British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930

Book excerpt: 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 enabled an interrogation of women’s changing circumstances, ghosts could have both subversive and conservative implications. Haunted house narratives by Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant become troubled by uncanny reminders of the origins of middle-class wealth in domestic and foreign exploitation. Corpse-like revenants are deployed in Female Gothic tales 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 psychoanalytically-informed stories by May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt explore just how far gender relations have really progressed in the post-First World War period. Study of the woman’s short story productively problematises literary histories about the “golden age” of the ghost story, and about the transition from Victorianism to modernism.