perception that Gothic storytelling was originally an oral tradition predominantly curated by women long before it manifested in novel form.⁵ Whether such associations are based in fact or fiction, these and similar cultural linkages have aligned the Gothic with gendered discourses, creating a tangled ongoing negotiation in which genre and gender overlap and inform each other. It is only fitting, then, that in one of the many Gothic works produced by women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries female characters are positioned as both the ostensible source from which these generic engagements developed and as the primary consumers of Gothic tales. Roche, as the author, offers an in-text examination of a female-driven literary legacy even as she innovatively advances methods of Gothic storytelling.

Roche’s work ostensibly falls under the heading of Female Gothic, a term officially coined by Ellen Moers in her 1976 work Literary Women and that, in its original iteration, is ‘easily defined’ as encompassing ‘the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic’.⁶ Her chapter on the subject evokes one of the most well-known Gothic authors, Ann Radcliffe, and most notably William Hazlitt’s description of Radcliffe’s ‘imaginary horrors’ and Sir Walter Scott’s backhanded compliment comparing reading her novels and drug usage.⁷ Moers argues that Radcliffe ‘firmly set the Gothic in one of the ways it would go ever after: a novel in which the central figure is a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine’.⁸ This classification is reinforced by later critics who frame Radcliffe as a literary grandmother of the Gothic in general and of the specific subcategory of Female Gothic in particular. It is as an extension of her innovations, Moers suggests, that authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley negotiate active ‘female selfhood’ as a reaction to restrictions placed upon the lives of women.⁹

The term Moers describes is effective in its simplicity, yet critical classifications of the Female Gothic quickly encompassed more complicated discourses. It is arguably a sub-mode preoccupied with negotiations of female identity, and more specifically the development of an idealised balance of emotional sensitivity and Enlightenment rationality, explorations of female-focused socio-political and domestic anxieties and the preservation of said identity in male-dominated, often radically destabilised spaces. Norman Holland and Leona Sherman offer a similar equation to Moers’s in which the sub-mode equals ‘the image of woman-plus-habitation and the plot of mysterious sexual and supernatural threats in an atmosphere of dynastic mysteries’, with, as Claire Kahane suggests, elements such as ghostly mothers and matrilineal inheritances ‘signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront’.¹⁰ Female selfhood is achieved through, and in conjunction with, aesthetic examinations of the sublime, supernatural incidents that are nearly always reframed using semi-rational explanations and classifications of ‘terror’ as potentially emotionally elevating.

So-called Male Gothic, by contrast, includes unexplained supernatural incidents and the aesthetics of ‘horror’ realised in graphic depictions of violence and trauma. Long before Moers’s critical work such simplistic and gendered distinctions within and between Gothic novels were hinted at by critics and authors such as Jane Austen – in Northanger Abbey (written in 1803 and published in 1817) unlikely heroine Catherine Morland reads or attempts to read Radcliffe, Roche, Parsons and Sleath, while her boorish suitor John Thorpe dismisses all novels as ‘nonsense and stuff’ with the exception of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796).¹¹ Compounding his sins, Thorpe misidentifies Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and rejects Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796) as ‘unnatural stuff’ no doubt informed by Burney’s French husband.¹² Though hardly the purveyor of good taste, Thorpe suggests the aforementioned pattern in which ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ novels are distinguished informally according to gendered categories by those who produce and consume them. As Angela Wright further notes, such examinations in Northanger Abbey also suggest a prevailing critical response ‘to authorship, and the gendering of a text through authorship’ that demarcates the reading and creative practices of men and women – Catherine and Isabella Thorpe are interested in the titles of the novels mentioned and the popular tropes they explore while Thorpe and Henry Tilney cite the names of authors, making gender an inescapable factor in their choice of reading materials.¹³

Despite this insistent and arguably critically effective focus on gendering the Gothic via the identity and creative preoccupations of the author, expressed more fully in contemporary criticism as feminist discourses gained traction towards the end of the twentieth century, even novice Gothic readers quickly encounter ambiguities when forced to delineate their favourite novels thus. Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1803) includes scenes of graphic horror, but does it not also examine female identity? What category does Horace Walpole fall under as the first Gothic novelist? What about those authors whose Minerva Press publications, many of which remain critically underappreciated to this day, offer a diverse range of Gothic negotiations? What of the bluebooks so loved by Percy Shelley? What of Clara Reeve’s attempts to curb Walpoleon excess in The Old English Baron (1774)? Perhaps it would be better to say that Female Gothic is ‘Radcliffean Gothic’ (and that Male Gothic belongs wholeheartedly to Matthew Lewis), but doing so risks not only oversimplifying the complexity of Radcliffe’s work but also her engagements with earlier writers such as Sophia Lee and the critical impact of other, equally popular and influential female authors on the developing mode. Moreover, where do such definitions leave Radcliffe’s underappreciated later works, the historical romances which took the mode in a whole new direction?

