I’ve had ghost stories on the mind lately, and in honor of Women’s History Month, I want to highlight some of the contributions that women have made to this particular genre. Ghost stories in one form or another have been a part of the literary tradition—both oral and written—going back centuries. But the period between the beginning of the Victorian era in the 1830s and the onset of World War I is considered the Golden Age of the ghost story as we know it today. Short fictional accounts of encounters with ghosts abounded in literary magazines and in the form of collected anthologies. Big name novelists and more obscure authors alike turned to writing ghost stories as a fun and reliable source of income in these years, and more than a few of those authors were women. Below are four of my favorites:
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865)
One of the earlier influential writers of ghost stories was Elizabeth Gaskell, though ghost stories were by no means her only contribution to the literary scene. Today she is perhaps best celebrated for her social novels, including Cranford and North and South, which painted compelling pictures of the various social issues that troubled Victorian society. She also wrote the first published biography of Charlotte Brontë, with whom she was close friends. But alongside these more serious endeavors, she was writing ghost stories, many of which were published by Charles Dickens in his widely circulated magazine, Household Words. I mentioned one of her stories, “The Poor Clare,” in my recent post on the Gothic trope of prophecies and curses. Another great story of hers is “The Old Nurse’s Story,” which you can read online here.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915)
Like Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is also better known for her novels, mainly her most popular sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret. She wrote more than eighty other novels, as well as a handful of short fiction. Her ghost stories were particularly popular in the decades after her death and were included in major anthologies such as Montague Summers’s The Supernatural Omnibus (1931) and Fifty Years of Ghost Stories (1935). One of my favorite stories by her is “The Cold Embrace,” which can be found here.
Violet Hunt (1862–1942)
Violet Hunt is not often talked about today, except in terms of her relationships with more famous authors of the era, but I feel that her literary legacy needs to be celebrated in its own right. Violet Hunt was a prominent British feminist. She founded the Women Writers’ Suffrage League in 1908 and published a number of feminist novels, including The Maiden’s Progress and White Rose of Weary Leaf. She rubbed shoulders with Henry James and D. H. Lawrence, was romantically involved with H. G. Wells, and may have even been proposed to by Oscar Wilde. She wrote a biography of Elizabeth Siddal, the wife of prominent pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On top of all that, she published multiple collections of ghost stories, beginning with Tales of the Uneasy in 1911. One of the best stories from that volume is “The Prayer,” though not quite a ghost story in the traditional sense. You can read it here.
Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
Edith Wharton is probably the most familiar name on this list (and the only American). Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence and her tragic novella Ethan Frome are both commonly read in high school English classes. But few known that she also wrote several ghost story anthologies, including Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910) and the posthumous Ghosts published shortly after she died in 1937. The spookiest story from her first collection is “Afterward,” which you can read here.
Who are your favorite ghost story writers? Have you read any of the women mentioned here? Let me know in the comments!