Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Gothic Literary Studies) 0708325645, 9780708325643, 9780708325650

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Gothic Literary Studies

Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Melissa Edmundson Makala

University of Wales Press

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WOMEN’S GHOST LITERATURE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

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SERIES PREFACE Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia David Punter, University of Bristol Chris Baldick, University of London Angela Wright, University of Sheffield Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Melissa Edmundson Makala

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF 2013

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© Melissa Edmundson Makala, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7083-2564-3 e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2565-0

The right of Melissa Edmundson Makala to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copy­ right, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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For my parents, Rudy and Karen

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Contents

Acknowledgementsix Introduction1 1 Female Revenants and the Beginnings of Women’s Ghost Literature

22

2 Ghostly Lovers and Transgressive Supernatural Sexualities48 3 ‘Uncomfortable Houses’ and the Spectres of Capital

91

4 Haunted Empire: Spectral Uprisings as Imperialist Critique132 Conclusion167 Notes173 Bibliography205 Index217

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the staffs of the following institutions for their assistance with this project: the Rare Books, Manuscripts and India Office Records sections of the British Library, the Depart­ment of Special Collections at Edinburgh University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University and the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina. I would also like to thank the British Library, Edinburgh University Library and Pennsylvania State University Library for permitting quotations from letters in their collections. An abridged version of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘The “Uncomfortable Houses” of Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant’ in Gothic Studies 12/1 (May 2010), and part of Chapter 4 was published in an earlier version as ‘Bithia Mary Croker and the Ghosts of India’ in The CEA Critic 72/2 (Winter 2010). Thanks to the editors of these journals for granting me per­ mission to reproduce this material. I would like to express my gratitude to Paula R. Feldman, who read several early versions of this book, and who was always available to lend advice or talk through certain ideas. Her pioneering work in reclaiming forgotten British women writers has greatly influenced my own research and continues to inspire me. This book would not have been possible without the early support of Andrew Smith, who offered invaluable comments and suggestions during the manu­ script stages. It was a rewarding experience to work with such a gracious scholar in the field of Gothic studies. My sincere thanks go as well to the reviewer for the University of Wales Press, whose careful readings and insightful suggestions made this a better book. Sarah Lewis likewise has my gratitude for her early interest in the project, her patience, and her overall guidance of this volume from the initial evaluation process to final publication.

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Acknowledgements

My appreciation is also due to the women writers discussed in this book, whose work has provided me with years of reading fascin­ating poems and stories, along with discovering their equally captivating lives through biographies, letters and memoirs. If ghosts do exist, I hope these women are smiling approvingly as I write. I would especially like to thank the family and friends who en­ couraged me throughout my years of research and writing. This book could not have been completed without the love and support of my parents and grandparents, who fostered my interest in literature and history from an early age. Growing up in a house full of books, ideas and conversation most certainly led me to pursue a life of research and writing. I would also like to express my appreciation to my grandmother, Dixie, who earned her college degree during the 1930s and became a much-loved elementary school teacher. She taught me the importance of an education and never let me forget how proud she was of me for continuing on to graduate school. She didn’t live to see this book completed, but her memory was with me every step of the way. I would especially like to thank Jeff, who read and commented on several early drafts and assisted in my endless quest for obscure sources. He has offered advice and support throughout the creation of this book and has otherwise patiently lived with my interest in ghosts and the Gothic over the years. Final thanks go to Dalton and Murray for always being there.

x

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‘At my nativity The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes Of burning cressets . . . . . . I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’

– Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, as quoted by Elizabeth Gaskell in ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’

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Introduction

 Prior to the nineteenth century, there were a small number of ghost stories and poems written by women, but these works had limited printings and today are exceedingly rare. Sarah Malthus’s pamphlet, King William’s Ghost (1704) and Elizabeth Boyd’s ballad ‘Altamira’s Ghost; Or Justice Triumphant’ (1744), which tells of a barony dispute between an uncle and his nephew, are two examples of works by women who used their writings as a means of social and political commentary. However, during the nineteenth century, ghost literature became increasingly popular among women writers. It was published in collections of supernatural tales and was regularly seen in magazines throughout the century, including special Christmas issues. These stories and poems also were frequently published in keep­ sakes, under such titles as ‘The Regretted Ghost’ (1826) by Mrs Hofland and ‘A Ghost Story’ (1846) by the Countess of Blessington. In their Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (1991), Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert state that ‘the reasons why women took to the ghost story so successfully is one of the great unasked critical questions’.1 Their answer to this question is the one usually given by critics: women writers needed to make a living and tended toward the ever-popular and reliable ghost story to make money. This reason is no doubt true for many women writers of the century, ranging from writers of chap­book ballads in the early 1800s to authors of penny-dreadfuls and ‘shilling shockers’ later in the century. But for many women

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who included supernatural plotlines in their writing, this argument does not present the entire rationale behind the phenomenon. These authors understood that any writing by a woman which sought to critique gender inequality or their country’s involvement in question­able socio-political or imperial practices would be auto­ matically subjected to greater scrutiny by reviewers, as well as the general reading public. Regarding the publication of her Gothic ballad collection, Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), Anne Bannerman admitted to her publisher, Thomas Hood, that she was ‘well aware that from their peculiarity of subject, it was not to be expected they could please generally’.2 Other authors, such as Ellen Wood and Bithia Mary Croker, who had already achieved financial success as writers of popular romance novels, later ventured into the realm of the ghost story without being assured of a financial profit. At the turn of the century, Olive Schreiner used the supernatural in Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonland (1897) to critique the contro­ versial policies of Cecil Rhodes. The title page to the first edition of the work, showing hanged native Africans, was subsequently banned in later London editions. Schreiner’s choice of subject almost as­ suredly had more to do with raising British awareness of the problems in South Africa after the notoriously badly handled Jameson raid on the Transvaal Republic in 1895–6 than with making money by serving the public taste with run-of-the-mill romance or sensation novels. Throughout the nineteenth century, women emphasized the importance of the supernatural and repeatedly discussed an artistic and intellectual appreciation for the possibilities of the genre that goes beyond a mere obsession with financial profit. In her essay, ‘On Ghosts’, published in the London Magazine of March 1824, Mary Shelley described the appeal of supernatural stories for both readers and writers. She saw the modern world as too regimented and organ­ ized, and in the face of the modern, the world was losing its un­known quantities and mysteries. In the absence of these things, Shelley asks, ‘What have we left to dream about?’3 She also connects this loss of superstition to a loss of fear and imagination, which are natural parts of human nature. For her, the unknown holds an important place in the everyday world because it reminds us of the limits of earthly knowledge: 2

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Introduction There is something beyond us of which we are ignorant. The sun drawing up the vaporous air makes a void, and the wind rushes in to fill it, – thus beyond our soul’s ken there is an empty space; and our hopes and fears, in gentle gales or terrific whirlwinds, occupy the vacuum; and if it does no more, it bestows on the feeling heart a belief that influences do exist to watch and guard us, though they be impalpable to the coarser faculties.4

The ability to imagine is vital to both the author of the ghost story and the reader of the story; each person must give way to the un­ known, the ‘empty space’ as Shelley calls it, to experience the full impact of a supernatural tale. Nearly seventy years later, Vernon Lee, in the Preface to her short story collection, Hauntings (1890), would write about the continuing importance of mystery and the abstract in telling good ghost stories: the supernatural, in order to call forth those sensations, terrible to our ancestors and terrible but delicious to ourselves, sceptical posterity, must necessarily, and with but a few exceptions, remain enwrapped in mystery. Indeed, ’tis the mystery that touches us, the vague shroud of moonbeams that hangs about the haunting lady, the glint on the warrior’s breastplate, the click of his unseen spurs, while the figure itself wanders forth, scarcely outlined, scarcely separated from the sur­ rounding trees; or walks, and sucked back, ever and anon, into the flickering shadows.5

For Lee, truly scary tales have their beginnings in the creative mind, which also creates the lingering sense of fear and disorientation that comes from such a tale. Rumours of dead relatives returning to visit family members or local village corpses rising from their graves, told as factual occurrences, are to her, ‘flat, stale, and unprofitable’.6 The ‘real’ terror exists in products of one’s imagination: They are things of the imagination, born there, bred there, sprung from the strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in our fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid impressions, litter of multi-coloured tatters, and faded herbs and flowers, whence arises that odour (we all know it), musty and damp, 3

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain but penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the air when the ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the flickering flames of candle and fire start up once more after waning.7

While Lee insisted on the internal workings and irrationalities of the human mind as the genesis for true terror, other authors, such as Catherine Crowe, who published her own collection, Ghosts and Family Legends: A Volume for Christmas (1858) and contributed to the increased public taste for ghost stories with her widely read prose work, The Night Side of Nature (1848), believed that the ‘authentic’ ghost story occurred outside the human mind, was often provable, and could be ‘learned’. One of the most famous Victorian ‘ghost hunters’, Crowe sought to bring the public closer to an under­ standing of the unknown, describing in the Preface to The Night Side of Nature ‘these vague and misty perceptions, and the similar obscure and uncertain glimpses we get of that veiled department of nature, of which, while comprising, as it does, the solution of questions concerning us more nearly than any other, we are yet in a state of entire and wilful ignorance’.8 The Night Side of Nature is organized by chapters discussing such varied things as ‘Allegorical Dreams’, ‘Doppelgangers’, ‘Troubled Spirits’, and ‘Haunted Houses’, and throughout the book, Crowe attempts to establish a ‘scholarly’ exploration of these as-yet-unexplained phenomena. Crowe’s work was so successful that it even led fellow ghost connoisseur Charles Dickens to accuse her of stealing some of his own stories. After being, in turn, accused by Elizabeth Gaskell of claiming one of her stories as his own idea, ‘To be Read at Dusk’, published in Heath’s Keepsake for Christmas 1851, Dickens responded: Crows have plucked at the fleeces of other Ghosts of mine before now – but I have borne it meekly. Ghost-stories, illustrating particular states of mind and processes of the imagination, are common-property, I always think – except in the manner of relating them, and O who can rob some people of that!9

The cultural significance of Crowe’s work and her influence on the ghost tradition is attested to in Anstey Guthrie’s essay, ‘The Decay of the British Ghost’, which appeared in the January 1884 issue of 4

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Introduction

Longman’s Magazine. In the essay, Guthrie applauds Crowe’s effort on behalf of authentic ghosts, calling her collection an ‘excellent work’, which is ‘positively swarming with spectres; spectres to suit all tastes; spectres ugly and comely, opaque and transparent, full dress and undress, plain and coloured, and all on such impeachable testimony that unbelief is rendered impossible’.10 The interest in spirit phenomena among women writers con­ tinued at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond. In an 1895 letter to William Morris Colles, Flora Annie Steel described the main plot of her most famous novel, On the Face of the Waters (1897), which remains one of the most effective nineteenth-century critiques of the 1857 Indian Uprising: ‘Its central idea is that the Mutiny was, what the natives call it “a breath”, a moving on the face of the water of a spirit evoking order from disorder, light from darkness.’11 The wife of an Indian Civil Service officer, Steel spent several years in the Punjab observing Indian natives and working to promote the education of Indian women. She recognized that the spiritual or ghostly (i.e. unseen) causes which stirred the revolt were directly connected to the ‘disorder’ that ensued because of the British imperial presence in the region. In a larger context, British women writers and their stories of the supernatural can also be seen as ‘a moving on the face of the water’. Their writings stirred British social consciousness by exposing the social tensions and inequalities that existed for those who were on the margins of society (namely women, the poorer working classes and minorities). Recognizing that direct political or social critique would potentially alienate their reading audiences, these authors sought more subversive means to discuss current issues. Like the ghosts and spirits which haunt their pages, women writers of ghost stories ‘troubled’ the present by raising awareness of unsafe domestic spaces, gender relations, economic conditions and the consequences of imperialism. This social use of the supernatural has been discussed by theorists as a way of understanding how the political functions in literature and history. In The Fantastic (1973), Tzvetan Todorov regards super­ natural writing as a way of bringing about change:

5

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain The supernatural appears in the series of episodes which describe the transition from one state [to] the other. Indeed, what could better disturb the stable situation of the beginning, which the efforts of all the participants tend to consolidate, if not precisely an event external not only to the situation but to the world itself ?12

Todorov believes that the supernatural is the literary motif that best brings about change in narratives. In this context, the supernatural serves ‘to afford a modification of the preceding situation, and to break the established equilibrium (or disequilibrium)’.13 This break­ ing of established order lends itself well to social critique. As Todorov says, ‘We see, finally, how the social and the literary functions coincide: in both cases, we are concerned with a transgression of the law. Whether it is in social life or in narrative, the intervention of the supernatural element always constitutes a break in the system of pre-established rules, and in doing so finds its justification’.14 Likewise, in Specters of Marx (1994) Jacques Derrida describes the political implications of ghosts in the collective memory, and his theories help to shed light on women authors’ use of the supernatural as a means both to forward and to complicate identity. According to Derrida, ghosts are forces that should not be forgotten, as they go beyond history and haunt all subsequent generations. He states that ‘this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’.15 Punning on the words ‘ontology’ and ‘haunting’, Derrida uses the word ‘hauntology’ as a way of describing this return: ‘After the end of history, the spirit comes by coming back [revenant], it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again.’ This idea of repetition is key to under­standing the force of meaning inherent in the ghost. For him, it is ‘a question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.’ (p. 11). The unsettling nature of the ghost not only complicates the present, but also exists beyond a specific moment, representing the past and influencing the future. Derrida describes this impact as a disruption to temporal normality: What exactly is the difference from one century to the next? Is it the difference between a past world – for which the specter represented 6

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Introduction a coming threat – and a present world, today, where the specter would represent a threat that some would like to believe is past and whose return it would be necessary again, once again in the future, to conjure away? . . . Why in both cases is the specter felt to be a threat? What is the time and what is the history of a specter? Is there a present of the specter? Are its comings and goings ordered according to the linear succession of a before and an after, between a presentpast, a present-present, and a present-future, between a ‘real time’ and a deferred time’? . . . If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt this reassuring order of presents. (p. 39)

He ties this ‘coming back’ to a political consciousness that must be recognized and dealt with, as living beings must reconcile them­ selves to their (ever-present) past: an obligation of justice . . . this justice carries life beyond present life or its actual being-there, its empirical or ontological actuality: not toward death but toward a living-on [sur-vie], namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any effectivity. There is then some spirit. Spirits. And one must reckon with them. (p. xx)

It is precisely this political undertone which the ghost carries that makes Derrida’s theories so pertinent to the study of what I term the ‘social supernatural’. From the dual meaning of the term ‘haunt­ ing’ itself [the French term ‘hantise’ can also mean ‘an obsession, a constant fear, a fixed idea, or a nagging memory’] the implications behind the word stress the unwanted return of memory, as well as a social consciousness.16 While Derrida’s notions of spectrality must inform any discussion of socio-political memory, his theories are by no means the only way to ‘read’ meaning in literary spectres. In his introduction to The Ghost Story, 1840–1920 (2010), Andrew Smith states that different ways of ‘reading ghosts’ are important in ‘decoding the central political visions of the period’.17 In addition to Todorov and Derrida’s theories of the spectral, more recent studies by Julian Wolfreys in 7

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Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (2002) and Christine Berthin in Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts (2010) have reaffirmed the Gothic’s connection to psychoanalytic theory and the deeper cultural anxieties that fic­ tional spectres symbolize. Likewise, the importance of feminist theory in bringing to light the gender concerns that are inherent in women’s writing has been well established. Yet, as important as these theoret­ical frameworks are to understanding the meaning behind ghosts, we must be careful not to lose sight of the fact that literary ghosts are also direct products of their time, and as such, have a vast amount to tell us about the many significant cultural shifts that occurred in the nineteenth century. As Margaret Anne Doody claims in her study of female dreams and the Gothic novel, history is a chronicle of pain and sorrow. Institutions, power, political activities are the nightmarish cruel realities from which no one can escape. All the characters are trapped in their own historical situation; what we have here may not be exactly the history of the textbooks, but we are presented with an historical situation. The past affects the present.18

She goes on to say that within the Gothic genre, women writers could make private suffering public: ‘It is in the Gothic novel that women writers could first accuse the “real world” of falsehood and deep disorder. Or perhaps, they rather asked whether masculine control is not just another delusion in the nightmare of absurd historical reality in which we are all involved. The visions of horror are not private – they have become public’.19 Likewise, Andrew Smith observes that ‘the ghost retains its status as a vehicle through which a superior, because critical, insight into the past and the present can be established’ (p. 187). In particular, women authors of the nine­ teenth century recognized the social and political power behind the genre of the ghost story and used it to shed light on cultural problems and inequalities. Their supernatural writings frequently trans­gress the cultural boundaries of their day, just as the spectral forces in their writings transgress the boundary between life and afterlife. The difficulty in identifying and uncovering forgotten super­ natural texts by women authors is compounded by the lingering 8

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Introduction

difficulties faced by critics in discussing the genre of supernatural fiction itself. In her essay on women’s ghost stories as Female Gothic, Diana Wallace mentions that one of the reasons that there has been so little criticism on the ghost story is because of debates over genre and how exactly the ghost story fits into the larger Gothic tradition. She advocates ‘detaching’ the idea of Gothic from ‘the Gothic novel’, which she rightly claims would then allow the ‘Gothic’ as a whole to become ‘flexible enough to encompass the ghost story’.20 Wallace states, ‘The lack of critical attention to women’s ghost stories is also to do with a wider neglect of the short story, within which the ghost story (associated with anthologies or magazines and other ephemeral types of publication) has been doubly marginalised’ (p. 57). In order to rectify this ‘lack of critical attention’, scholars of the Gothic have also had to struggle for credibility in attempting to show how the supernatural, as such an integral part of nineteenthcentury culture and reading habits, has a tremendous amount to offer those critics who recognize ghost literature as a cultural artifact of the times. In a 2003 article on ‘The Trouble with Ghost-seeing’, Srdjan Smajic opens by saying, ‘Despite the immense popularity of ghost stories in the nineteenth century and their pervasiveness in the literary periodicals of the time, it appears we are today as un­ likely to see new scholarship on the subject as we are to see an actual ghost’.21 This idea is not helped by Smajic’s own insistence in limit­ ing the scope of supernatural criticism to exclude historical or social analysis in favour of psychological readings: Since ghosts evidently belong everywhere in literature – and con­ sequently, one might say, nowhere in particular – the ghost story appears better adapted to the climate of formalist or psychoanalytic, rather than historicist, readings. In fact, the genre as such seems to validate precisely the type of criticism that downplays the significance of cultural and historical context and, instead, emphasizes the im­ mutability of certain mythic structures or psychological constraints.22

