Gothics and ghosts, vampires, witches, and l'écriture-femme
Mary Boyne (Kate Harper) in of Edith Whaton's "Afterward", a ghost story
For more than six years I wrote regularly on listservs about the gothic genre: on Litalk-l,
Trollope-l, Gaslight, WomenWritersThroughtheAges, and EighteenthCenturyWorlds I managed
to get a group of people together who around Christmas as well as other times of the year were willing
to read and to write about ghost and gothic stories with me. I also got people
on these lists to discuss books about the gothic and books readily identified as female romance or woman's novels (écriture-femme). Sometimes all these genres and
subgenres combined in one text, as for example, Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Grey Woman" and
Edith Wharton's "Afterward." During this time I also taught a themed literature course regularly
which I ended up calling "Gothics and Ghosts, Romance and the Supernatural." I covered gothic
novels, vampire and ghost stories and the "female gothic." During this time I also wrote on these
and other lists (e.g., C18-l) commentary on books about the gothic and about women's literature.
This section is made up of my and the postings other people produced during these years and
notes from the lectures I did for my teaching. I also include appropriate pictures and make an effort to find pictures by women.
Individual Authors: l'écriture-femme
- Germaine de Staël's Corinne, ou, l'Italie
- George Sand
- Indiana and Valentine
- Horace
- Elizabeth Gaskell
- A. S. Byatt's Possession
- Valerie Martin's The Great Divorce
- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's East into Upper East (1998)
Ghost and Vampire Stories
- Elizabeth Gaskell
- Mary Elizabeth Braddon
- Amelia Edwards
- Sheridan Le Fanu
- Margaret Oliphant
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Edith Wharton
- Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
- Mary Austin
- M. R. James
- "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" (1911) (alongside his "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" [1895], with mention of Christopher Woodforde's "Cushi" [1952])
- "An Episode of Cathedral History" (1919)
- Ellen Glasgow
- "The Past" (1920) (alongside Josephine Daskam Bacon's "The Children" [1913] and Glasgow's "The Shadowy Third" [1923], with a review of Betty Rizzo's Companions Without Vows [1994])
- May Sinclair
- Helen R. Hull
- "Clay-Shuttered Doors" (1926) (alongside Mrs. Wilson Woodrow's "Secret Chambers" [1909] and Josephine Daskam Bacon's "The Gospel" [1913])
Female Gothic
- Ann Radcliffe
- A Sicilian Romance (1790)
- The Romance of the Forest (1791)
- The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
- Comparative study: Victorine de Chastenay's Mysteres d'Udolphe and Radcliffe's Mysteries of
Udolpho
- The Italian (1797)
- Christopher Cave's essay on the Abbé André Morellet as an Enlightenment figure and his French translation of Radcliffe's Italian
- Daphne DuMaurier
- Suzy McKee Charnas's The Vampire Tapestry (1980)
- Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly
Autobiography: Memoir and Travel Writing & Literary/Art Criticism
- Ann Radcliffe
- A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794
- George Sand
- Lettres d'un Voyageur
- Un hiver à Majorque (A Winter in Majorca)
- Azar Nafisi
Literary History and Criticism: Commentaries
Cover Illustration to Chantal Thomas, Coping with Freedom
Home
Contact Ellen Moody.
Pagemaster: Jim
Moody.
Page Last Updated 18 January 2005