As such notions complicate our retroactive classification of specific works, so to do they potentially obscure our vision of the woman author in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary landscape. How many authors have been marginalised within the ever-developing academic discipline of Gothic studies because they did not easily conform to such definitions, or because their work was, arguably, mere ‘imitation’ – and if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all? How many women fell out of favour in their own time because they were not considered true authors or have faded into obscurity today because they have disproportionately suffered at the hands of Great Traditionalism? In applying sometimes arbitrary definitions of merit, as Elaine Showalter suggests in her ground-breaking study of women’s literature, we have ‘lost sight of the minor novelists, who were the links in the chain that bound one generation to the next’, and in doing so have developed a skewed idea of the literary legacies birthed during an intensely complex and foundational period of time.¹⁴ Indeed, to call such authors ‘minor’ in the first place is to unfairly negate their importance, not only in terms of their initial reception but also in the ways in which they maintained and furthered a sense of Gothic generic identity through which all authors who followed could develop creative work. As the following collection of research demonstrates, the complicated long-term impact of even marginalised women’s Gothic writing cannot be overstated, expanding over geographical borders and broad expanses of time.

Lauren Fitzgerald rightly argues that the Gothic’s association with gender, inescapable even during the eighteenth century, effectively defined it as a mode, while contemporary ‘feminist criticism, for better or worse, transformed how the Gothic is read and its status within the academy’.¹⁵ The problematic offshoot of this is suggested in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s argument in their seminal 1979 text The Madwoman in the Attic that a woman author’s creative identity is informed by the socio-cultural assumptions transposed upon her – that she is shaped by feelings of loneliness, alienation, ‘culturally conditioned timidity’, fear, dread and differentiation, always defined as a ‘woman’ first and an ‘author’ last.¹⁶ What Gilbert and Gubar identify as anxieties regarding legacy – what one inherits from literary predecessors and what one leaves behind for the next generation – suggest, for women writing within a male-dominated hierarchy, a certain kind of isolation, a fundamental disconnect from the wider literary community. Indeed, if patriarchy is the primary moderator of creative output, it is perhaps not an unsound argument that ‘the literature of women’, as G. H. Lewes states, ‘has fallen short of its functions owing to a very natural and a very explicable weakness – it has been too much a literature of imitation. To write as men write is the aim and besetting sin of women’.¹⁷

Such critical characterisations invite us to assume that women authors of the early Gothic, like their heroines, were trapped in repressive spaces and thus limited in their output, in what they could write and in how they exercised their influence. Whether they wrote for pleasure or fame or money, their motives were intensely scrutinised, and indeed their very right and ability to pick up a pen in the first place was both overtly and covertly questioned. If they, as some have argued, operated in a completely different creative space from men, a space isolated, lonely and lacking a comparable sense of community, how could they truly contribute to a developing literary mode and the broader cultural landscape? Such a position oversimplifies the innovations of individual authors that in fact function within a complex, fruitful and ongoing literary tradition developing between women. To write Gothic fiction, too – that mode of appropriation and repetition! Women Gothic authors are therein allegedly guilty of a double imitation, defined, with a few exceptions that arguably prove the rule, by the drive to write the same old novels with the same old tropes, and to write them as men. With such assumptions lingering in the critical consciousness, the few women authors during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century whom we do read today take on the air of the exceptional and, to extend the Gothic metaphor, the almost otherworldly. Is it any wonder that the recurring image of Ann Radcliffe, an unquestioned icon of the early Gothic, is that of a great and distant ‘Enchantress’ who wrote her books in a relative vacuum, refused to respond to literary criticism, perhaps went mad, perhaps disappeared and perhaps did not have a happy marriage?¹⁸ At what price decorum – and at what price deviance!

And so, publishers G. G. and J. Robinson of London paid the unheard-of sum of £500 for Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), while The Italian (1797) earned £800 from Cadell and Davies. However, as Rictor Norton notes in his biography of her, Radcliffe and her husband both needed to sign the copyright contract for Udolpho for it to be a legally binding document – ‘married women had no legal status for agreements regarding property, intellectual or otherwise’.¹⁹ Other female authors, including those who, like Charlotte Turner Smith, were famously dependent on their creative labour for their livelihoods, made closer to an estimated £10 per work, and the radically innovative Mary Robinson earned less than £10 total over the course of several years for three novels and a play. Julia Young, Sarah Wilkinson and others were forced to write to the Royal Literary Fund for monetary assistance even as they adopted and adapted their work in ways which dramatically expanded the mode’s generic boundaries. All authors are subject to the whims of a volatile literary marketplace, but women at this time had less negotiating power as a rule. Criticism, too, could be wildly unforgiving, and women who contributed to the literary landscape were often castigated equally for both a lack and overabundance of worldly knowledge, and were defined by, and forced to respond to, a complicated gender critique. It is difficult to believe that the reality for women Gothic authors was anything more or less than an inescapable Gothic labyrinth in which success and failure were ultimately one and the same thing; as Robert Miles has noted, even while Scott identified Radcliffe as a gifted writer he also shaped ‘the critical debate that by the end of the century would succeed in relegating Radcliffe to someone at the head of a second-division genre: the Gothic’.²⁰

