By
Melissa Edmundson Makala
Throughout
nineteenth-century Britain, female writers excelled within the genre of
supernatural literature. Much of their short fiction and poetry uses ghosts as
figures to symbolize the problems of gender, class, economics, and imperialism,
thus making their supernatural literature something more than just a good
scare. Nineteenth-century ghost literature by women shows the Gothic becoming
more experimental and subversive as its writers abandoned the stereotypical
Gothic heroines of the past in order to create more realistic, middle-class
characters (both living and dead, male and female) who rage against the limits
imposed on them by the natural world. The ghosts of Female Gothic thereby
become reflections of the social, sexual, economic, and racial troubles of the
living. Expanding the parameters of Female Gothic and moving it into the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries allows us to recognize women’s ghost
literature as a specific strain of the Female Gothic that began not with Ann
Radcliffe, but with the Romantic Gothic ballads of women in the first decade of
the nineteenth century. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century
Britain recovers and analyzes for a new audience this “social supernatural”
ghost literature, as well as the lives and literary careers of the women who
wrote it.
“This
groundbreaking study makes a persuasive case that nineteenth-century women
authors wrote ghosts into their fiction and poetry not just in order to
entertain but also as a vehicle for social criticism. Through the figure of the
ghost, they drew attention to religious, gender, and class-based inequality
within British society, and to the human costs of empire and the industrial
revolution.”
– Paula
Feldman, University of South Carolina
University of Wales Press
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