Smajic then describes the ghost story genre as ‘fundamentally a­historical’, concluding: ghost stories are probably the last place one would think to look for evidence of how industrialization, Darwinism, or colonial expansion 9

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain affected Victorian society and culture. It is as if the figure of the ghost demarcates the borders of an inhospitable, alien territory where social and political consciousness, the sense of literature’s historical and cultural embeddedness, the intricate network of ties that bind literary to nonliterary practices and discourses, are somehow mysteriously effaced – temporarily suppressed or forgotten – or, at best, are just barely visible, themselves made insubstantial and spectral.23

This resistance to recognizing the social and historical compo­ nents to the supernatural (not to mention women’s roles as leading practitioners of the genre) has only recently changed, as more critics begin to examine ghost literature as a cultural product. Vanessa Dickerson, in Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (1996), interprets the idea of ‘ghost’ broadly, relating the notion of a ghost as something ‘seen and not seen’ to women’s restricted, liminal place within Victorian culture.24 Dickerson relies on feminist theory to attempt an explanation of why women authors were so intrigued by ghost stories. She notes that ‘the act of writing a ghost story was for the popular woman writer the creation of a public discourse for voicing feminine concerns’ and further claims that because male writers of the supernatural (including Le Fanu, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton and Stevenson) could not experience the ‘in-betweenness’ of a female existence, their literary use of ghosts was naturally different and tended toward ‘diagnostic, clinical, journalistic’ depictions of spectres.25 Dickerson concludes: ‘It was finally not men’s but women’s ghost stories that truly treated the return of the repressed and the dispossessed; ghost stories could provide a fitting medium for eruptions of female libid­ inal energy, of thwarted ambitions, of cramped egos’ (p. 8). Through­ out her work, Dickerson parallels the cultured ‘invisibility’ of the woman writer with the ghost: The female is specterized; women become associated with the numin­ ous and the natural in a peculiar kind of supernaturalization that reroutes emphasis from the physical feat of woman’s child-bearing to the more sacralized social function of mothering, which in turn renders woman’s intellectual and material contributions to society less solid. What this kind of redefinition creates is an even stronger metaphorical 10

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Introduction link between women and supernaturalism. It was women who, after all, had the truly haunted intellects, whose ‘collective genius’ was sus­ pended between their maternal powers and their limited intellectual achievement. Inasmuch as they found themselves and their powers equivocalized, hystericized, and spiritualized, Victorian women were at some more profound level the real ghosts in the Victorian noon­ tide. (p. 30)

Women writers then used this culturally imposed, ‘sacralized’ realm in which they were placed to their advantage by writing stories about literary spirits that reflected a subversive feminist agenda: Writing a ghost story . . . had for the nineteenth-century woman the double meaning not only of making out of the nothingness of the white page something visible . . . but also of making her position as well as her self legible, visible, readable, so that she who had been legally, financially, even intellectually absent in the broad light of day could assert in her supernatural writings the truth of her spiritual and cultural being. (p. 147)

According to Dickerson, one of the key ways that Victorian women connected to the idea of spirituality (and used it as something em­ powering instead of limiting) is through the Spiritualist movement that began in the mid-nineteenth century and stood directly opposed to the scientific (male-dominated) world of rationality from which women were excluded. Andrew Smith also makes this important con­nection to Spiritualism and discusses the movement as a major impetus for the ghost story (and ideas about the spirit world in general) during the period, highlighting Spiritualist texts as ‘an alternative exploration of the ghostly’ (p. 97). Smith also expands Dickerson’s emphasis on feminist readings of women’s ghost stories by discussing both male and female writers and including a wider historical range of stories that are read through political, economic and colonial contexts.26 Like Dickerson, Smith is interested in how the ghostly ‘articulates feelings of estrangement and alienation’ (p. 2) and how ‘the spectre thus makes visible the invisible contra­ dictions that are represented as ghostly political possibilities which are silenced or made absent by the dominant culture’ (p. 2). Smith 11

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goes beyond previous studies of the genre, however, by showing ‘how the ghost story between 1840 and 1920 engages with a series of grand political debates about economics, national and colonial identities, gender, and the workings of the literary imagination’ (p. 2). Likewise, Clare Stewart, in ‘“Weird Fascination”: The Response to Victorian Women’s Ghost Stories’, provides invaluable infor­ mation regarding the reception of women’s ghost stories during the Victorian period. She finds that the mixed reviews that women authors were usually met with were a result of reviewers not know­ ing how to precisely ‘read’ the social intentions behind their works. She states: For women writers, supernatural tales enabled exploration of danger­ ous subjects and an entrance into the kind of theological arenas normally only accessible to men. Readers, although not necessarily able to identify or vocalize this specifically as a problem, were aware that there were differences between supernatural fiction and more mainstream literature that they struggled to contend with. It is this attempt to label, to recognize the cause of a vague feeling of dis­ comfiture, to deal with the unfamiliar, which is often at the root of any unfavourable reviews.27

Though her essay is limited to the later nineteenth century, some of her conclusions can and should be applied to women’s writing from the earlier part of the century as well. For instance, she claims, ‘The ghost story proved an ideal discourse for hidden agendas and deeper textual levels, as well as representing, on the wider level, women’s own marginalization, like the supernatural, to the realms of the irrational/Other. The more the subject is examined, the more it seems that Victorian society, women’s reading and writing, and the ghost story are irrevocably intertwined’. 28 These char­ acteristics had their beginnings in the Romantic era, though, by women who laid the groundwork for these later Victorian authors. In other places, Stewart’s claims about the change in women’s supernatural writing during the nineteenth century need to be questioned and expanded. She states that ‘a change in emphasis had already been witnessed from the gothic stories of the early part of 12

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Introduction

the nineteenth century and end of the eighteenth, in that ultimate responsibility for events was placed, not on unstoppable fate, but on the human characters and their choice of actions. Neither were the supernatural circumstances negated by physical explanations at the end’.29 There are many works, in particular poetic works, from the Romantic era that focus on human choice and its repercussions (examples of this are shown in this study, especially in regard to Anne Bannerman and Charlotte Dacre’s Romantic ballads). Like­wise, Romantic supernatural literature did not always have ‘explanations at the end’. The Gothic ballads of Bannerman and Dacre do not offer such natural explanations for the supernatural activity; their ghosts retain their mystery. Stewart concludes her essay by recognizing the ongoing appeal and sense of mystery that the ambiguity in women’s ghost literature continues to offer readers: Whilst there are those who express dissatisfaction that they fail to provide conclusive answers, most of their appeal would instantly vanish if it were otherwise. Victorian women’s ghost stories may have been regarded at times by their contemporaries as being variously mystifying, complicated, frustrating and infuriating, but it is for all these reasons that they retained their popularity, and also why they hold such magnetism for a modern reader. Their hidden agendas and multifarious layers ensure that they will enjoy life eternal.30

Likewise, in ‘Visible Margins: Women Writers and the English Ghost Story’, Nickianne Moody recognizes the sensitivity to cultural issues that is inherent in twentieth-century women’s ghost stories and the necessary connectedness of those stories to the historic times in which they were written: ‘what is perceived as frightening by the woman writer of ghost stories, and the discourse used to convey it, is sensitive to the changing cultural rather than the literary climate’.31 Though, like Dickerson, Moody concentrates on the ghost story as an avenue for understanding women’s experience and struggles against patriarchy, her argument opens up the possibility of extend­ ing discussion of women’s treatment of social issues not directly related to gender. On the enduring importance of ghost stories, Moody says: 13

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain All hauntings invite the percipient to share their feelings, and the conventions of the ghost story provide a rhetoric for presenting personal experience . . . These stories are purposeful. Pure descriptive­ ness is not enough for them to succeed; the reader must engage with a chain of consequence. Ghost stories linger rather than shock. They provoke the re-evaluation of the personal history that has been made known. So the ghost story becomes a territory for describing and accounting for powerful emotions such as grief, loneliness, frustration and despair.32

These stories provide a space for ‘social acknowledgement’ and ‘cultural expression’,33 a space that was started by women writers as early as the eighteenth century. Another important difference between men’s and women’s ghost literature is that there is simply more of it written by women. In his retrospective essay on ‘The Ghost Story and Its Exponents’ (1923), S. M. Ellis recognizes the importance of women within the super­ natural genre and acknowledges several female writers as producing some of the best ghost literature of the nineteenth century, includ­ ing Elizabeth Gaskell, Amelia B. Edwards, Rosa Mulholland, Charlotte Riddell and Mary Louisa Molesworth.34 More than half a century later, Richard Dalby, in his Preface to Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers (1988), states that ‘Over the past 150 years Britain has led the world in the art of the classic ghost story, and it is no exaggeration to state that at least fifty per cent of quality examples in the genre were by women writers’.35 In her collection, What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (1989), Jessica Amanda Salmonson is even more liberal in her estimation, asserting that ‘supernatural fiction written in English in the last two hundred years has been predominantly women’s literature and much of it is clearly feminist’. She goes on to say that ‘as much as seventy per cent of the supernatural fiction [in British and North American Victorian magazines] was the work of women, the majority of it never reprinted in any form and only haphazardly preserved’.36 Another important gender distinction within the supernatural liter­ature tradition is the idea of Male and Female Gothic, which has been well elucidated in recent years, beginning with Ellen Moers’s 14

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seminal statement in Literary Women (1976): ‘What I mean by Female Gothic is easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic.’37 Though there has been much subsequent debate over the potential uses of the term within the Gothic trad­ ition, Moers’s importance in allowing women to claim a tradition within the Gothic is now firmly established. Lauren Fitzgerald goes so far as to say, ‘Moers has a place not only in the history of Gothic criticism but also in the Gothic tradition, as much, really, as Radcliffe. Neither is quite the “originator” of Female Gothic, as tradition or critical category, as was once believed, but their importance as “pioneers” in both is indisputable.’38 With the coining of the term came new opportunities and chal­ lenges as critics of the Gothic began to assimilate the notion of ‘Female Gothic’ into studies of Gothic writings by women. Building on Moers’s work, Juliann Fleenor, in The Female Gothic (1983), was one of the first critics to explore the many possibilities of this category. In her introduction to the collection, Fleenor states that ‘a major problem of definition of the Female Gothic’ is that ‘it has many levels and many forms and is a protean entity not one thing. There is not just one Gothic but Gothics.’39 More recently, Diana Wallace has noted the continuing elusiveness of both Gothic and Female Gothic, saying, ‘“Gothic” is a notoriously slippery term, “Female Gothic” perhaps even more contentiously so.’40 Wallace and Andrew Smith, in their recent collection, The Female Gothic: New Directions (2009), also highlight the many other descriptive terms for Female Gothic, giving a sense of how Moers’s phrase has taken on a life (or afterlife) of its own: ‘women’s Gothic’, ‘feminist Gothic’, and ‘Gothic feminism’, to name a few.41 If attempting to pin down this term has been a continuing problem for Gothicists, then its critical variations should also be seen as strengths. If we embrace the idea of Female Gothic as a protean form, as Fleenor says, then we have the opportunity to expand its discussion into many different areas of cultural analysis. Earlier discussions of the Female Gothic were centred on feminist agendas and as such, showed how Gothic writing by women was influenced by a limiting patriarchy and women’s efforts to free themselves from a male tradition that attempted to define women’s place in the world. 15

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Classifying Gothic by gender has its limitations, but it provides a helpful starting point in recognizing some of the basic distinctions between ghost literature authored by women as opposed to that written by men, as well as why women were more naturally attracted to this genre of writing. One particularly useful description of how the Female Gothic influenced women writers is given by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolmar: ‘From the female Gothic, they inherited a series of themes and images – of women victimized by violence in their own homes, of women disposed of homes and property, of the necessity of understanding female history, and of the bonds between women, living and dead, which help to ensure women’s survival’.42 Likewise, Rosemary Jackson offers a helpful discussion of the reasons why women were naturally suited to the writing of supernatural literature and how their insistence on the other-worldly was directly tied to worldly concerns.43 She contends that unlike many male authors, who ‘investigate “horror” for its own sake’, women seek to ‘extend our sense of the human, the real, beyond the blinkered limits of male science, language, and rational­ ism’.44 In other words, women, in their ghost literature, concentrated on the limits of this world and were generally more interested than their male counterparts in changing the public’s mindset by bringing to notice problems that existed in the everyday world. Jackson connects this tendency to the feminist tradition and Hélène Cixous’s notion in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ of writing to bring about change: ‘writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures’.45 In terms of the supernatural, whereas the majority of men in their writing were tied more closely to the Male Gothic’s reliance on out­ ward, physical horror for its own sake, women inherited a female tradition of psychological terror, which was grounded in very real social concerns stemming from women’s precarious and dependent placement in a patriarchal society. In later decades, this tradition expanded out, taking the form of other social concerns, such as poverty, disease and imperialism, which impacted all of Britain, not just British women. Thus, one of the most important goals of this study is to extend the definition of the Female Gothic and build on the work of such scholars as 16

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Ellen Moers, E. J. Clery, Alison Milbank, Diane Long Hoeveler, Suzanne Becker, and, in particular, Diana Wallace, whose recent work has attempted to move discussion of the Female Gothic past the traditional realm of the novel and to examine women’s short stories as a form of Female Gothic. In her essay, ‘Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic’, Wallace contends that ‘The ghost story as a form has allowed women writers special kinds of freedom, not merely to include the fantastic and the supernatural, but also to offer critiques of male power and sexuality which are often more radical than those in more realist genres’ (p. 57). Ghost stories by women gain even more critical importance when placed within the women’s Gothic tradition: ‘The Female Gothic is perhaps par excellence the mode within which women writers have been able to explore deep-rooted female fears about women’s power­less­ ness and imprisonment within patriarchy’ (p. 57). One of Wallace’s most important points (one which will be expanded by the poems and stories included in this present work) is her observation of how ghost stories by female authors (specifically, Elizabeth Gaskell, May Sinclair and Elizabeth Bowen) complicate two of the main tenets of Female Gothic outlined by Anne Williams in Art of Darkness (1995): the explained supernatural and the happy ending. Wallace rightly notes that many female-authored ghost stories are ‘an exception to both these rules’ (p. 58), yet remain important contributions to traditional Female Gothic concerns. I would argue that, in particular, nineteenth-century ghost literature by women shows the Gothic becoming more experi­ mental and subversive as its writers abandoned the stereotypical Gothic heroines of the eighteenth century in order to create more realistic, middle-class characters (both living and dead, male and female) who rage against the limits imposed on them by the natural world. The ghosts of women’s Gothic thereby become reflections of the social, sexual, economic and racial troubles of the living. Expanding the parameters of Female Gothic and moving it into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries allows us to recognize women’s ghost literature as a specific strain of the Female Gothic that began not with Ann Radcliffe, but with the Romantic Gothic ballads of women writers such as Anne Bannerman and Charlotte Dacre in the first decade of the nineteenth century. From the supernatural 17

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unrest of the ghosts in these Gothic ballads, we are able to see a trad­ ition that was continued in the ghost poems and short stories of the next one hundred years and onward. Christina Rossetti’s revenants are the offspring of the troubled souls that peopled these earlier ballads, and her ghosts have the same concerns as ghosts in Victorian short stories. In attempting to establish this new area of Female Gothic, I feel that to arbitrarily divide these ghosts simply because of genre would be to limit the discussion of this form of women’s Gothic. There­ fore, I freely discuss poems alongside short stories and privilege content over form in order to show a more direct line of develop­ ment and use of the ghost as a figure of social critique over the long nineteenth century. By beginning my study with ballads and ending with short stories, I want to showcase the progression of this ghost literature from its initial concern with female/male relations at the beginning of the century to how later nineteenth-century women explored the troubled place of marginalized men and women in a rapidly changing world and successfully utilized the popular realm of short fiction in Victorian times in order to advance their social critiques among the ever-increasing British reading public. Gender will always be central to any discussion of these authors and their works, but I also want to extend the discussion beyond gender into the economic and political realm in order to recognize a wider and more complex social consciousness that is present in women’s Gothic. As the nineteenth century progressed and ghost stories became increasingly popular, women writers continued to highlight female characters and gender concerns, but there also develops an added emphasis on a diverse range of topics beyond gender, such as rental properties, inheritances, battlefields, race relations and imperialism. If the traditional Gothic has always been concerned with forms of marginalization, then women’s ghost literature of the nineteenth century provides an extended example of the con­tinuance of this concern and an important link between traditional and modern Gothic, while at the same time continuing to expand and redefine the much-contested term ‘Female Gothic’. Thus, this work takes Female Gothic in some of the ‘new directions’ that Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith highlight in their recent collection of essays, namely ‘national identity, sexuality, language, race and history’.46 18

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The range of women authors included in this book is necessarily selective. We will never know exactly how many women produced ghost literature (many women wrote anonymously or under pseudo­ nyms), and we can never fully understand or appreciate the impact these stories had on the people who lived during the time this literature was published. All of the women in this book were con­ nected by a common goal: to raise awareness of social problems and inequalities through the figure of the ghost. The writers I discuss, from such seemingly disparate figures as Anne Bannerman and Ellen Wood, were chosen to illustrate several ranges in the development of ghost literature written by women. Instead of a comprehensive survey of the supernatural works by each of the women included in this study, I show how a particular theme – vengeful revenants, sexualized ghosts, haunted houses and imperialism – is illustrated and how that particular social issue relates to and expands ongoing debates about the Female Gothic. Chronologically, my study encompasses the beginnings of women’s ghost literature at the start of the nineteenth century, in the Romantic ballads of Anne Bannerman and Charlotte Dacre, to writers who continued their literary output into the beginning of the twentieth century and beyond, such as Bithia Mary Croker, Mary Louisa Molesworth and Vernon Lee. On a geographic level, this book also covers a broad range, starting in Great Britain, then expanding out to the far reaches of the Empire, as Ellen Wood and Bithia Mary Croker’s supernatural stories highlight the ghosts of India. The women in this study also represent varying economic and social levels. Writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee and Christina Rossetti were comfortably middle class, while other authors, like Anne Bannerman and Charlotte Riddell, struggled on the verge of poverty for many years. The majority of the authors I discuss were ‘working women’ who made successful careers out of writing and editing and managed to financially support their (sometimes large) families. These include Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell and Ellen Wood.47 A few authors are relatively unknown today and biographical details for these women are difficult to come by. Anne Bannerman died in poverty in a small town outside of Edinburgh, and her (possibly unnamed) grave has not yet been located. There are also few sources on the life and works of Elizabeth Harcourt 19

