![]() (The words come from a newly published collection of literary odds and ends, Let Me Tell You, but her 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, has been cited by Stephen King as one of the greatest horror novels of all time.) I live in a dank old place with a ghost that stomps around in the attic room we’ve never gone into (I think it’s walled up), and the first thing I did when we moved in was to make charms in black crayon on all the door sills and window ledges to keep out demons, and was successful in the main”. Some decades later, with feminist gains threatened by the rise of the 1950s domestic goddess, Shirley Jackson could be found mischievously railing against convention: “I am tired of writing dainty little biographical things that pretend that I am a trim little housewife in a Mother Hubbard stirring up appetising messes over a wood stove. The ghosts become proto-feminist figures who – in death at least – cast off the traditional roles that society foists upon them, those of obedient wife, doting mother, dutiful daughter. What makes them terrifying is that death has enabled them to break free of social mores and fully unleash the anger that their living sisters must swallow. These ghost women are often deeply sympathetic characters. She manages all this with a “hard, bright, surface competency” and yet, Austin observes, “Emma had always wanted things different, wanted them with a fury of intentness that implied offensiveness in things as they were”. ![]() Published the same year as Slosson’s story, Mary Austin’s The Readjustment conjures up the character of Emma Jossylin, a woman whose life’s achievements amount to a “little low house”, a “common” husband and a son who is crippled. Whatever women repress, ghost stories suggest, will eventually come back to haunt if not them, then those who colluded in keeping them downtrodden. And yet by continually effacing herself, hadn’t she become a ghost even while alive? Little wonder that she can’t settle in the afterlife either. The Dissatisfied Soul of Annie Trumbull Slosson’s 1908 story is Maria Bliven, a spinster described by her sister-in-law as being “the fittiest, restlessest, changeablest” person imaginable, always leaving before she can be thought to have outstayed her welcome. Little wonder they were so prone to feeling haunted by lives that might have been. Forced to reply on the goodwill of male relatives, they were expected to embrace self-sacrifice and good works. Spinsters are another group whose discontent is given voice by spooky goings-on. As Welch notes, a significant number of the Victorian and Edwardian women authors featured in her anthology were active supporters of the women’s suffrage movement, and it’s not hard to see why the idea of a ghost would have resonated. The ghost is the ultimate outsider – an absent presence, all-seeing and yet unable to partake of life in any meaningful way. But what really killed him – could that reality be still worse? In the wake of the trial, she goes mad.Īlong with their fears and anxieties, women use ghost stories to exorcise their resentments over societal restrictions. ![]() ![]() In Kerfol, a story by Edith Wharton, a woman is falsely accused of murdering her older husband. The doctor faints upon finding his wife stripping the walls, leaving her to “creep” over his inert body to freedom.Īgain and again, stories by women can be found emphasising the psychological aspects of a character’s torment. One such classic is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), whose nameless narrator, suffering from post-natal depression, is confined to bed rest under the care of her doctor husband and begins to lose her mind.Īppreciated at the time for its horror, it was reappraised almost a century later as a condemnation of Victorian patriarchy. It was in the 1970s that critics first began to appreciate how gender affected ghost stories, excavating subversive subtexts in stories that women wrote. In stories by women, when something goes bump in the night, it’s often the sound of the author butting her head against society’s rigid definitions of her role. In stories by James and co, male protagonists commonly find their intellectual and scientific ideas challenged by supernatural phenomena. The names of these authors – Amelia Edwards, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte Riddell, Mary Louisa Molesworth – have largely faded into obscurity while others (think Edith Wharton and E Nesbit) are remembered for other works. According to some scholarly estimates, in the 19th Century, at the height of the form’s popularity, women were contributing around 70% of ghost stories published in British and American magazines. What’s interesting is that this is really nothing new.
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