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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.
List of contents
Introduction: Our Own Ghostliness.- (Other)Worldly Goods: Ghost Fiction as Financial Writing in Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Riddell.-Neither Punishment nor Poetry: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edith Nesbit and Female Death.- The Good Memsahib? Marriage, Infidelity and Empire in Alice Perrin's Anglo-Indian Tales.- Haunted Modernity in the Uncanny Stories of May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt .- Conclusion.
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“Readers are likely to be excited by the many fascinating stories that this book has brought back to life.” (Clare A. Simmons, Victorian Studies, Vol. 63 (4), 2021)
“This challenging and polemical study will be essential reading for students and scholars of the Victorian ghost story, modernism and women’s writing.” (Emma Liggins, Women's Writing, October 4, 2021)
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"Readers are likely to be excited by the many fascinating stories that this book has brought back to life." (Clare A. Simmons, Victorian Studies, Vol. 63 (4), 2021)
"This challenging and polemical study will be essential reading for students and scholars of the Victorian ghost story, modernism and women's writing." (Emma Liggins, Women's Writing, October 4, 2021)