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Rolls. I also have tried to create a balanced discussion of women from three main areas: (1) women whose lives and works are relatively unknown and neglected; (2) women who are now more widely read, but who may not be immediately identified as supernatural writers; and (3) women who made their reputations as super­ natural writers. Even among the more widely read authors, their ghost literature remains largely ignored by scholars. This includes the short stories of Elizabeth Gaskell, and the Gothic poems of Charlotte Dacre and Christina Rossetti. The authors and works I have selected are meant to show the cultural changes that occurred during the nineteenth century (as the middle class became more literate and more mobile) and the shifting anxieties that are mirrored in their writing. The imperial horrors present in the work of Bithia Mary Croker could hardly have been imagined by women of the late eighteenth century, but issues of gender inequality are relevant for all women included in this study. It is my hope that readers will see how women’s ghost literature adapted and changed with the times, as well as how these authors managed to excel in different literary forms, from Gothic ballads to short stories. Regarding form and plot, I have endeavored to include several examples of women’s ghost stories and poems that end badly, so to speak, in order to complicate the notion that the Female Gothic tends to have happy endings. The majority of tales in this book refuse to leave their readers in a positive mood, further heightening the sense of spectral/social trouble that underlies the plotlines. By combining well-known women writers with lesser-known (and as yet ‘un-rediscovered’) authors, I have sought to suggest the range of ghost literature written by women and to show the extent to which they contributed to the genre of the ‘social supernatural’, as well as the specific issues that intrigued these writers. Often, these authors transformed their own personal anxieties into ghost narra­ tives. These anxieties are as varied as the women themselves, ranging from issues of artistic popularity, literary ‘worth’, and recognition as an author, to concerns over how to financially support one’s family and, by the latter half of the century, expanding outward to respond to Britain’s role as a world power. As many recent critics of nineteenth-century women’s writing have pointed out, several of these issues are only beginning to be discussed and understood, 20

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including the neglected genre of ‘popular writing’. In their intro­ duction to Popular Victorian Women Writers (2004), Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones address this neglect, as they cite Amy Cruse’s influential 1935 study, The Victorians and Their Books, asserting: Contemporary literary history now has to address both the ‘reposi­ tories of the higher culture’, and debate what ‘higher culture’ might mean and who says so. It also takes stock of ‘old favourites in tattered covers’, the books that were once ‘new volumes from the circulating library’ and attempts to quantify their importance to individual readers and the wider society.48

This study also attempts to recover the literary worth of some of these ‘old favourites’ by analysing women’s writing during the nineteenth century from not only a specific genre, the supernatural, but also from a particular position, that of social critique. In so doing, the authors discussed, along with the works they dedicated their writing careers to, will once again come to light and will hopefully spark new conversations about the continuing significance of the Female Gothic and ghost literature. When we think about ghosts, social critique is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Ghost literature by women, however, offers us spectres that are more ‘real’ because they are grounded in contemporary social concerns that affected real people. Women writers of the nineteenth century truly brought ghosts home – in all senses of the phrase. They positioned their ghosts on British soil and made those spectres matter to the British reading public in a body of literature that reflected fears that were as real as they were supernatural. The ghosts are often scary, and all the more so because they bring with them a heightened awareness of problems that already haunt the living. In this literature, characters and readers alike are left with the un­ easiness of these issues long after the ghosts disappear.

21

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1 Female revenants and the beginnings of women’s ghost literature  Distressed heroines are a mainstay of Gothic literature. These characters, so integral to the Gothic landscape of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are repeatedly tormented by oppressive forces, kidnapped and imprisoned against their will, and otherwise deceived or misled by the sinister forces around them. In recent years, however, studies of women’s Gothic writing from the turn of the nineteenth century give us new ways of appreciating the extent to which women authors in particular used violent, nontraditional women in their writings as a means of embodying and claiming – through a piece of literature – a power that was denied them in the ‘outside’ world. In Women’s Gothic (2004), E. J. Clery challenges conventional notions of what anxieties lay beneath women’s writing of the early Romantic period: the dualism of male and female traditions involves a simplification of the reality and fails to account for many aspects of women’s writing in the period. It has notably distorted our understanding of women’s achievements in Gothic writing. The current fascination with the Gothic genre in the academy and in the culture generally, has led to many studies of early female writers of Gothic, and almost invariably their works have been read as parables of patriarchy involving the heroine’s danger from wicked father figures, and her search for the absent mother.1

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Yet Clery sees something missing from this traditional critical frame­ work, asking, ‘But what happens if we lay aside our assumptions about women’s writing and look again at women’s Gothic? What we find there suggests the need for another story: wild passions, the sublime, supernatural phenomena, violent conflict, murder and torture, sexual excess and perversion, outlandish settings, strange minglings of history and fantasy.’2 Likewise, Adriana Craciun notices similar limitations in critical readings of Romantic women writers: Central to feminist literary criticism on British women writers is the usually unspoken aim to demonstrate that women as a class (that is, as a sex outside of class) eschew violence, destructiveness, and cruelty, except in self-defense and rebellion, like Gilbert and Gubar’s im­ prisoned madwoman in the attic. This faith in women’s benevolence, for it is indeed a foundational belief of many modern feminisms, originated in the rise of the bourgeois order itself, which enshrined the maternal, nurturing, and domestic middle-class woman as the protected, private moral center of this new socio-economic order.3

In order to challenge this social stereotype, women writers of the Gothic appropriated the ballad tradition in order to voice concerns that they could not otherwise publicly articulate within the wider culture of their time. Craciun notes that Anne Bannerman’s otherworldly female figures – mermaids, revenants and prophetesses – ‘emerge as deadly “women” poets whose voices usher in destruction, not creation’.4 These figures are unwomanly because they destroy and refuse to remain silent. The importance of the speaking dead body has also been com­ mented on by Diana Fuss, who discusses how poems about speaking corpses ‘bring language more fully in line with death; they are literary fictions that seek to revivify and reauthorize the dead.’5 Fuss goes on to say that ‘the corpse poem poses a series of difficult questions about death, survival, and the animating power of language’. 6 However, Fuss’s argument is centred on the notion that nineteenthcentury corpse poems were written as comic or religious pieces, and that it is not until the twentieth century that poems spoken by the dead begin to concern themselves with history and politics.7 I would argue that Gothic ballads written by women complicate this 23

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idea by concerning themselves with socio-cultural assumptions that the truest, most feminine women were silent – seen but not heard. In other words, through poetic language, women claimed identities that were denied them elsewhere. Supernatural, otherworldly characters could embody this subversive language more easily than regular, everyday women because these women, being beyond the expectations of the natural world, did not have to fit into the prescribed gender roles of the time. According to Craciun, ‘Incarnations of fatal women – the seductress, the mermaid, the queen, the muse – recur throughout the works of women writers, demonstrating that fatal women played an important role in the development of women’s poetic identities in the Romantic period.’8 Subsequently, Romantic women poets allow scholars a ‘unique opportunity to reevaluate not only Romanticism and gender, but also the meaning and usefulness of a distinct female literary tradition and even a distinct femaleness.’9 It is not in the living, innocent Gothic heroine, but in the dead, vengeful revenant that this distinct female identity is fully realized. In her essay, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci: the revenant as femme fatale in romantic poetry’, Lieselotte E. Kurth-Voigt lists the various forms in which fatal women appear in Romantic writing, such as ‘beautiful profligate’, ‘passionate temptress’, ‘power-hungry woman’, and ‘evil demon’.10 According to Kurth-Voigt, literary interest in the revenant began in 1725, after stories spread across Europe and Great Britain of a Hungarian man, who supposedly died, was buried, and then reappeared as a living being. This event was followed by numerous scientific studies attempting to prove the existence of the living dead. Kurth-Voigt provides an overview of early, maleauthored female revenant poems, such as Goethe’s ‘The Corinthian Bride’ (1798), Robert Southey’s ‘The Old Woman of Berkeley’ (1799), and M. G. Lewis’s ‘The Grim White Woman’ from Tales of Wonder (1801).11 These poems present female revenants that differ from those found in poems by women writers. The women in maleauthored poems are either taken from their lovers by forces beyond their lovers’ control (and often still remain faithful to their lovers after death) or are evil women in life who continue their treachery after death. Lewis portrays the character ‘Janet’ as the stereotypical helpless heroine of Gothic literature. As the wronged woman of 24

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the poem, she is unable to seek revenge through her own power. When her lover, Ronald, abandons her, she must seek assistance from the mysterious Grim White Woman in order to regain Ronald. Then, after losing him a second time because of a failed magic spell, Janet promptly becomes insane and dies a raving lunatic. Women writers of the Gothic ballad chose, instead, to depict strong female revenants that are far from stereotypical, helpless heroines of earlier Gothic novels, or the unredeemable, oversimplified evil women of male-authored Gothic ballads. In Gothic ballads by women, there is a recurring motif in which female char­ acters, who are either passive or in some way powerless in their lives, are transformed by death and return from the grave as empowered and often intimidating figures seeking revenge on those who wronged them. They seek no outside legitimization for their exist­ ence or their power. Their strength comes from within themselves and grows out of their past traumas as silenced or victimized women. This motif is at the centre of Anne Bannerman’s ‘The Perjured Nun’ and ‘The Penitent’s Confession’ from her Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802),12 as well as Charlotte Dacre’s ‘The Aireal Chorus’, and ‘The Skeleton Priest’ from her collection Hours of Solitude (1805). Victorian writer Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls con­ tinued this distinct genre with her 1854 poem, ‘The Ballad of Sir Rupert’, which features a ‘Spectre Nun’, who haunts a Spanish battlefield. Rolls’s poem, not only represents the transition from the Romantic to the Victorian eras, but, with its use of a revenant that blends gender issues with the larger problems of war, marks a shift in women’s ghost literature and signals Victorian women’s more direct and wider involvement with the supernatural as social critique. All three poets use the female ghost as a way of transform­ ing helpless women into empowered figures who, only in death, are able to speak and act for themselves. The description of these revenants as implacable beings alludes to their connection to con­ sciousness itself. They have privileged knowledge of the crimes and guilt of those around them and their unexpected or dreaded return represents the return of con­science to the living. These revenants provide the Female Gothic with its first representatives of social critique – women who embody and vocalize the dangers and crimes of gender inequality. 25

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Female ghosts in Anne Bannerman’s gothic tales Though not much is known about Anne Bannerman’s (1765–1829) life (or death, for that matter), it is clear from reading her few pub­ lished poetry collections that she possessed considerable talent for writing supernatural tales, culminating in the collection Tales of Superstition and Chivalry in 1802. With this use of the supernatural in her writing also came risqué subjects, such as illicit affairs and unashamedly sexual women.13 We do know that she never attained the success through her writing for which she hoped, despite the dedicated emotional and financial support Bannerman received from her long-time friend, the Edinburgh doctor, Robert Anderson, whose letters provide some of the most substantial biographical information available about the poet. He wrote to Joseph Cooper Walker in a letter dated 3 May 1800, after the publication of Bannerman’s first collection, Poems, that ‘the author is scarcely out of her teens’ but her works ‘are the production of no common mind’.14 In Anderson’s letters to Thomas Percy, it is clear that he cared deeply for Bannerman’s well-being, and he tried to provide for her following her mother’s death, a loss which left her financially destitute. Anderson encouraged Percy to read Tales of Superstition and Chivalry and later asked for Percy’s financial support for a planned volume of poems, which Bannerman chose to sell by subscription. Percy himself favoured Bannerman’s writing, telling Anderson in a letter dated 23 July 1803 of ‘the almost irresistible Spells which your enchanting Females are throwing over my mind’.15 However, Anderson seemed to sense that the reading public was not prepared for the daring subjects and themes of Bannerman’s literary ‘spells’. In a letter to Percy dated 24 January 1804, he expressed concern over her future as an author: Her literary powers, eminent as they are, do not seem, for any of her efforts hitherto, to be of ready or popular application. They are, perhaps, better qualified to acquire fame than profit. The Almighty regards with an equal eye all the works of his hand, but I cannot conceive what is to become of my young friend. I think that, from her own inability to earn a livelihood, her total want of relations, and her great merits, the public money might be worse applied than in affording her a small annuity.16 26

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Later, in June 1806, Anderson reported to Percy that Bannerman had undertaken the publication of her collected Poems (1807), which combined works from her first collection, Poems (1800) and Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802). He states that the subscription cost one guinea and that Bannerman had collected 250 names.17 Bannerman’s literary reputation was also noted by Sir Walter Scott in his April 1830 ‘Essay on imitations of the ancient ballad’: Miss Anne Bannerman likewise should not be forgotten, whose Tales of Superstition and Chivalry appeared about 1802. They were perhaps too mystical and too abrupt; yet if it be the purpose of this kind of ballad poetry powerfully to excite the imagination, without pretend­ ing to satisfy it, few persons have succeeded better than this gifted lady, whose volume is peculiarly fit to be read in a lonely house by a decaying lamp.18

In his review, Scott also recognizes what Percy described as Bannerman’s ‘enchanting’ literary talent, while at the same time hinting at the more inventive aspects of her supernatural writings that may frustrate contemporary readers by leaving them wanting more.19 This same quality can be applied to Bannerman’s female revenants, spectres that appear on the scene and then disappear just as quickly, leaving the reader both disturbed and enchanted by their presence. In ‘The Perjured Nun’, Anne Bannerman presents a sympathetic, yet powerful, female revenant who warns another woman not to follow her same fate. At the beginning of the poem, Geraldine does not believe the story of the Perjured Nun, who supposedly haunts a nearby tower. She calls the story a jest, ‘a dream’, and ‘an idle tale’ when her lover, Lord Henrie, tells her about his fear of the tower.20 She does not understand why he must go to the tower every night and wants to accompany him, asking, ‘And why do you say you must watch till day,/Where, alas! I may not be?’ (3–4). He warns her not to follow him to the tower and tells Geraldine that she may only watch the lights from the tower’s windows. Henrie describes his nightly visits to the tower as a duty which he must perform: 27

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain And urge me not, my own Geraldine! For it may not, cannot be! I am doom’d to this, and I may not miss, But none must watch with me. (25–8)

He has ‘doom’d’ himself by his actions, and his nightly visits to the tower become a forced ritual of atonement for his guilt. Henrie tells Geraldine that his task is dangerous, and if she sees the lights go out in the tower, his ‘hour of fate’ has arrived. He makes her promise not to go in search of him, saying, ‘You must swear to God, on the holy rood,/That you will not seek me there!’ (47–8). This insistence on the part of Henrie is partly for Geraldine’s safety but also is motivated by his desire to keep his secret past from her and to keep her from meeting the Perjured Nun, whom he has wronged. After Henrie leaves for the tower, Geraldine anxiously awaits his return and counts each hour Henrie is away. Her heart races with the ticking of the clock, and she ultimately decides to enter the tower to find Henrie. At this point in the poem, Bannerman describes Geraldine as very much a living being in order to juxtapose her vitality with the hollow sadness of the spectral Nun. Her heart beats quickly, her ‘pulse leaps . . . thro’ her burning brow’ (67), and as she enters the tower, ‘the blood rush’d back to her clay-cold feet’ (85). When she enters the tower, she embraces Henrie but finds that he is already dead: ‘Like the dead from the grave/Was the form she had clasp’d around!’ (89–90). Geraldine then sees ‘the phantom’ Nun (91), who immediately addresses Geraldine with the command, ‘Let your watching cease, and depart in peace,/For him you shall never see’ (95–6). Bannerman makes it clear to her readers that the Nun does not intend any violence toward Geraldine, and the Nun’s com­ ment suggests that she has done Geraldine a favour by ending her emotional connection with Henrie. The Perjured Nun then tells her story to Geraldine: For him! for him, I resign’d my vows, And the guilt is on my head. I could conjure here! but my hour draws near, And I may not rouse the dead! 28

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Female Revenants and the Beginnings of Women’s Ghost Literature For him! for him! I forsook my God, And his soul unblest shall be! And the sacred blood for man that flow’d, O Heaven! will it plead for me! (97–104)

Her story serves to communicate both suffering and knowledge to Geraldine, thereby saving her from a fate similar to the Perjured Nun’s. Andrew Elfenbein notes that this event also promotes the nun to ‘the place of a traditional male hero because she has dispatched a villain who threatened the heroine’.21 Taking this interpretation a step further, the Nun herself should be considered the true heroine of the poem because she manages to achieve revenge on Henrie while saving the powerless and meek Geraldine. The poem also suggests the tortured afterlife which awaits the ‘unblest’ soul of Henrie,22 as well as the ambiguous fate of the Nun, who continues to ask forgiveness from heaven for breaking her sacred vows to the church. The last lines of the poem again contrast the innocence of Geraldine with the tragic, guilty conscience of the Nun, who tells the girl: I hear a call you can never hear, And I may not now unfold! Let your soul be at peace, and your watching cease, For his faithless heart is cold! (105–8)

Though the Nun must ‘live’ with the guilt of her broken vows and remain to ‘haunt’ the tower (112), she has saved Geraldine from endangering her own virtue by continuing her relationship with Henrie. The Perjured Nun is a sympathetic being who suffers and relates the story of her sin in order to instruct Geraldine. At the same time, she is presented as a vengeful woman who causes the death of Henrie and succeeds in keeping her unfaithful lover away from his new romantic interest.23 The title of Bannerman’s poem, ‘The Penitent’s Confession’, hints at the success of the female revenant, Ellinor, whose ghostly return prompts her murderer to confess his crime. As with other rev­enant poems by women writers, the poem focuses on the spiritual terror, guilty conscience and subsequent confession of the murderer, rather 29