The gendered discourses that define the Gothic both as a platform for creative expression and as a product to be consumed are just as critical and complicated now as they were in the eighteenth century, and indeed threaten to define processes of retrospective reading and critique. When discussing contemporary horror cinema, Linda Williams notes the broad cultural perception that ‘whenever the movie screen holds a particularly effective image of terror, little boys and grown men make it a point of honour to look, while little girls and grown women cover their eyes’.²¹ This is arguably because a woman negotiating terror and horror ‘is often asked to bear witness to her own powerlessness’ or, paradoxically, because ‘women are given so little to identify with on screen’.²² Either way, she is regulated to the status of object rather than creator or audience, suggesting Laura Mulvey’s argument that within visual productions, and by extension larger negotiations of the elements that compose the Gothic, women are ‘(passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man’.²³ Roche’s heroine is certainly reluctant enough to ‘look’ during the aforementioned scene in Clermont. When one particular story becomes too much for her heightened sensibilities, Madeline grows pale and upset, and the servants pause their exchange in order to give her time to collect herself, sharing toast and mulled wine while she takes a nap.

However, Madeline’s emotional investment in the frightening tales the women share in Clermont is unquestioned, even after her dizzy spell – she covers her eyes for only a moment before coming back to the fire willing and eager to hear more. Indeed, there is significant evidence that women do look, and look closely, at the very things that ostensibly render them powerless, objectified or othered. The volume and quality of women’s Gothic writing towards the end of the eighteenth century moreover suggests that this ‘looking’ resulted in the development of a complex literary movement that shaped the Gothic mode and the publishing landscape more broadly. Moral panic that women would effectively be consumed by the very Gothic texts they read and change radically as a result did perhaps have an unexpected basis in reality – the Gothic, perhaps more than any other literary mode up to this point, inspired many women to respond to and create their own works. Moreover, these responses shaped concepts of childhood, marriage, captivity, repression, maternity, monstrosity, mourning and identity, and stretch across geographical and temporal boundaries. The Gothic mode has, as the following research proves, a complex legacy running parallel to and intertwined with that of women’s authorship and authorial identity.

Students of Gothic literature may not have heard of many of the authors discussed in this collection or considered the ways in which the unsung heroines of the mode contributed to and continue to shape the brick-by-brick recreation of Gothic identity. We assume, rightly or wrongly, that patriarchal discourse dominated the literary scene, both in the economics of publishing and in the social, political and aesthetic criticisms that defined the advancement of ideas. Since these avenues suggest distinct yet interlinked methods for determining value, it is not outside the realm of reason to posit that, by extension, widespread female authorship could not have had the impact it did. However, the early Gothic is dominated by works written by women, and, moreover, as Michelle Levy notes, ‘thousands of women participated in print culture … they were authors, publishers, printers, distributors, sellers, and critics of the vast quantities of printed materials that appeared’ from 1750 to 1830.²⁴ Even those who only produced a single title in their creative careers engaged with a literary culture and the Gothic as a developing mode. A survey of the Gothic reveals a literary landscape built by women, many of whom negotiated the boundaries of what we now define as the Female Gothic even as they effectively broke that particular mould in innovative ways. Even as critical discourses understated the importance of some of these women or framed their works primarily as weak imitations of other authors, they were hardly less prolific or popular in their own day. As this collection demonstrates, a wide and complex range of authors, some named and some not, shaped the Gothic in ways which we are just now beginning to comprehend.

Despite a dearth of critical and popular appreciation for many women Gothic authors in contemporary constructions of a literary canon, the early Gothic is heavily populated with such figures, many of whom advanced creative developments of the mode and solidified its cultural status through their writing. Indeed, with their complicated legacy of ‘witching rhymes’ it is hardly surprising that so many women should find inspiration in the macabre and fantastic. After all, if a woman can bring herself to uncover her eyes the subsequent act of looking carries its own power, including the ability to critique, analyse and understand. A heroine is locked away in a haunted castle, but her willingness to examine and contextualise the world around her ultimately enables her survival and escape. In similar way, a woman writes and therein redefines the boundaries of her world. When a woman, whether she be fictional or not, observes, interrogates and responds, she exercises power over her universe. There are always other avenues for creativity and self-discovery, and if you cannot find them in a drawing room you may very well find them in a haunted crypt.

And, moreover, you may very well find community, an unexpected sisterhood of fellow travellers in the convents, in the crypts, in newly rediscovered portraits and letters and within what