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.

The Dead of Night by Oliver Onions