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than on physical horror related in details about how and why Ellinor was killed. The murderer, who remains unnamed and is known only as ‘the Penitent’, confesses his crime to a priest forty years after the murder of Ellinor. Bannerman makes it clear to readers that the Penitent could realistically get away with his crime because he tells the priest that on the night of the murder, ‘No soul shall know from whence, or where,/I came with Ellinor!’24 However, the crime remains in his memory, and the sight and sound of the dying Ellinor remains real to him, just as her ghost will soon become real to him as well: At the dead of night the deed was done, And I saw her laid upon the bier; But that stiffening hand and straining eye Are ever, ever near! That cry, I heard at deep midnight, I hear for evermore! (25–8, 31–2)

His memory signals that he already has some regret about the crime, and his guilt does not allow him to hear the prayers that are sung in the convent after Ellinor’s death. The Penitent travels to the surrounding woods in order to escape the songs, but his retreat is thwarted by the presence of the ghostly Ellinor: Its stiff, white arms were stretched wide, I could not pass it then; I tried to cross on either side, But it was all in vain. The form! the height! . . . I stood and gaz’d! The robes were white it wore! One thought of horror struck my heart, That it was Ellinor! (61–4, 69–72)

Her presence on the bridge restricts his movement, just as he restricted her movement during the strangulation. The Penitent can only refer to the ghost as ‘it’, though he recognizes the form as Ellinor. Her innocent whiteness is twice noticed by the man in his description of the encounter, her white dress and her ‘white arms . . . stretched 30

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wide’. His surprise at the ‘form’ and ‘height’ of the ghost also hints at the degree to which the dead Ellinor physically intimidates her assailant in a manner that was not possible when she was living. This intimidation caused by the female body in Bannerman’s poem prefigures the use of ghosts by Victorian women writers. Thomas Fick, in ‘Authentic Ghosts and Real Bodies: Negotiating Power in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Ghost Stories’, a study of ghosts in works by American women writers, notes that revenant forms ‘give the powerful and self-transforming heroine a physical presence’.25 He goes on to say: the authentic ghost story renders in dramatic terms the nineteenthcentury woman reader’s desire – if not always her ability – to act forcefully in the realm of the body politic. If the ghost is authentic because it is a woman acting bodily in this world, then the ghost story is authentic because it affects the world outside the narrative – it has cultural substance.26

Fick also cites Nina Auerbach’s Woman and the Demon (1982), in which she claims that the ‘cultural myth of a slain and self-restoring heroine’ relates to ‘the self-transforming power surging beneath apparent victimization’.27 Both Auerbach and Fick’s discussions centre on the importance of the return of the physical bodies of these wronged women and the Victorian terror caused by the intimi­ dating physical body of a woman freed from earthly and societal restraints. In Bannerman’s poems, the terror of the female revenant is also caused by her spiritual presence as a harbinger of guilt and retribution. These women are not only spectral bodies, but also ‘speaking’ bodies who remind the living of their past indiscretions. They are not as concerned with the loss of their physical forms as they are with the loss of their virtue and emotional freedom. The Penitent further describes the increased physical strength of Ellinor, telling the priest that she leaned on his arm with a ‘dull and deadly weight’ (84). The double meaning of ‘deadly weight’ suggests the weight of Ellinor’s physical body and the weight of the guilt on his mind, which is mentioned by the murderer a few lines later:

31

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain I moved on, . . . but that weight of death Will never leave my brain! I thought I never might uncling That ghastly arm again! (89–92)

She physically and mentally ‘holds’ her attacker in a reversal of the victim and the victimized. Ellinor’s ghost then drags the Penitent ‘by the arm’ (95) to the seashore and leaves him there. Unlike the Perjured Nun, Ellinor never vocalizes her suffering (though her actions speak in the absence of her voice), and her past remains mysterious. Her ghost remains an enigmatic figure both to the Peni­tent and to the reader. Though she does not discuss ‘The Peni­ tent’s Confession’ or ‘The Perjured Nun’ in her chapter on Anne Bannerman in Fatal Women of Romanticism (2003), Adriana Craciun calls Bannerman’s ambiguity a ‘(proto)feminist resistance to ideals of femininity and feminized ideals’.28 Likewise, in a later article on Bannerman’s use of the ballad, Craciun notes that ‘by exciting but refusing to satisfy our desire to unveil the feminized ideal, Bannerman foregrounds the ideal’s power and centrality in ballads, and simul­ taneously foregrounds the power of the poet in so expertly seducing her readers’.29 Bannerman’s ambiguity, as well as the reader’s frustration at encountering a partly realized character, is a comment on the instability of many women in the period, and, indeed, on the financial, social and literary instability of her own life and career. This challenging of conventional expectations in her poetry is something Bannerman herself commented upon in a letter dated 17 October 1804 to Thomas Hood, in which she said that she was ‘well aware that from their peculiarity of subject, it was not to be expected [the poems] could please generally’.30 However ambiguous Ellinor’s past circumstances may have been, her continuing effect on the mind of her murderer is clear. Forty years later, the man’s guilty conscience, represented in the figure of Ellinor, forces him to confess to the priest. He not only has mem­ ories of his encounter with the ghost, but like his victim, is left with physical scars. He shocks the priest by showing him the arm Ellinor touched, which is now ‘a dry and wither’d bone’ (104). This spectacle places fear within the priest’s mind as ‘he quak’d to think that arm had met/The touch of Ellinor’ (107–8). The physical remembrance 32

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becomes a part of the Penitent, and the arm becomes a ‘living dead’ object, a sort of momento mori meant to remind the man of the woman he murdered. By the poem’s end, despite his confession, the Penitent remains unpardoned by heaven and wanders near Ellinor’s grave. Without forgiveness by the church or heaven, his ‘deep, deep groans’ are ‘heard for evermore’ (115, 116) by the priest, and the murderer punishes himself to a death in life, which serves as a reversal of Ellinor’s life in death. The villains and the virtuous: Charlotte Dacre’s female revenants Though Charlotte Dacre (1772?–1825) is best known for her radical treatment of femininity and violence in Zofloya (1806), she also pro­ vides a lengthy examination of the psychological effects of abandon­ ment and revenge through the female revenants in her poetry col­ lection, Hours of Solitude (1805), and like her contemporary, Anne Bannerman, Dacre includes poems that discuss violence against women. ‘The Aireal Chorus; or, The Warning’ contains a female revenant who returns to tell the story of her murder at the hands of her lover to another woman who is about to meet the same fate. Like Bannerman’s female revenants, the unnamed woman in Dacre’s poem has the power to communicate her suffering and thereby revenges herself by preventing her unfaithful lover from gaining another victim. The ‘aireal chorus’ is the murdered woman’s voice, who begins the poem with her warning to a ‘Lady’: ‘Tempt no more this dang’rous wood;/Blood-besprinkled is the way,/Evil lurks, to injure good’.31 In order to convince the lady not to enter the wood, the revenant relates her painful past: I was once a virgin fair, Morven lov’d, and thought him true; Morven left me to despair – Morven thus will do by you. (9–12)

The situation of the revenant mirrors the impending fate of the unsuspecting lady. She fell under the influence of Morven and describes his magical power: ‘If you step in magic spell,/Never may 33

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you turn again’ (31–2). Although she could not escape Morven’s ‘horrid charm’ (18) and ‘magic words’ (19) while living, the rev­ enant is able to break his ‘magic spell’ after death by warning the lady. The revenant both empowers the lady with knowledge she did not previously possess and is empowered herself by preventing her former lover from claiming another victim. This prevention gains even more significance later in the poem, when the ghost tells the lady exactly what Morven is: Lo! they rush – they seize you now – In your bosom dart their fangs; Now your blood begins to flow – Wild they suck amid your pangs. Spent with fury, now give o’er – Yelling bear you swift away; Sink to hell, and rise no more Till they scent another prey. (33­–40)

Because Morven is a vampire and depends on the blood of others for his sustenance, the ghost’s warning to the lady and the sub­ sequent prevention of her entrance into the woods serves not only to deny Morven his lover but also injures his ‘health’ by denying him human blood. In the symbolic sense, Morven took the deceased woman’s heart because she ‘lov’d, and thought him true’ (10, 42), but he also took her physical life by drinking her blood. By warning the lady, the ghost inflicts the same action on the unfaithful and wicked Morven, albeit indirectly and with less violence. As with Anne Bannerman’s Perjured Nun, the ghost’s power lies in her ability to retell her tale and to prevent physical and emotional damage to other women. She repeats her story in the final lines of the poem, and this repetition signals both her triumph over Morven and her ability to keep repeating the warning to any future women who are facing the same danger. This unnamed ‘Lady’ will become another lady who will receive the same knowledge from the revenant, making the ghost a ‘living’ force that exists in opposition to the evil of Morven. This resistance to silence and passivity is what James A. Dunn describes as the ‘ideological liberation’ of Dacre’s female characters, as she ‘sets her women free from the destiny of passive 34

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suffering so widely represented and accepted by Gothic con­ven­ tions’.32 Though this liberation has largely been discussed by critics interested in Dacre’s novels, the female revenants in her poems also achieve a freedom from earthly (female) restraint. The ghost in ‘The Aireal Chorus’ transforms from passive victim to active messenger after her death and succeeds in revenging herself on her unfaithful lover. A female revenant who returns to warn another woman of im­ pending doom is also the subject of Dacre’s ‘The Skeleton Priest; or, the Marriage of Death’. Despite the title, the poem centres not on a ‘Skeleton Priest’ but on a young woman named Irene who travels through the woods to meet her lover, a man she considers her soon-to-be husband, Orlando. The opening lines of the poem hint at the impending disruption of Irene’s world by describing the disruption in nature as Irene sets out on her journey: ‘The winds whistled loud the bleak caverns among,/The nightingale fearfully lower’d her song,/The moon in dark vapors retir’d’.33 In addition to this ominous change in the natural world, there is a storm that provides another warning, but which Irene ignores: ‘Her white veil it flutter’d as onward she flew,/Not regarding the tempest, tho’ harsher it blew’ (7–8). The storm itself seems to be pushing Irene back to the safety of her home, but she continues onward and goes deeper into the wood, toward her meeting with Orlando. As she walks, a flash of lightning illuminates her surroundings, and she finds herself ‘close to a precipice brink’ (16), suggesting her nearness to danger. At the same instant, she hears a mysterious disembodied voice cry, ‘Beware!’ (18). At first, in her questioning of the strange voice, she considers the possibility that it may be a voice sent to help her: ‘“Who bids me beware?” she trembling exclaim’d;/“Say, art thou a guardian who may not be nam’d,/Or was it my fancy alone?”’ (19–21). Her initial instinct is to listen to the voice, and she admits her fear that she will never be Orlando’s bride, saying, ‘this is the night of my doom’ (27). She subsequently mistakes, however, the nature of the voice and takes it for an evil presence. In her fear, she makes a fatal wish, asking, ‘Oh, spirit of darkness! wherever you be,/I ask but this night for my happiness free;/Let the rest be o’ershadow’d with gloom’ (28–30). At this point, Irene is ignorant of the fact that the voice means to save her from her fate 35

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and to stop her from meeting the fatal Orlando, but her wish for one night of happiness is granted by the evil spirit, who waits for her beyond the forest. Irene continues her journey and is suddenly met by a mysterious ‘lady’, who wears a dress ‘more fair than the day’ (35). She follows Irene but makes it clear that she has come to help her and means her no harm: ‘O be not afraid, lovely maiden’, she cried, ‘But grant me the favor to walk by your side; My road is the same as your own: The bride of Orlando you hasten to be, But that is an hour you never may see, And ’tis gloomy to wander alone.’ (37–42)

The lady’s words are full of double meanings. They are indeed on the same road to meet Orlando, but the mysterious lady knows what awaits them because she also has been on this road previously in her own life. She suffered the same fate as Irene and made the same mistake when she put her trust in the false Orlando. She warns Irene that she will never be the bride of Orlando, which proves to be true when Orlando turns into Death itself at their marriage. Like the warning voice in ‘The Aireal Chorus’, this female spectre comes to warn the unsuspecting young woman on her way to ruin, but, unlike the outcome of the previous poem, this lady is met with fear and disdain. Irene calls her a ‘prophet of woe’ (43), as the lady changes from a ‘guardian’ to a dangerous, untrustworthy presence. In addition to her words, the lady holds ‘a mouldering skull in her hand’ and ‘a lamp the red blood on her bosom betray’d’ (46, 47), showing Irene a graphic picture of her own bodily fate if she continues her journey. To this image, the lady combines another warning, more detailed than the first: ‘You start, lovely maiden! What folly is fear! And what in this skull can so hideous appear, Since you may resemble it soon; Unless you consent to be guided by me, Return to your home, live contented and free, Or your journey may end in the tomb.’ (49–54) 36

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As if ignoring a parental warning, Irene refuses to listen to or heed the deathly vision which the lady presents. She obstinately states that she will marry Orlando, no matter what ‘sorrow’ (60) befalls her. At this point, the reader begins to suspect that Irene is making the wrong decision and that her words will return to haunt her more than she is haunted by the mysterious lady. In this way, Dacre establishes the lady and her warning as a pathetic presence in the poem, whose efforts on behalf of Irene remain ignored. A victim of Orlando herself, she is a plaintive voice that selflessly worries for the well-being of an ungrateful woman whose romance with Orlando was possibly the cause of her own death: The stranger sigh’d deep as in autumn the wind; She turn’d her pale visage, so sad and resign’d, On Irene, and shuddering said, ‘Orlando is wedded. This night, to be thine, He committed on heaven and nature a crime Which in vengeance his soul must be paid. (61–6)

As the murdered victim, the lady has the authority to speak to the character of Orlando. She plainly says that he is ‘by demons possess’d’ (70) and even offers to take the burden on herself, sacrificing her own peaceful rest in the afterlife in place of Irene: Then court not perdition; take homeward thy way, Alone let me wander, alone let me stray, Or dread the reward of thy crime: Forbear thou the union cemented by blood, A bond of destruction to lure thee from good; The murderous compact resign. (73–8)

She gives Irene the choice to ‘Return’ to life or ‘Proceed’ to death (79, 82). However, Dacre makes it clear to readers that it is Irene’s misguided love for Orlando that makes her ‘proceed’ to her demise, ignoring the warnings of the wise but mysterious lady. Dacre uses the situation of the poem to return to her continuing literary interest in exploring the negative consequences of passion. Ann H. Jones asserts that this interest led to Dacre’s highly emotional 37

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writing, as she attempted ‘not merely to follow a fashion but to explore human (especially female) psychology’.34 Jones also gives the ways in which Dacre explored this psychology, saying that ‘the confession, the epistolary mode, the soliloquy, and even the super­ natural’ allowed the author ‘to portray some of the darker, less rational areas of the mind’.35 In her supernatural poems, Dacre combines these narrative forms to present female characters who struggle with the causes and consequences of passion.36 In ‘The Skeleton Priest’, Irene falls victim both to outward forces and to the force of her own psyche. Because of her irrational love for Orlando, Irene misinterprets the voice. The clarity of the lady’s warning makes it even more obvious that Irene is not thinking clearly. She only sees the woman as possible competition, a person who seeks to distance her from her lover. She blames the woman for delaying her trip and calls her a ‘demon’ (93). According to Irene, these demons ‘envy those raptures they cannot divide’ (94). She also misinterprets what she sees (or what she thinks she sees): ‘They mock at my feelings, they laugh at my pain,/But all their delusions they essay in vain – /Orlando, I still will be thine!’ (97–9). Dacre heightens the irony in this section by having Irene accuse the ghostly woman of being delusional, when, in fact, she is the one who is confused. When she finally meets Orlando, Irene does feel uneasy for a moment, perhaps in consequence of the repeated warnings she earlier chose to ignore. When she embraces him, the narrator states that ‘A chilling despondence crept over the bride,/A mistrust that she dar’d not pursue’ (107–8). When she feels this ‘mistrust’, how­ ever, it is too late. Orlando exclaims that he is ‘anxious’ for her (117), more so as his next victim than as his next wife. Dacre also introduces another supernatural element when she describes the ghost ship, with ‘cables’ of ‘mist’, sails composed of ‘vapor’, and ‘no creature to guide it’ (122, 123). Though she felt her journey through the woods was tortured by the ‘evil’ voice, Irene’s marital journey with Orlando proves much worse: ‘He forc’d her still on through a rocky descent,/Her feet and her bosom were cruelly rent,/And blood did each footstep pursue’ (130–2). The ‘skeleton priest’ makes his appearance, and Orlando reveals himself as Death. He rebukes Irene for her impetuousness, saying, ‘For, maiden, thy love was 38

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imprudent and bold’ (140). It is also interesting that the revenant never judges Irene for her actions in going to meet Orlando (she is concerned with warning her instead), whereas Orlando is quick to punish her for her ‘unladylike’ desires. In this scenario, Dacre suggests that women are the more understanding ones when it comes to the issue of female desire, and they possess the ability to deal with these issues more positively (and less harmfully) than men. The ghostly lady reappears, and instead of her sympathetic de­ meanor in the woods, the narrator describes how ‘the spectre now menacing stood’ (146), as she imparts her last bit of knowledge to Irene before she dies: ‘The wife of Orlando was I; He sent my soul wand’ring, thy beauties to gain; I warn’d thee, alas! but I warn’d thee in vain, For thou wert determin’d to die.’ (147–50)

This statement suggests that the ghost was supposed to lure Irene but chose to warn her instead, thereby actively subverting the devious Orlando. She also places the blame for Irene’s fate on the woman herself, claiming that it was ultimately her decision to die because she chose not to heed the repeated warnings. Thus, she partly deserves her fate and is ultimately held accountable for her actions, as well as for her failure to listen to the spectral woman’s warning. This reading reinforces Dacre’s recurring concerns with the detrimental effects of excessive female desire, a concern that runs through her Gothic novels and her Gothic ballads. Spirits of the battlefield: ‘The Ballad of Sir Rupert’ Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls’s (1833–1910)37 ‘The Ballad of Sir Rupert, A Ghost Story’, dated ‘Christmas 1854’, takes its story from two separate historical events, but the most memorable parts of her poem go beyond any specific historical period. It is supposedly ‘founded upon an incident that happened during the Peninsular War’, but the actual ‘scene of the ballad’ is based on Edward the 39

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Black Prince and his campaign against Henry of Trastamare in the 1300s. However, Rolls’s ballad does not concern itself solely with historic events, but, rather, is a lesson about fatal pride and the fight for spiritual possession of the battlefield. Like her Romantic fore­ bears, Rolls presents a powerful female revenant who successfully wins a power struggle with the pompous Sir Rupert, and who effectively wins control of the battlefield by the end of the poem. The ballad is structured as a tale being told around a fireside to an audience which is removed from the time of the events related in the poem. The first line of the ballad, ‘O speak not lightly of the dead’,38 previews the main concern of the tale and the mistake Rupert makes, which ultimately costs him his life. The past action takes place on a battlefield in Spain, and near the field is a convent that is used to shelter wounded soldiers. The narrator comments on the image of Christ in one of the convent’s stained glass windows: ‘The Crucified who once had died/That men might dwell in love’ (37–8). But in the absence of that ‘love’, Rolls questions the absence of Christ: ‘Doth He see below, the crimson glow,/And the blood­ red flag above?’ (39–40). Suggesting a kind of judgment for their violent actions, the suffering of these soldiers is ignored by the angels, but not by the ‘demons’: And the blessed angels heed them not, But the demons hear them moan, For they say a Spectre Nun glides by In the deadly depth of night, And turns upon the wounded ones Her lantern’s awful light. (43–8)

In her examination of the fine line that exists between angel and demon and of the Victorian anxiety over female transformative power, Nina Auerbach claims that ‘female demons bear an eerie resemblance to their angelic counterparts, though characteristics that are suggestively implicit in the angel come to the fore in the demon.’39 In language particularly relevant to Rolls’s ballad, Auerbach describes these demonic women as ‘illicit invaders of traditional Anglican symbolism.’40 Not only is the Spectre Nun an ‘invader’ in the traditional male realm of the battlefield, but she is 40

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also a Spanish nun, a Catholic ‘invader’, who represents a threat to the English Sir Rupert and his men. Though described as carrying an ‘awful light’, the Spectre Nun, nonetheless, takes an interest in the soldiers’ suffering and releases them from their earthly pain: And ever thus and ever thus She comes in the dead of night, And glides with her lantern to and fro, A strange and ghastly sight, To summon a spirit far away To the silent spirit land, O Merciful! have mercy now On the souls of the dying band! (65–72)

Rolls describes the nun’s nightly work as an endless cycle that takes place as long as the war continues. At the break of day and before the battle begins again, she returns to her vault in the church and ‘sleeps’ until the sun sets and the day’s fighting is over. Rolls’s ambiguity regarding the personification of the Spectre Nun calls into question who is the ‘merciful’ one. Though the soldiers, espe­ cially Sir Rupert, see her as a demon and an evil spirit, her actions portray her as a strong and purposeful yet pitying force that ends the soldiers’ suffering. Daniel Defoe, writing under the pseudonym ‘Andrew Moreton’, addressed the problems surrounding the associ­ ation of ghosts with evil in his work, The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos’d (1729). In it, he summarizes the popular view of people such as Sir Rupert: ‘we either will allow no Apparition at all, or will have every Apparition be the Devil; as if none of the Inhabitants of the World above, were able to show themselves here, or had any Business among us, but the Devil, who I am of the Opinion has really less Business here than any of them all’.41 In distinguishing between angels and demons, Defoe asserts, ‘almost all real Apparitions are of friendly and assisting Angels, and come of a kind and beneficent Errand to us’.42 This way of thinking in Rolls’s ballad, that the Spectre Nun is inherently evil, may, in part, be due to Victorian concerns over women’s status, and the characterization of the Nun as ‘evil’ by Sir Rupert could be Rolls’s attempt to draw attention to this gender anxiety. As Auerbach asserts: 41

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain In Victorian literature female demons often assume this broader identity, while male demons limit themselves to single-minded opposition to good. The female invasion of religious iconography is not a pallid surrogate for the real thing, but one agent of the radically new sort of terror, conflating divinity with demonism.43

It is this transgression of traditional boundaries that makes the Nun so terrifying to the soldiers. In her ability to freely roam the battle­ field and to take life whenever she sees fit, she possesses far more power than any of the soldiers surrounding her. The second part of the ballad begins with soldiers sitting around a fire recalling ‘their valour’ (88) in the day’s battle. An older and more experienced knight tells the story of the Nun and how her ‘awful ghost’ (94) roams the battlefield at night and takes the wounded soldiers to the afterlife. His warning is met with laughter and scorn by the other soldiers, and the men treat the ominous tale as a kind of light entertainment instead of a lesson. Among the group of soldiers, Rupert laughs the loudest and quickly recognizes the Nun as a challenge to his prowess as a soldier: I would hunt this spirit round the hall, As I hunt in Rupert’s dale; She may turn her lantern on my face, Think, comrades, it would pale? A dauntless eye and a courage high, Hath Rupert of the Dale! (111–16)

After these comments, the older soldier fears for Rupert’s safety and warns him to ‘speak not thus/So lightly of the dead!’ (123–4). Rupert, however, chooses to ignore the warning, even after he is told that the Spectre Nun ‘is one that never dies’ (144). He insists that his strength on the battlefield, ‘the clash of steel I know and feel’ (155), will be no match for the Nun’s ghost. He sees his material advantage as being greater than the Nun’s spiritual powers, and the action of the ballad becomes not only about the larger battle being waged between the English and Spanish, but also about a fight between the living Rupert and the dead Nun for control and dominance on the battlefield. 42

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The third part of the ballad details the inevitable confrontation between the Spectre Nun and Sir Rupert, as Rupert waits among the wounded for the ghost to appear. At first, they observe her nightly ritual: On did she glide to the wounded side Of each warrior low and lone, They watch the light with their failing sight And shiver as they moan, For she bringeth there the cold night air Of the burial vault so damp; (221–6)

Instead of allowing the Nun to continue her work with the wounded soldiers, Rupert issues a challenge, telling her to return to her grave. After he fails to heed the repeated warnings of the older knight, who pleads with him to go to the church and pray, Sir Rupert pursues the Nun and mocks her efforts on behalf of the fallen soldiers. Though he recognizes her as a ‘sister fair’ (239), Rupert also calls her the ‘evil one’ (231, 240). He issues a warning to the Nun to return to her resting place, ‘the ghostly shades beneath’ (232), or else he will destroy her. However, it is his inability to classify her that so upsets Rupert. In relation to this tendency, Auerbach states, ‘The historical and sacred violence of our divine-demonic invader legitimizes her supernatural stature, explaining in part the homicidal feelings she has always inspired, in characters, authors, and readers alike, when she assumes her purely angelic guise’.44 In her response to his challenge, the Nun does not display any outward signs of violence. When he comes closer to the Nun, her lantern light falls on Rupert’s head but does not immediately harm him. At the beginning of the battle the next day, the older knight tells the other soldiers of the previous night’s encounter with the Spectre Nun, but, again, they laugh at him and refuse to take the story seriously. Riding on horseback, Sir Rupert is among the men, when, suddenly, his horse begins to run furiously around a nearby lake. The roles of the previous night are reversed, as the narrator exclaims,

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain thou wouldst last night A spectre hunter be, And now my friend, thy life must end, For the spectre’s chasing thee! (297–300)

After circling the lake three times, the horse runs into the lake, and both horse and rider drown. Only the older knight and the Spectre Nun watch Rupert’s body in the lake. At midnight, he witnesses the Nun look into Rupert’s face ‘with a fixed unearthly stare’ (322) and make ‘a long low laugh with a horrid sound’ (323). Rolls then includes a stanza that introduces other females into the ballad, Rupert’s intended, Alice, and his mother, while at the same time questioning their ability to understand events on the battlefield: Doth the blue-eyed Alice hear it As she gazes on the moon, And puts these questions to her heart “How fond? how true? how soon?” As Rupert’s mother sits within The grey old English hall, Doth she hear the Spanish Nun’s wild laugh And see the lifted pall? (325–32)

These women are separated from the action, although they are, arguably, Rupert’s closest relations and have the greatest emotional connection to him. Despite their loyalty and concern, they do not seem to sense that something has happened to Rupert and are un­ able to hear the Nun’s laugh after Rupert’s death. This comparison places the Spectre Nun in a privileged position as a part of the traditional male realm of the battlefield and also in her position as a ‘healer’ of the wounded men, a traditional female role. Surrounded by armoured, battle-hardened men, she puts fear in them all, and her right to be on the field of battle is challenged by no one, except Sir Rupert, who meets a dismal end due to his confrontation with the Nun and his challenge to her authority. On the home front, women in their traditional roles are of little use to the soldiers on a foreign battlefield. The ‘Spanish Nun’, as she is referred to in this 44

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stanza, also takes the English soldiers to their graves and does not seem to differentiate between nationalities; she ends the suffering of all the soldiers, regardless of their countries. Unlike the men who are fighting, she does not take sides. Part of the threatening nature of the Spectre Nun in Rupert’s view is the fact that she physically inhabits the battlefield, a trad­ itional male space. Rolls describes her as ‘stealthy’ and cat-like as she roams the battlefield and notes how the nun glides with ease around the wounded bodies. She is also stronger than the men around her. This female power and the very ‘real’ spectral presence of a female body are significant in terms of the literary view of women in writings by both male and female authors during the nineteenth century. As Adriana Craciun says: Once we begin to look for different uses of the corporeal in women’s writings, we can explore bodies that bear more than truth. Unsexed and undead bodies are such bodies, sharing an anomalous status between two normative, supposedly fixed categories of truth (male and female, living and dead); they function as a disruptive ‘third term,’ which, as Gilbert Herdt has argued in Third Sex, Third Gender, embodies not the harmony of the androgyne, but the destruction of all such binary formulations as gender and sex complementarity, and their imagined syntheses in the androgyne.45

Indeed, the Spectre Nun crosses several boundaries. She functions in the male realm of the battlefield but does not take part in the actual battle, and she both relieves suffering and takes life as she walks among the dying soldiers at night. She is giver and taker: she takes the men’s earthly life and provides them assistance on their journey to the afterlife. This idea of existing on both sides of a given boundary, thereby com­plicating the very essence of that boundary, can also be ex­ tended to women’s supernatural writing in general. As Vanessa Dickerson says, these writings ‘constituted both expression and exploration of their own spirituality and their ambiguous status as the “other” living in a state of in-betweenness: between the walls of the house, between animal and man, between angel and demon’.46 Similarly, Nina Auerbach concludes, ‘woman is not frailer than man 45

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is, but stronger and more powerful; her nature is broadly demonic rather than fallibly human; she must lead us out of history toward a new dispensation; in short, woman is “so much more addicted to the practice of the black art” because by definition, woman is an angel’.47 In ‘The Ballad of Sir Rupert’, written during the first year of the Crimean War, Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls builds on and ex­ pands the Romantic notion of a female revenant who becomes stronger in the afterlife. She also challenges the traditional roles and placement of women in wartime while representing this powerful female presence. In this way, the Spectre Nun prefigures the role Florence Nightingale would play as ‘the Lady with the Lamp’, another woman who would become a powerful presence near the Crimean battlefield very shortly after Rolls’s poem was published. In her introduction to Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women (1993), Glennis Byron asserts that it was not until the 1880s and 90s, in the form of ‘New Woman’ literature, that ‘the female narrative voice become more assertive, and willing to address women’s problems directly and openly’.48 I would argue that this cultural shift occurred much earlier in the century, in the daring Gothic ballads written by women. In the works discussed in this chapter, in what many contemporary reviews described as ‘unconventional’ collections of poetry, both Anne Bannerman and Charlotte Dacre present de­ cidedly unconventional female characters who are denied physical or emotional respect in life, but who ultimately return from the grave in order to take revenge on their tormentors and murderers. These women express and condemn the double-standard of men and women’s sexual freedom. In so doing, these revenants provide an alternative to the stereotypical helpless heroines of early Gothic novels and become true heroines who not only demand retribution but also acknowledgment. This transition from victimized heroine to proactive revenant provides an important link between early Gothic ballads and women’s ghost stories later in the nineteenth century. Diana Wallace argues that the ghost story complicates the categories put forward by Anne Williams in Art of Darkness (1995), which classify Female Gothic literature as the explained supernatural with a happy ending and what Williams calls the heroine’s “‘wedding to culture’”, and Male Gothic as unexplained supernatural with tragic endings.49 I would extend this argument and say that this 46

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complication comes much earlier, in the female revenant poems of Bannerman and Dacre in the early nineteenth century. It is in these poems that we begin to see the split between the Gothic proper and the emergence of the Female Gothic ‘ghost story’ genre as Wallace describes it. There are no happy endings in either Banner­ man or Dacre’s ghost poems, and the ghosts exist precisely because women are denied their proper ‘happy ending’ and their ‘wedding to culture.’ Likewise, Elizabeth Rolls offers a female revenant who com­ municates an even broader social message. Every bit as strong and intimidating as the revenants in Bannerman and Dacre’s ballads, the Spectre Nun takes on even greater significance by imparting lessons which concerned broader social problems of the time in the form of overly masculine attitudes that lead to confrontation and war century after century. As a revenant, the Spectre Nun ‘speaks’ what otherwise may go unsaid or unacknowledged and intervenes in death in ways ordinary women could not do in life. These women, silenced by their conventional placement in society or by crimes committed against them, are transformed and liberated through death into empowered forces who have the ability to incite terror in the minds of those who wronged them and possess the knowledge to communicate their suffering and bitterly learned lessons to others.50

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2 Ghostly lovers and transgressive supernatural sexualities

 In the previous chapter, ghosts were manifestations of guilt, fear and indifference and they haunted their victims to exact revenge for some wrong done. The protagonists are punished because they choose to forget or choose to ignore the wrongs being done to others. But there is also a class of ghosts in the Female Gothic that comes back to the living because people cannot forget. The obsessive memory of the living conjures ghosts and draws them out of their graves, into the world of the living. This inability to forget is often connected to sexuality that is in some way dangerous or trans­ gressive. As the nineteenth century continued, the illicit affairs and secret emotional connections that ‘haunted’ the themes of earlier female revenant poems gradually became more explicit and found their way into Victorian supernatural literature written by women. Through the ghosts in this literature, women found a way to speak of sexuality and its consequences and were better able to subvert the strict Victorian standards imposed on men and, most especially, on women, which caused these ‘unsanctioned’ sexualities to become repressed and thus to be pushed deeper into individual conscious­ ness. In dealing with transgressive desire, the Female Gothic writers in this chapter successfully appropriate the ‘demon lover’ motif in order to comment on the perceived dangerous and monstrous con­ sequences of women’s desires. The plot of ‘The Demon Lover’, a

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popular English and Scottish ballad that had its beginnings in the mid-seventeenth century (and possibly earlier), involves a demonic, vengeful suitor who returns to claim his unfaithful partner, con­ vincing the doomed woman to leave her husband and children by promising her wealth and adventure. In her study of demon lovers in British fiction, Toni Reed notes: authors typically attribute demon-lover figures with supernatural traits that distinguish them from other [living] characters. In fiction, the supernatural quality of the demon-lover – the mysterious charm and the perverse, dangerous impulses – establishes a direct parallel to the earlier ballad. The women in these works are both repelled by and attracted to the supernatural character of their demon-lovers. Very often the dark figures are compared to Satan, a powerful super­ natural being, or are said to possess demonic qualities, and their behavior seems excessively cruel, even diabolic at times.1

Reed goes on to say, ‘In a sense, the ballad is a distilled version of a Gothic romance about obsessive love and hate.’2 Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti and Vernon Lee engage with this myth by com­ plicating the traditional male aggressor/female victim formula. All three authors describe supernatural female characters that prey on weak or ineffectual men, who are both repelled and attracted by the revenants in each work. By changing the gender dynamics but keeping the basic plot, each author toys with the expectations of readers. Gaskell and Rossetti only go so far with their narratives. Lucy is finally saved (relegated) to the traditional role of wife by the end of Gaskell’s ‘The Poor Clare’, but her literal confrontation with her demonic/sexual self remains part of her consciousness, a part of herself that once acknowledged, cannot be forgotten. Like­ wise, Rossetti hints at the possibility of sexual freedom for women before marriage in ‘The Hour and the Ghost’ (a more traditional rendering of the demon lover motif) and ‘The Poor Ghost’ but ultimately these women must pay the moral price for their suggested sexual dalliances by being forced into a torturous life-in-death existence that seemingly has no end. Vernon Lee, the most modern of the three authors discussed in this chapter, pushes the limits of sexual liberality the farthest by allowing Medea da Carpi to seduce, 49

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manipulate and finally cause the death of Spirideon Trepka in ‘Amour Dure’. Medea is also allowed to retain her freedom at the end of the story and ‘live’, so to speak, to prey on other men. Unlike Gaskell and Rossetti’s women, Medea’s power is decidedly not diminished at the end of the story. The demon lover tradition is frequently linked to a ‘fatal sexuality’ that is embodied by the revenant who attempts to claim a living lover.3 Also connected to this tradition is the motif of a living person whose persistent mourning (usually depicted as crying over a grave) inhibits attempts by the deceased to find rest. One of the seminal texts in this tradition is ‘The Unquiet Grave’, an English folk song dating back to the Middle Ages and collected by Francis James Child in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1898). Like the female revenants in the previous chapter, the physicality of the revenant-en-corps is crucial to the spectre’s ‘presence’ in these works. Each of the ghosts is described in detail, which provides the reader with a sense of how they physically attracted the living, and how, in death, these physical characteristics are amplified by the fact that these spirits attain an other-worldly power over the living, which makes their seductive, sexual tendencies all the more threatening to the living characters to whom they attach themselves. As Peter D. Grudin says, this corporeality ‘could be employed to express the horrible consequences of an unsanctioned eroticism’,4 an eroticism that underlies each of the works in this chapter. According to Helen Stoddart, ‘the demonic, itself a highly un­ stable category, may be read as a meaningful register of ongoing ideological struggles to establish and test cultural limits, with the demonic being that which breaks, subverts, or falls on the other side of a given boundary. Most frequently the stakes in these conflicts are taken to be those of gender, sexuality, class and race and in each case the demonic figure is read in terms of its unsettling of category or hierarchy in one or more of these arenas’.5 The idea of the de­ monic and monstrous and how these supernatural forms subvert boundaries is most useful in the study of Female Gothic when it is discussed in relation to limitations or boundaries within female identity. Karen F. Stein sees this identity as a reflection of the desire that women could only express through fictional narrative: ‘In the Gothic mirror, the self is reflected in the extreme poses of rebel, 50

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out­cast, obsessive seeker of forbidden knowledge, monster . . . In their Gothic narratives women reveal deep-seated conflicts between a socially acceptable passive, congenial, “feminine” self and a sup­ pressed, monstrous hidden self.’6 Stein continues by describing how women had to choose between the domestic angel and sexual demon, noting that ‘to win social acceptance many women have sought, con­sciously or unconsciously, to be the virgin, the angel, to hide or disown the traits which might be seen to threaten their acceptability. The decorated surface may come to seem a sham; . . . the woman is then confronted with her own terrifying split between “monstrous” inner drives and “nice” outward appearances.’7 This inner conflict was most easily ‘spoken’, made outwardly real, by using the freedoms accorded by the other-worldly Gothic narrative: ‘Delineating the emotional dimensions as well as the social contexts of the characters’ lives, [these narratives] present women frustrated by the narrow avenues of experience open to them as they face their conflicting desires for achievement and social acceptance. The Female Gothic may thus be seen as a version of the Gothic created by women authors to explore formerly unspeakable, “monstrous,” aspects of women’s lives.’8 Each author in this chapter participates in the tradition of ‘speak­ ing’ women’s ‘monstrous’ sexuality subversively within a super­ natural plot that involves discovering hidden aspects of sexual desire that usually prove dangerous for the living characters who must confront these monsters, demons and ghosts who symbolize the consequences of such ‘impolite’ desires. Eugenia C. DeLamotte describes this confrontation as a kind of identity crisis for women writers of the Female Gothic and their characters. In other words, no matter how pure or socially ‘correct’ an author or heroine is, she must acknowledge an affinity with a liberated (demonic) form of herself, a social deviant who lies just beneath the surface: Like the Good Other Woman, the Evil Other Woman often spends much of her life hidden away in the castle, secret room, or whatever, a fact suggesting that even a virtuous woman’s lot is the same she would have merited had she been the worst of criminals. The heroine’s discovery of such Other Women is in the one case an encounter with women’s oppression – their confinement as wives, 51

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain mothers, and daughters – and in the other with a related repression: the con­finement of a Hidden Woman inside those genteel writers and readers who, in the idealization of the heroine’s virtues, displace their own rebellious feelings with filial piety, their anger with forti­ tude, and their sexuality with sensibility. Both discoveries reveal com­ple­mentary aspects of women’s subordination: their immure­ ment in domestic spaces as sisters, wives, and daughters and the im­ mure­ment inside themselves of an angry, rebellious, sexual Other Woman that conventional morality taught them to reject.9

DeLamotte notices, however, that this subversive wish remains tangential to the actual plots of the novels and often gives way to the more traditional happy ending that many critics see as a staple of the Female Gothic. Earlier Female Gothic writers (namely Radcliffe) choose to punish these ‘Evil Other Women’ because of their social/sexual sins in plots that ‘depend on the punishment and exorcism of the rebellious feelings the narrative itself expresses through its portrayal of women’s silent suffering’.10 Another import­ ant aspect of these earlier Gothic plots is that the happy ending for the heroine is only possible when ‘anger, rebellion, passion, and filial ingratitude – which one might have thought the logical con­ comitants to such grievance – are shown emphatically not to belong to the wronged heroine and/or her wronged female relative, but to somebody else, who was ultimately sorry for them, anyway, and furthermore is dying or dead.’11 What makes the supernatural writings of Gaskell, Rossetti and Lee so integral to a reappraisal and expansion of the Female Gothic tradition is that this ‘anger’ is emphatically not laid to rest. In Gaskell’s story, Lucy’s demonic double never apologizes and, although Lucy is seemingly freed from her ‘Evil Other’, there is always the possi­ bility that Lucy could be possessed again. The evil is exorcized, sent away, but not ‘killed’; once innocence is lost, it cannot be regained. Likewise, Rossetti’s ghostly lovers are already beyond the death that ensures finality (and a return to normalcy) in earlier Gothic narra­ tives. As ghosts, and therefore already beyond the limits of the living, Rossetti’s revenants retain their power over their earthly lovers and thus keep their ability to judge the living at the end of the poems. Like the messages they convey, these ghosts refuse to 52

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stay buried. They remain undead symbols of the earthly desire that the living protagonists try to distance themselves from by attempt­ ing to forget the dead. Lee’s Medea da Carpi is perhaps the most flagrant of these ‘Evil Women’, because, as a ghost, like the super­ natural entities in Gaskell and Rossetti’s writing, Medea remains beyond the world of the living and escapes any form of punish­ ment for her crimes. The extent of her anger and vengeance only increases through­out Lee’s story. Unspeakable love: Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Poor Clare’ In her letters, Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) describes her personal interest in ghosts and superstitions. She repeatedly talks of being superstitious and enjoying ghost stories, both written and recited ones. In a letter to her friend, Eliza Fox, dated 29 May 1849, Gaskell describes a visit to Shottery: ‘did not we pour out the treasures of our London campaign to the rural inhabitants staying in the house, who believed in ghosts, and told some capital stories thereupon’. She then relates, ‘we had brilliantly fine days when we went [on] long drives; in one of which (to a place where I believed the Sleeping Beauty lived, it was so over-grown and hidden up by woods) I SAW a ghost! Yes I did; though in such a matter of fact place as Charlotte St I should not wonder if you are skeptical.’12 During that same visit to Shottery, Gaskell and her cousins heard of a nearby house haunted by a woman’s ghost. While visiting the house, Gaskell saw a woman in the window, and, when she inquired next door, was told that she had seen a ghost.13 In a letter to an unknown recipient, dated 27 July 1855, Gaskell also goes into detail regarding her view of the importance of ghost stories and their suitability for certain audiences. Referring to ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, she says that her recent stories are all moral & sensible, – and one or two of the H. W. [House­ hold Words] stories might not so well do for young people. One is an unexplained ghost story for instance. I am glad to hear that these stories are liked by working-men & women in your parts; I some­ times get here the pleasantest little glimpses of their being liked; but I did not know how far Southrons would care for them.14 53

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Clearly, Gaskell believes that some of her stories go beyond simple entertainment and children’s bedtime stories. In the Introduction to his edition of Gaskell’s works, A. W. Ward touches on the author’s interest in the supernatural as he discusses ‘Lois the Witch’: The supernatural always had a strong attraction for Mrs. Gaskell, and her imagination could not fail to concern itself with those human delusions which are closely connected with the terrors largely fed by an instinctive tendency to which her own mind was no stranger. But, while her sweet reasonableness subdued all such fancies, no principle which influenced her was stronger than her abhorrence of injustice, and no conviction held by her was so much part of herself as the belief, that what is most divine in man is the forgiveness of those who sin against him.15

As he describes the influences behind Gaskell’s composition of ‘Lois the Witch’ and connects Gaskell’s talent for the ghost story with her concerns over ‘injustice’, Ward significantly highlights an import­ ant theme in Gaskell’s other stories involving ghosts, that of the ever-present social terror underlying the presence of her literary ghosts.16 In Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977), Julia Briggs offers the following definition of what constitutes a ghost story: ‘it can denote not only stories about ghosts, but about possession and demonic bargains, spirits other than those of the dead, including ghouls, vampires, werewolves, the “swarths” of living men and the “ghost-soul” or Doppelgänger.’17 Much like the ghost stories of Defoe and Dickens, there is an ongoing debate about whether Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Poor Clare’ is actually a ghost story. In the Preface to Gaskell’s ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’ (also known as ‘The Crooked Branch’), from his collection Mrs. Gaskell’s Tales of Mystery and Horror (1978), Michael Ashley says, ‘Apart from “The Old Nurse’s Story” and “Lois the Witch”, Mrs Gaskell avoided the supernatural in her fiction. Instead she concentrated on creating a tangible atmosphere of suspense and terror and a belief in the inevitability of fate.’ Ashley omits ‘The Poor Clare’ from the book, though one would think the category of ‘Mystery’ would have allowed its inclusion, especially considering 54

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his comment that Gaskell’s ‘prime contribution to the genre of horror-story writing was her ability to describe the emotions and feelings of her characters to emphasize the personal as opposed to the scientific aspects of the supernatural’,18 an analysis that fits well with the central concerns of ‘The Poor Clare’, a supernatural tale that is a prime example of Gaskell’s use of the Female Gothic in order to highlight the haunted nature of female sexuality. ‘The Poor Clare’, published in the December 1856 issue of House­ hold Words, describes the demonic possession of Lucy Fitzgerald, a young woman accidentally condemned to live with her doppel­ gänger because of a family curse enacted by Lucy’s grandmother, Bridget Fitzgerald.19 The story also concerns itself with past actions and the impact those actions have on the present. Like the seductive child in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, whose presence lures Rosamond out into the dangerous moors, Lucy’s double is a temptress and represents the freer, sexual side of the seemingly innocent and un­ tainted Lucy.20 Not realizing that a curse has been placed on his daughter,21 Squire Gisborne, Lucy’s estranged father, accuses her of ‘delighting [herself] in such wanton mischief – dancing over the tender plants in the flower-beds’ and of ‘undue familiarity – all unbecoming a gentlewoman – with his grooms’.22 However, these supposed improprieties are done by Lucy’s double, not Lucy herself. As Lucy tries to defend herself from her father’s accusations, she comes face to face with her other self: ‘I looked up in terror. In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged’ (p. 361). But Lucy’s choice of words to describe her first vision of this ‘other Lucy’ betrays her true feelings and lead the reader to think there is something more going on beneath the surface of her outward ‘terror’. Instead of describing the reaction of her soul as a ‘shudder’, ‘quake’, or ‘shiver’, all words with more negative con­ notations, she chooses to describe her reaction as a ‘quiver’, a bodily sensation that suggests excitement, stimulation, exhilaration and excessive feeling. As terrified as she is, there is also a physical thrill in seeing this other self and the new possibilities of experience this mirror image of Lucy presents. Rosemary Jackson discusses the importance of the mirror in supernatural literature as ‘a symbol of 55

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psychic exploration’, adding that the act of looking at oneself in a mirror ‘suggest[s] the instability of the real on this side of the looking-glass and it offers unpredictable (apparently impossible) metamorphoses of self into other’.23 Likewise, Leo Bersani com­ ments on the conflict of possibility versus limitation that is intro­ duced by the act of looking: The mirror [serves] as a metaphor for the inaccessibility of one’s possible selves to one’s present consciousness. It is a spatial represen­ tation of an intuition that our being can never be adequately enclosed within any present formulation – any formulation here and now – of our being. It is as if the experience of perceiving ourselves elsewhere suggested the possibility of our becoming something else.24

The judgment of the female image and the inherent sexuality such an image outwardly represents is also very much a part of women’s Gothic concerns. Ellen Moers describes this representation as an historical female anxiety: The savagery of girlhood accounts in part for the persistence of the Gothic mode into our own time; also the self-disgust, the self-hatred, and the impetus to self-destruction that have been increasingly prominent themes in the writing of women in the twentieth century. Despair is hardly the exclusive province of any one sex or class in our age, but to give visual form to the fear of self, to hold anxiety up to the Gothic mirror of the imagination, may well be more common in the writings of women than of men.25

As Lucy looks at her other Self in the mirror, she also subconsciously sees (and must recognize) the sexuality that created her. Although dead, Lucy’s mother, Mary Fitzgerald, looms large and in many ways, haunts the narrative. Bridget regrets the troubled relationship she had with her daughter and wishes she could call Mary back to her, whether it be from a distant part of the world, or from the grave. Mary’s uncontrolled sexuality led her to elope with Gisborne and become pregnant with Lucy. After she learns that Gisborne will not marry her, she drowns herself. However, Gaskell intimates that the seductive tendencies of Mary have been inherited by the daughter; 56

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in effect, Lucy is haunted by her mother’s past decisions just as much as she is haunted by Bridget’s curse. The limitations and dangers of a female sexuality that cannot be controlled or denied are what truly give this story its characteristic Gothic unease. Claire Kahane states, ‘What I see repeatedly locked into the forbidden centre of the Gothic which draws me inward is the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and allencompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront.’26 In this sense, Mary Fitzgerald gives birth to two daughters: the beautiful (innocent) Lucy and the sexual (demonic) Other Lucy. As Lucy recovers from the emotional ‘trauma’ of this discovery, her double ‘was seen by all, flitting about the house and gardens, always about some mischievous or detestable work’ (p. 361). Again, Lucy’s description of her ‘swoon[ing] away’ (p. 361) and later waking up in bed, where she stays ‘for days’ (p. 361), can be seen as a recovery from the momentary excitement this image produced in her mind, and the subsequent internal con­ flict and depression that she undergoes, knowing that the ‘quiver’ she experienced cannot be sustained or repeated in her socially restricted world of ‘proper’ behaviour. Though the narrator insists that he intends to fight on behalf of Lucy, with whom he falls in love, the ‘evil’ double of Lucy – her spiritual, sexual other – is the part of her that attracts him most powerfully: Just at that moment, standing as I was opposite to her in the full and perfect morning light, I saw behind her another figure – a ghastly resemblance, complete in likeness, so far as form and feature and minutest touch of dress could go, but with a loathsome demon soul looking out of the grey eyes, that were in turns mocking and volu­ ptuous. My heart stood still within me; every hair rose up erect; my flesh crept with horror. I could not see the grave and tender Lucy – my eyes were fascinated by the creature beyond. I know not why, but I put out my hand to clutch it; I grasped nothing but empty air, and my whole blood curdled to ice. (p. 362)27

The intersection of repulsion and attraction is apparent as the pres­ ence of the innocent/sexual Lucy causes a momentary split in the 57

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narrator’s feelings toward her. He, too, is divided between the two women. Indeed, the heightened erotic language of this passage represents the narrator’s sexual attraction with the purely sexual ‘other half’ of Lucy. He later admits these feelings toward Lucy: I took her by the hand, and led her silently through the budding heather – we dared not speak; for we could not tell but that the dread creature was listening, although unseen, – but that it might appear and push us asunder. I never loved her more fondly than now when – and that was the unspeakable misery – the idea of her was becoming so inextricably blended with the shuddering thought of it. She seemed to understand what I must be feeling. She let go my hand, which she had kept clasped until then . . . (p. 363)

Again, the narrator’s language is some of the most passionate of the story, as he describes his sexual urge to see the other Lucy, almost as though he were having an illicit affair with another woman with­ out Lucy’s knowledge, which is suggested by the fact that she drops his hand as soon as she senses that he is thinking about her double. Representing the gendered views of many of his Victorian con­tem­ poraries, the narrator cannot accept this sexual, alluring self as a natural part of Lucy, just as he also cannot admit his attraction to this sexual other. He repeatedly calls this other self ‘it’, signifying that he considers the sexual Lucy as something not quite female, some­ thing beyond female, or at least not traditionally female. Because the narrator cannot accept both sides existing peacefully in one person, he can only describe the troubling side of Lucy in animalistic terms, something that intrudes upon Lucy’s gender instead of being a natural part of her. This language returns when the narrator dis­ covers what he terms Gisborne’s ‘profound indifference’ (p. 376) regarding his daughter’s psychological trouble. He goes on to say, ‘One almost felt as if he would have been as content to put her out of existence, as he would have been to destroy some disgusting reptile that had invaded his chamber or his couch’ (p. 376). The recurring connotation of Lucy’s double as an ‘it’ calls up Derrida’s notion of the spectre as something between being and non-being. In women’s use of ‘it’ to describe supernatural beings, the term carries with it an implicit critique of the status of women’s identity 58

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in the nineteenth century. The nebulous, protean quality of the ghost is its source of power. Apparitions defy categorization, and therefore defy many of the social limitations placed on the living. This is especially true of female ghosts, who gain more freedom in their supernatural form. They are beyond the usual nineteenthcentury cultural restraints which were imposed on them because of their gender and/or class. Ghosts come back whether they are wanted or not. They represent a consciousness that will not be denied, no matter how much society tries to suppress them. In dealing with repressed consciousness, Gaskell’s story utilizes many characteristics of Freud’s notion of the uncanny. In his 1919 essay, Freud states that the ‘phenomenon of the “double”’ is one of the ‘most prominent’ occurrences of the uncanny and is frequently ‘a thing of terror’.28 His longer description of how the uncanny functions with repression and recurrence is telling when read in light of Lucy Fitzgerald and her double: if psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frighten­ ing things would then constitute the uncanny.29

This passage, particularly the emphasis on anxiety and fear, describes Lucy’s repressed feelings which manifest themselves as her double. The double represents those things which should remain un­ spoken in society, and therefore causes anxiety not only for Lucy, but also for her father, grandmother and the narrator. The idea that the double represents another ‘side’ of the same Lucy is further strengthened if we include another element of Freud’s uncanny – that what is deemed fearful is actually something familiar: for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us . . . to understand . . . the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.30 59

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This description highlights both the ‘familiar’ nature of Lucy’s double as the outer representation of something inner, something socially questionable and therefore fearful, as well as the troubled nature of memory that exists in the story. Lucy’s attempt to forget her complete self in order to exist as a respectable daughter of Gisborne ultimately fails because Bridget’s curse becomes a phantom that haunts Lucy. In Gothic Hauntings (2010), Christine Berthin uses the theories of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok to discuss haunting as a ‘transgenerational’ phantom because ‘it takes the shape of a secret transmitted within a family or a community without being stated because it is associated with repressed guilt, shame or is the result of a trauma that has not been worked through.’31 Bridget’s failure to accept her daughter’s sexual choices leads to her quarrel with Mary and later to her anger against Gisborne and the curse which subsequently haunts and almost des­ troys her granddaughter Lucy. Looking further into the idea of the uncanny also sheds light on the old traditions that Bridget Fitzgerald represents and the conflicts those traditions cause in the modern world of the story. She, like her granddaughter, represents a broader sense of the uncanny or the troublingly familiar: Let us take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of thoughts, with the prompt fulfilment of wishes, with secret injurious powers and with the return of the dead. The condition under which the feel­ ing of uncanniness arises here is unmistakable. We – or our primitive forefathers – once believed that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgement something like this: ‘So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!’ or, ‘So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!’ and so on.32

This process of realization of the uncanny describes the reactions of the narrator as he is thrown into a world of old traditions and curses that do actually work. 60

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Read in light of Freud’s theories, Lucy Fitzgerald is the em­bodi­ ment of the uncanny. She encompasses all the major characteristics of the uncanny, most obviously through the doppelgänger and her unfixed, uncontrolled sexual identity, but also through the story’s emphasis on fate and repetition, and she represents all that is repressed in herself, in the narrator and in society as a whole. In this way, self and society become their own doubles. Felicia Bonaparte notes that although Lucy despises her demonic other, she recognizes that other as her ‘self’. This psychological connection also hints at Lucy’s repressed thoughts and allows the demon to have power over her. Bonaparte reads the description of the double ‘mocking’ Lucy as a sign of this power: ‘If it had really failed to tempt her, the demon would have had no reason to mock. The demon laughs because it knows that to emerge “undefiled” from temptation, Lucy has had to emerge divided, split between the “holy nature” (5:366) she accepts as her identity and those wicked thoughts and deeds that, since they have been disowned, have become her daemonic double’.33 The characters in Gaskell’s tale represent the unspoken that society tries to repress. More specifically, it is a critique of the hypocrisy of overzealous religious attitudes, as well as a critique of the Victorian values which stifled human freedom. As Patsy Stoneman puts it, both Catholics and Puritans ‘practise[d] repression of the flesh’ and because Lucy’s demonic double is seen by all characters in the story, the double ‘makes visible the repressed sexuality of a whole society’.34 This idea makes Gaskell’s religious attitude more ambiguous in the story because Lucy is ultimately both damned and saved by religion. The repressive and judgmental attitudes of the society around her force her to split herself into ‘good’ Lucy and ‘bad’ Lucy, the angel and the demon, but Bridget’s decision to live as a nun with the Poor Clares symbolizes her return to religious faith, which ultimately saves Lucy from the original curse. She must give up the powerful witch to become a selfless nun. In her discussion of ‘The Poor Clare’, Margaret Homans makes the point that Bridget’s vow of silence as a Poor Clare means that she must lose her voice in order to lift the curse. In order for her granddaughter to live a normal (conven­ tional) life, Bridget must give up her autonomy and her power within the Coldholme community.35 Bridget’s loss of identity is 61

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further sug­gested in the text as she goes from being ‘the Coldholme witch’ [emphasis mine], a powerful woman who is well-known in her village, to a Poor Clare, someone who is nameless, has no individual identity and is one of many. Lucy’s placement in the story and the larger narrative structure of ‘The Poor Clare’ provide an even greater comment on the (im) possibility of this sexual self. Many critics have commented on the unevenness of the story’s narrative form, which begins with Bridget Fitzgerald and her curse upon Squire Gisborne, moves to Lucy’s demonic possession and the growing infatuation of the lawyer/ narrator, and then returns to Bridget again through the detective work of the narrator, who follows her to the convent of the Poor Clares in Antwerp.36 Before Bridget leaves England to repent as a Poor Clare, she confronts the physical manifestation of her curse in the form of Lucy’s double. A powerful woman herself, who is feared by the locals and labeled ‘the Coldholme witch’ (p. 372), she also rejects the other half of her granddaughter: Bridget arose slowly, her gaze fixed on the creature beyond: drawing her breath with a hissing sound, never moving her terrible eyes, that were steady as stone, she made a dart at the phantom, and caught . . . a mere handful of empty air. We saw no more of the creature – it vanished as suddenly as it came, but Bridget looked slowly on, as if watching some receding form. (p. 371)

Just as her ‘phantom’ self recedes into the distance, Lucy, too, recedes into the background of the narrative. The story turns to the nar­rator’s search for Bridget, and for several pages, relates his experiences in Antwerp. Bridget’s repentance and her forgiveness of Gisborne become the central theme of the final section, and Lucy only returns to the story indirectly in the last line, as Bridget says, ‘“She is freed from the curse!”’ (p. 390). As Lucy is lost within the narrative framework, Gaskell is able to comment on the inability of an overtly sexual woman to comfortably exist in Victorian society. Women must also ‘lose’, hide or repress this part of themselves in order to live in polite society or else they, too, will have to live with such a ‘curse’. Though readers do not return to Lucy’s narrative after Bridget’s selfless act as a Poor Clare, we assume that the nar­rator 62

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will be true to his word and marry Lucy because Bridget’s sacrifice has freed Lucy of her ‘demon’. This union allows the re­spect­able Lucy to become the sexual being she desired earlier, but in legal and socially acceptable terms as a wife, behind closed doors, instead of the promiscuous demonic Lucy, who flaunted her sexual freedom throughout her father’s estate. But with this potential for a happier life, there remains at the end of the story an unshakeable sense of change and loss. At the beginning of the narrative, in which the nameless lawyer is thinking back to the events which happened much earlier in his life (indeed, Lucy’s story is actually told in retro­ spective through a male narrator), he does not refer to Lucy as ‘my Lucy’, ‘my beloved’ or ‘my wife’, but instead as ‘poor Lucy’ (p. 329). This suggests that after seeing the sexual possibilities in the younger and freer, though cursed, Lucy, no matter how much he says he is repulsed by the Other Lucy, the narrator ultimately sees her as a lessened, scarred woman, someone to be pitied. Carol A. Martin notes Elizabeth Gaskell’s own connection with the women in her stories, as well as the ghosts which haunt them.37 As an author living between two worlds, Gaskell resembles Bridget Fitzgerald, ‘both rebellious and submissive, defiant of the world’s opinion and yet fearing it, it is no wonder that Gaskell uses the possibilities of the ghost story to depict a powerful woman who dares to defy heaven and earth, but whose power turns back upon herself and makes her, once again, a victim’.38 A benefit of the form of the ghost story for Gaskell is that it allowed her more freedom to depict independent female characters while highlighting the social conditions that restricted women. As Martin says: in the remote time and place and the supernatural context of the ghost story, a special wildness, an uncontrolled power, can be allowed to the women characters without their forfeiting the reader’s sympathy. At the same time, the ghost story presents a dark vision of the trap women are in, in a culture like Bridget’s that views them as it views her, ‘either a great sinner or a great saint’ (Ward, 5:383), with not much room between.39

Likewise, in The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester (1992), Felicia Bona­ parte explains that Gaskell felt less socially constrained in her short 63

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fiction than in her novels: ‘Gaskell felt freer to express herself in her stories than in her novels. Novels had for her the character more of official statements. Stories were more like private confidences’.40 By confronting her own ghosts in her short stories, Gaskell was able to find an alternative means of working through the social issues that she critiqued in her longer fiction. Haunted love: Christina Rossetti’s revenants Most noted for her poems dealing with sisterhood, religion and the troubled persistence of memory and the need to forget, Christina Rossetti (1830–94) chose to focus her ghost poems on speakers who return from the grave either to reinforce their former lovers’ mem­ ories of them, often inflicting guilt through this use of memory, or to beg release from the earthly love that keeps them bound, at least partially, to the material world. Rossetti’s three main ghost poems include ‘The Hour and the Ghost’, published in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), and ‘The Poor Ghost’ and ‘The Ghost’s Petition’, published in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866).41 In Rossetti’s poems, the spectres represent the desire to have what is beyond the social norm, much like Lucy Fitzgerald and her ‘demon’ double in ‘The Poor Clare’. As Suzanne Waldman says in The Demon and the Damozel (2008): Christina Rossetti’s gothic . . . uncompromisingly maintains a schism between illicit, abject gratification and symbolic conformity. She thus depicts scenarios in which women are about to enter sensible, con­ ventional marriages with loving but unexceptional men, only to be overwhelmed by alluring but deadly outlaws . . . Rossetti’s heroines are forced to make momentous choices among the claims of different parts of themselves, with the gothic complication that Rossetti’s heroines have no choice, because they have already been condemned by their susceptibilities to a desire for a jouissance tinged with sin.42

Taking this argument a step further, Rossetti’s Gothic subjects represent this ‘schism’ through troubling memories and the inability to forget the past. Her speakers are indeed ‘overwhelmed’ by the sexual sides of their natures that return in the form of the ghost. 64

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‘The Hour and the Ghost’, written on 11 September 1856, is one of Rossetti’s earliest ghost poems and is perhaps the most chilling and memorable of these works. It contains a revenant that returns from the grave in order to scare his former lover to death so that she might be forced to become his partner again in death, and, therefore, also be forced to leave her current lover. Thomas Burnett Swann, in Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti (1960), sees strong autobiographical elements in this poem, with Christina as the bride and her past suitor James Collinson as the bridegroom. According to Swann, the ghost then becomes Christina’s conscience and her regret over giving up a chance at marital happiness with Collinson in favour of religious devotion.43 Whether or not one sees Rossetti’s own life in the poem, it serves as a stark comment on the oppressive persistence of memory and the inability of love to maintain stability in a transitory world. The scene begins with an unnamed ‘bride’ in a state of fear over the perceived return of her ghostly, former lover. She describes the return in the form of a storm, which she cannot withstand, pleading with her bridegroom: O love, love, hold me fast, He draws me away from thee; I cannot stem the blast, Nor the cold strong sea: Far away a light shines Beyond the hills and pines; It is lit for me.44

The bride’s language is reminiscent of the relentlessness of nature and the persistence of memory, the repeated act of coming and going, signified in the reference to the sea and the bride’s description of the drawing movement of the ghost. At this point in the poem, the ghost remains out of sight for the bridegroom, and presumably anyone else who would be in the room, but not for the bride. The light of the ghost, though ‘beyond the hills and pines’, is lit for her; it exists both as a symbol of her internal knowledge of his presence and as the representation of his returning spirit, which still exists on earth because of her. Just as with the coming of a storm, the bride cannot stop the returning of her consciousness of the past relation­ 65

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ship. Jan Marsh, in Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life (1995), notices that ‘throughout Christina’s verse, ghostly lovers return in the dark, frighteningly intent on reclaiming their loved ones. Monsters rise and fall . . . Secrets must be kept, or cannot be told.’45 However, much of the underlying anxiety that gives the poem such force is the fact that one’s past indiscretions may be a secret kept from others, but it cannot be kept from oneself. The bride’s recent mar­ riage is a ‘secret’ which she also cannot keep from her former lover, and her past with that man a secret she cannot keep from destroying her present happiness. The short, unaffected response of the bridegroom shows his in­ ability to recognize the danger his bride is in and also his inability to appreciate the significance of the light she sees. Instead, he refers to it as ‘the northern light’ (‘Hour’, 10). In the third stanza of the poem, the ‘Ghost’ appears to the bride and immediately issues his command: ‘Come with me, fair and false,/To our home, come home’ (‘Hour’, 11–12). In this sense, he ‘comes calling’ in a morbid form of courtship. Rossetti stressed this former closeness of the pair in an earlier manuscript version of the poem, in which the ghost re­ calls that he once ‘wooed leaned and said’.46 Rossetti later amended this passage by omitting the word ‘leaned’, a word suggesting added intimacy between the two. However, this intimacy is lost to both poem and reader in the revised version. Instead of a happy home, he wants her to ‘cross the tossing foam’ (‘Hour’, 17) and return with him into the storm which she describes at the beginning of the poem. The bride immediately recognizes that she is doomed but begs her bridegroom to protect her. What she seeks refuge from, however, is not a tangible danger or person. She says: He taunts me with the past, His clutch is waxing stronger, Hold me fast, hold me fast. He draws me from thy heart, And I cannot withhold: He bids my spirit depart With him into the cold: – Oh bitter vows of old! (‘Hour’, 19–26)

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Their past together is what the ghost uses to control her. The return of this lover brings back feelings of guilt for the woman, but the exact cause of the guilt remains unknown. Both Jan Marsh and Suzanne Waldman discuss the past sexual relationship of the couple, and Marsh notes that the stanza which ends the poem bears a strong similarity to descriptions of tormented lovers in Dante’s second circle of hell.47 The ghost ‘taunts’ the new bride with the ‘bitter vows of old’, giving the sense that the bride did not uphold her previous arrangement with the lover. Like the effect of the moon on the tides, the ghost influences her behaviour and ‘draws’ her from her current love. Rossetti’s use of the moon is also symbolic of the cycle of heightened emotions that occur with the moon’s phases. This reference calls attention to the woman’s past height­ ened emotional and sexual arousal during her relationship with the ghostly lover – natural forces to which, like the tides, she must respond. In the next two stanzas, both the bridegroom and the spectral lover begin by saying, ‘Lean on me’ (‘Hour’, 27, 30), but only the ghost promises to ‘guide and steady’ her in death (‘Hour’, 31). In the metaphorical battle between the bridegroom and the former lover, the prior pledge proves stronger, and the ghost enacts the wedding vows signaling his intention to reclaim the bride for him­ self: Ah, sure bed and house, For better and worse, for life and death: Goal won with shortened breath: Come, crown our vows. (‘Hour’, 34–7)

The bride can only fulfill her vows by dying, and knowing that her end is near, she admits her past mistake by asking her bridegroom not to forget her: O friend forsake me not, Forget not as I forgot: But keep thy heart for me, Keep thy faith true and bright; Thro’ the lone cold winter night Perhaps I may come to thee. (‘Hour’, 42–7) 67

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Though she fears the ghost, she seeks her own future return as a ghost as the only way to return to her new husband, continuing the deadly cycle. Rossetti gives the final words of her poem to the spectral lover, who triumphantly takes his ‘bride’ and also dictates her own fate as a ghost. Because of what he calls her ‘sin’ (‘Hour’, 51) of forgetting him and loving another, she will experience the same lack of peace in the afterlife: Thou shalt visit him again To watch his heart grow cold; To know the gnawing pain I knew of old; To see one much more fair Fill up the vacant chair, Fill his heart, his children bear: – While thou and I together In the outcast weather Toss and howl and spin. (‘Hour’, 53–62)

The ghost wins in the end and dictates the manner of the woman’s return. Rossetti also returns to the image of the storm that the bride describes at the beginning. Her fate will be the ghost’s fate, their lives will be intertwined ‘for better and worse, for life and death’, and the ending does not suggest that she gets her dying wish to remain loved by the bridegroom. Instead, she will not have the power to haunt him actively but only distantly observe as he con­ tinues his life without her. In ‘The Poor Ghost’, originally titled ‘Alas, poor Ghost!’ and written by Rossetti on 25 July 1863,48 the person being visited by the ghost is not as sure of the return as the bride in ‘The Hour and the Ghost’. Instead, he asks where she comes from and why she has returned to him. Rossetti again uses the motif of the sea to signal the idea of withdrawal and return, as the man remarks that the ghost’s voice is ‘as hollow as the hollow sea’.49 The ghost promises to reveal knowledge to the person, saying, ‘From the other world I come back to you, . . . /You know the old, whilst I know the new:/But tomorrow you shall know this too’ (‘Poor Ghost’, 5, 7–8). As with Rossetti’s other ghost poems, the living are tied to 68

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memory while the ghost signifies the future. Rossetti also turns the peaceful, fresh image of morning dew into a damaging one for the dead: ‘My locks are uncurled with dripping drenching dew’ (‘Poor Ghost’, 6). As with the bride in ‘The Hour and the Ghost’, the former lover does not wish to die in order to be with the ghost in the afterlife. He requests more time and tells her, ‘Here I feel warm and well-content and gay:/Give me another year, another day’ (‘Poor Ghost’, 11–12). His inability to recognize his former love gives the sense that she has been dead for some time, but in the next stanza, the reader realizes that she has only been dead ‘a day and a night’ (‘Poor Ghost’, 13). At first she wants him to recognize her presence, but he insists that he has fulfilled his duty to her with her death, saying: ‘Indeed I loved you, my chosen friend, I loved you for life, but life has an end; Thro’ sickness I was ready to tend: But death mars all, which we cannot mend. ‘Indeed I loved you; I love you yet If you will stay where your bed is set, Where I have planted a violet Which the wind waves, which the dew makes wet.’ (‘Poor Ghost’, 17–24)

He believes that his symbolic, outward display of grief is enough and that death is the end of love. He sees the dew as something peaceful to the living, but it is not to the dead. The ghost recognizes his love as conditional – grounded in the physical – and remarks, ‘Life is gone, then love too is gone’ (‘Poor Ghost’, 25), but she tells him that no matter how well he thinks he has gotten over her death, his grief keeps her tied to the material world. Though she lies with ‘the forgotten dead’ (‘Poor Ghost’, 32), she cannot yet be fully at peace until he releases her: ‘But why did your tears soak thro’ the clay, And why did your sobs wake me where I lay? I was away, far enough away: Let me sleep now till the Judgment Day.’ (‘Poor Ghost’, 33–6) 69

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Rossetti’s reference to clay suggests not only the earth but also the biblical sense of the body as clay. The man’s tears reawakened her body and soul and forced her to return to him. His grief brought her unwillingly back. In a clever twist of time, however, the man’s grief is shown by Rossetti to be short-lived. In the day and night of the woman’s death, he has cried over her grave but has then moved on enough to remark, ‘I loved you for life, but life has an end’. Her pathetic plea for release juxtaposes with the revenant in ‘The Hour and the Ghost’, who will not relinquish his hold on an earthly being, whereas ‘the poor ghost’ seeks peace and a separation from her love but cannot find it. The lover’s tears (signifying the previous physical bond of the couple) called her back from a peace­ ful rest, only to find that he declares their love at an end and dismisses her return. Earlier manuscript versions of ‘The Poor Ghost’ heighten the sense of distance and strangeness that exists between the lovers after the woman’s death. Between the third and fourth stanzas, Rossetti originally included: ‘Your body to die or your soul to live It is not mine to withhold or to give. You must depart when sentence you receive: You must come home to me, and will you grieve?’ ‘Alas, my lost love and still my dear, I knew you here and I loved you well here: But now my flesh creeps to feel you so near, And if I do not shun I needs must fear.’50

Almost every line tells of the change which the man now feels toward his former love. He urges her to follow her death ‘sentence’, as if she is a convicted criminal. To him she is a ‘lost’ love, loved ‘here’ on earth (presumably for her physical beauty), but his love goes no further. His use of the past tense in line two of the second stanza reiterates the transition from past to present, where, in the present, he ‘now’ feels ‘fear’. However, if the man’s words stress the change in their relationship, the woman’s added stanza, after the current sixteenth line of the poem, argues that what little change 70

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there might be in her is only physical and should not affect his emotions or former feelings toward her: ‘Am I so [soiled] with the damp and the dust That my love loathes me as a leprous crust? Not decay has yet touched me, tho’ touch it must; The nails hold hard, tho’ they’re ’filed with rust.’51

In addition to his forgetting her so quickly, she is also troubled by the fact that his repulsion is based purely on outward, physical appearances. In her view, though the body decays, love should not. In his essay, ‘The Dead Woman Talks Back: Christina Rossetti’s Ironic Intonation of the Dead Fair Maiden’, George P. Landow discusses Rossetti’s distinctly female voice in ‘After Death’ and ‘Song’ in order to highlight her reversal of the popular Victorian (male) tendency to depict ‘the suffering woman as object of male pleasure’.52 Landow sees Rossetti’s dead female speakers as her way of ‘talk[ing] back’ to the male poetic tradition that objectified its female subjects. In these poems, the female speakers ‘concentrate more narrowly upon offering a woman’s view of male conceptions of romantic love and loss’. According to Landow, these poems represent women who are truly at peace with their death, and who are happy to ‘forget’ their previous connection to their loved one. The speaker in ‘Song’ forbids her lover from mourning for her: ‘When I am dead, my dearest/Sing no sad songs for me’. She admits that, from beyond the grave, she still considers him to be ‘dearest’ to her, but releases her lover from any ongoing emotional attach­ ment: ‘And if thou wilt, forget’. To encourage him to do this, she makes it clear that she is beyond any suffering or pain: I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on as if in pain.

Landow notes that in these lines, the female spirit ‘exist[s] in a world of sensory deprivation and apparent peace’, and that she ‘exists . . . beyond human desire’, but it can be further argued that the speaker 71

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does not feel ‘deprivation’ and ‘peace’ as much as she feels freedom from pain and worldly restraint. ‘I shall not see the shadows’ can be read as meaning that she will no longer see the ‘dark’ places of human existence (i.e. sadness and despair). And her comment about not hearing the nightingale (who also sings of pain and has associations with the suffering Philomel) suggests that she is now separated from a world that would potentially victimize, hurt and silence her. The importance of this poem, if read in contrast to her visible ghost poems, is that the speaker recognizes the danger in remembering. Not only does she encourage her lover to forget her, but she will try to do the same; as she concludes: ‘Haply I may remember,/And haply may forget’. This detachment finally releases her from earth and she readily leaves her corporeal body (and mind) behind for a happier, freer, spiritual self. The speakers in her visible ghost poems, however, cannot (or will not) do this, and this forced, lingering con­ nection with the living, this inability to forget, is what ensures their continued suffering. In these poems, Rossetti is still ‘reconfigure­ [ing] the poetic tradition’, as Landow says, but she is not making it as easy, so to speak, for her poetic subjects or her readers. There are no happy endings in these poems and no sense of peace at the end. In her visible ghost poems, Rossetti incorporates both male and female speakers, but I would argue that the gender dynamics in the poems are just as troubling, if not more so, than in her more ab­ stracted death poems. Her spectral speakers accuse the living, and their sense of injustice serves to heighten and complicate their past physical and emotional connection to the living. Her male and female speakers are heard, just as much, if not more so, than the speakers in ‘After Death’ and ‘Song’ because they, like the night­ ingale, ‘sing on as if in pain’, leaving the reader with a much more heightened, troubled sense of being haunted. Writing in the Gothic mode did not require Rossetti to abandon her religious themes; in fact, using a Gothic framework allowed her to discuss the consequences of material/physical attachment. As Waldman says, in psychoanalytical terms . . . Rossetti’s devotional and gothic modes are consistent, because while her gothic poems dramatize fantasies that the devotional modes abjure, they also tend to recommend 72

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Ghostly Lovers and Transgressive Supernatural Sexualities solidly against these fantasies, illustrating how subjects must learn to recognize, forgo, and – if necessary – recover from the diverse attract­ ions and compulsions of narcissistic regression to claim the benefits of symbolic transcendence.53

Likewise, in her biography of Rossetti, Jan Marsh describes the dark imagination that allowed Christina to write such poems: From the goblin merchants and the Satanic goat to the weeping crocodile and the ghost-lover of A Nightmare set on the coast where blood-red seaweeds drip, Christina’s recurrent dreams and waking visions had a monstrous, masculine, inescapable, incomprehensible aspect, where innocence and sensuality, terror and desire, fear and pity were mixed.54

These conflicting emotions are evident in Rossetti’s ghost poems, in which the characters struggle with their own emotional extremes, experiencing not only the above-mentioned anxieties, but also the relentless feelings of guilt over past actions or present inaction, and the uncontrollable return of troubling memories. According to Susan Conley, in ‘Rossetti’s cold women’, the ghost poems ‘exploit their gothic and ballad features to explore the workings of desire at the margins of those Victorian sexual economies circumscribed by the law, specifically conjugal domesticity, and can fruitfully be read as ironic interrogations of Victorian sexual politics’.55 Not only are the ghosts themselves pushing the boundaries of life and death, but they are also challenging Victorian standards of ‘proper’ relationships and courtship practices. Marlene Tromp’s focus on ‘matrimonial devotion’56 as it pertains to the Victorian séance is relevant here and provides a useful connection between the poems of Anne Bannerman and Christina Rossetti. According to the private diary of William Francis CowperTemple (later Lord Mount Temple), who was supposedly reunited with his first wife through a spirit medium, the emotional bond between him and his deceased wife did not end at her death. He writes, ‘It is not till death do us part, but till death do us join. Our birth is the first step that leads to our Death and our Death is a [leap into] never ending life.’57 Tromp goes on to say that Temple’s 73

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comment ‘revises the wedding vows and implies an ongoing alle­ giance to and respect for the one who has been lost’.58 This same idea can be applied to Rossetti’s poems, in which the bonds that connect lovers, whether they are married or not, only grow stronger after death. Likewise, the hold of the deceased person over the living partner also seems to intensify as they gain supernatural character­ istics. The ghosts are able to ‘get the attention’, so to speak, of the living more so than they did while alive and become ‘enforcers’ of the previous emotional bond. Of course, their return is unwelcome on the part of the living, but they, nonetheless, represent their ‘ongoing allegiance’ to their living partner. Jan Marsh sees an intriguing, though still not fully understood, correlation between Rossetti’s inner life and the dark poems she wrote in the 1850s–1860s. Like the subjects of her writing, these poems represent something in her psyche with which she was wrest­ling. Marsh calls 1857 Rossetti’s annus mirabilis, which gave birth to poems that ‘convey the impression of something seeking expression that nevertheless cannot be described, bound in with half-glimpsed fear’.59 These poems deal with the need for rest, a theme which recurs throughout Rossetti’s works, but the final rest of both the living and the dead is called into question in her ghost poems. The poems also complicate Rossetti’s own recurring posi­ tive descriptions of the afterlife in her letters, where she often describes ‘the joy of a firm immortal hope for the one not lost but gone before whom we hope to follow and to rejoin’.60 Though these poems remain undervalued by scholars and generally are not considered Rossetti’s most aesthetically rewarding or finest work, they do have something to offer if we read them through the lens of the Female Gothic, a genre which helps to uncover the fearful, uncontrolled sexual anxieties that emerge in these poems in the form of a ghost. Unrelenting love: Vernon Lee’s haunted history In her fictional imaginings of Italy, Vernon Lee (1856–1935) fre­ quently uses the supernatural as a main theme. During her career, she wrote over twenty supernatural stories and connected her own 74

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love of travel with her literary works. Her supernatural writings include Hauntings (1890), Pope Jacynth (1904), and For Maurice (1927), and her stories often concern role reversals involving ghosts and gender. As Vineta Colby discusses in her biography of Lee, the author was ‘fascinated with the past’61 since early childhood, and this love of the past found its way into her fiction. Colby also notes that almost all of Lee’s supernatural tales are set in Italy, Germany, and Spain, but unlike many other ghost writers of the Victorian era, her stories deal not with ‘domestic ghosts of the recent past but ancient gods and goddesses or by long dead spirits of the Renaissance and eighteenth century’.62 Indeed, Lee’s spectres have much in common with earlier literary apparitions, finding their dramatic force not in ‘real’ ghosts and the trauma that first caused their haunting, but in the terror and anxiety that exists within the ghost-seer. E. J. Clery’s description of eighteenth-century tragic ghosts is particularly rele­ vant to Lee’s apparitions: The affirmation of the tragic ghost takes to the limit the suspension of disbelief on which all dramatic effect depends. It is not simply an object of terror, as a real ghost might be. Nor is it a source of the detached amusement to be derived from a mock ghost. The effect it produces is pleasurable in so far as the object is known to be fictitious and enjoyed as part of the dramatic artifice, but terrible in that, simul­ taneously, disbelief is suspended far enough for the passions to operate as if the object were a reality. Given that there is no room for the supernatural in a rationalistic world, the making ‘real’ of ghosts in the response to dramatic fiction necessarily involves an enhanced sense of the possibilities of the aesthetic, and its separateness. Only in art could ghosts have an affective afterlife.63

Being so influenced by the eighteenth century and Italian history, it is no surprise that Lee’s ghosts are the most artistic creations of any of her contemporary women writers of the supernatural. The emphasis in her stories is on what Clery calls the dramatic ‘effect’ of the ghost and the main (living) characters. Frequently, her living characters, in their response to the ghosts, prove to be as tragic in their inability to live fully within their own time. This sense of emotional incompleteness leads to their obsessive need to connect with ghosts of the past. As she states in the Preface to Hauntings, Lee 75

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had no use for the supposedly real ghosts that were popular in Victorian literature of the time but, instead, preferred ghosts of the imagination, which could only be raised from the distant past. Thus, Italy itself is a ghost in her stories, a fanciful idea and impression that exists in the imagination as something different than reality. A reviewer for the Athenaeum describes Lee’s ghost stories as a type of exotic literature, where the true ‘spirit’ of the work lies in the ‘cultured strangeness’ that Lee depicts: But in Vernon Lee’s style the supernatural loses all trace of weirdness. It remains simply exotic. ‘Exotic’ is, indeed, the very word to describe all these tales [from Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales (1904)]. The themes are chosen, with one exception, from those medieval legends which are the favoured treasure-house for all lovers of the exotic, and are handled in the style of cultured strangeness which we have learnt to expect in such réchauffés of medieval imaginings. It is as different as possible from the spirit of the legends themselves; but that contrast is part of the exotic effect at which the writers aim.64

Likewise, in a 1956 review of Pope Jacynth and More Supernatural Tales, a reviewer for The Canadian Forum praised Lee’s ability to describe the ‘spirit’ of the Italian landscape, specifically citing Lee’s essay ‘Ravenna and Her Ghosts’, and saying, ‘Here the spectres as it were float up out of the landscape of Italy, whose evocation – indeed, materialization before the reader – is her particular gift, applied especially to the landscape of Italy where most of the stories are set . . . As a story-teller she exploits this gift, so that her people and spirits are partly embodiments of their settings.’65 In his introduction to The Snake Lady and Other Stories (1954), Horace Gregory asserts that Lee’s Italian stories are her best because she did not limit herself to any real, modern-day description of Italian life and culture: ‘These scenes are less of tourist Italy than of an Italy that exists in the imagination of the intimate traveller who is haunted by places and sees behind fretted ironwork and discolored facades an entrance to romantic passion, mystery, drama, hopes and despairs’.66 Lee artfully sets up the framework for the Italy of her characters’ imaginations because her own views of the past and the region were similar to those characters’ experiences there. Thus, 76

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her stories are as aesthetically pleasing as they are psychologically terrifying. Through her writings, she, too, attempted to connect with the ghosts of the past. Memory, or re-membering the past, proves fatal for the narrator of Vernon Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’, which first appeared in Murray’s Magazine in 1887 and was later collected in Hauntings. In the story, the past permeates almost every page. As the title suggests, the cruel love of a dead femme fatale is summoned by the narrator, who mistakenly believes that he has found the ideal woman. Throughout the story, Lee juxtaposes and compresses past and present until the narrator seems to be living equally in both times. The tale, itself told from the past in the form of diary entries, centres on Professor Spiridion Trepka, a Polish researcher who travels to Italy to conduct research in the Italian archives. From the opening paragraphs, Trepka repeatedly asks questions which point to his own disorientation in regard to place, time and purpose. He wants to connect with the past, as he says, ‘come face to face’ with it, and questions his ability to ‘ever come in spirit into the presence of the Past’.67 From the beginning, Trepka feels an unrelenting need to record and remem­ ber, even something as simple as his lodgings in Italy: ‘I forgot to jot down (and I feel I must jot down, in the vain belief that some day these scraps will help . . . to bring to my mind, in that hateful Babylon of Berlin, these happy Italian days) – I forgot to record that I am lodging in the house of a dealer in antiquities’ (p. 91). In this atmosphere, Trepka is surrounded by Italian history, and in the archives, he discovers a manuscript which tells the story of Medea da Carpi, an historical figure whom he admits he was attracted to before coming to Italy. Medea is clearly a femme fatale, a device which Vineta Colby attributes to Lee’s interest in earlier Romantic literature and the surge in popularity of the literary figure during her own era by the Decadents.68 At the age of fourteen, she stabbed and killed her would-be husband, then married Orsini, Duke of Stimigliano, only to organize his death by stabbing two years later. By nineteen, she began an affair with the already married Duke of Urbania and coerced him to kill his wife and marry her. The Duke subsequently gave his Duchy to Medea’s son by Orsini, and then was killed himself, allegedly through Medea’s machinations. She and her son then took control of the local government, until rebel 77

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forces finally caught and imprisoned her. Lee makes clear the seduc­ tive power of this woman, com­menting that her looks alone could charm men to do whatever she wanted of them. Like Medusa, a look from her could prove fatal. The narrator says that after her arrest, Duke Robert kept her hidden from view, and so ‘It seemed impossible that Medea should intrigue any further, for she certainly saw and could be seen by no one’ (p. 95). Ultimately, Robert has Medea killed and ‘insisted that only women – two infanticides to whom he remitted their sentence – should be employed for the deed’ (p. 96). By stressing that the executioners were infanticides, Lee seems to suggest that only un­natural, unfeminine women could kill Medea,69 herself unnatural and viewed as a lethal witch or demon during her lifetime. Trepka becomes increasingly intrigued by this woman of the past, and finds three images of her in the archives: a miniature portrait, a bust and a painting depicting her as Cleopatra.70 In the picture of Medea as Cleopatra, ‘she is kneeling, baring her breast for the victor to strike, but in reality to captivate him’ (p. 97). Trepka uses all three pictures to form an image of Medea, saying that ‘it is easy to reconstruct the beauty of this terrible being’ (p. 97). This ease of reconstruction, of bringing the past back to life, is the beginning of Trepka’s downfall. He describes her facial features as ‘tight’ and embodying ‘sinister seductiveness’. Her beauty is ‘voluptuous yet cold’ and ‘haunts the mind’ (p. 98). If these physical attributes are not enough to describe Medea’s inner personality, the message on her necklace certainly is: ‘Amour Dure – Dure Amour’. At this point, though fascinated by her beauty, Trepka still understands her destructiveness: I often examine these tragic portraits, wondering what this face, which led so many men to their death, may have been like when it spoke or smiled, what at the moment when Medea da Carpi fascin­ ated her victims into love unto death – “Amour Dure – Dure Amour,” as runs her device – love that lasts, cruel love – yes indeed, when one thinks of the fidelity and fate of her lovers. (p. 98)

Although this is his initial impression of Medea, Trepka begins to reconstruct a different Medea in his mind, and as he reconstructs 78

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the past, it becomes his future. He feels the need to find romance while in Italy but makes the mistake of ruling out the possibility of future love in favour of fatal love from the past: I am wedded to history, to the Past, to women like Lucrezia Borgia, Vittoria Accoramboni, or that Medea da Carpi, for the present; some day I shall perhaps find a grand passion, a woman to play the Don Quixote about . . . a woman out of whose slipper to drink, and for whose pleasure to die; but not here! (p. 100)

In a clever play on the word ‘here’, Lee suggests that Trepka’s growing attraction to Medea means that he isolates himself from potential love both in Italy and in the present. The modern world holds no fascination for him. The romanticized Italy that he has created in his mind does not equal the everyday Italy that he actually sees. This dissatisfaction, more than anything, urges him to resurrect the ghost of Medea and reject any possibility of modern romance, in favour of ‘dangerous romance’.71 According to Ruth Robbins: For Spiridion Trepka . . . the spectre is an emanation of his own desires, not the realization of his fears about the unfixity of identity. Trepka is dissatisfied with modern civilization, and has come to Italy with a mission to uncover the past. His role as a historian is aca­ demic and realistic; but alongside his professional role, he nurtures a romantic ideal of the past.72

He also isolates himself by staying in the archives for increasing lengths of time and gradually becomes emotionally lost in his research. Mary Patricia Kane notes, ‘The archive, with its maze of turrets and closets, becomes a spatial metaphor for our illusive per­ ceptions of the past’.73 As he grows increasingly obsessed with Medea, history begins to fail Trepka, or, rather, he fails history as he begins to make excuses for Medea’s past crimes. He rejects the ‘modern ideas of right and wrong’ (p. 101) because they could not apply to a time like Medea’s. In his thoughts of Medea, he also begins to reconstruct a woman more innocent and naïve than she really was. In so doing, he rejects the recorded history of the manuscripts in favour of his own 79

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imagined history. In a sense, having been influenced by the portrait of her, he begins to ‘paint’ another picture founded on pure con­ jecture. Lee makes this clear by having Trepka repeat such words as ‘fancy’, ‘reflect’, and ‘suppose’ to suggest that Trepka is creating a fictional past that serves his present loneliness. Trepka’s actions make him one of many Vernon Lee characters whose loneliness and need to connect to another human being (who is, unfortunately for them, usually dead) brings them danger­ ously close to the afterlife. Trepka’s actions make him especially remin­iscent of the narrator in ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’, another super­natural tale set in Italy and one of Lee’s earliest ghost stories, pub­lished in the January 1881 issue of Fraser’s Magazine as ‘A Culture-Ghost; or, Winthrop’s Adventure’. In the story, the past is sexualized by the narrator’s need to connect to it, both physically and emotionally, and thus becomes an object of desire. Winthrop’s fascination with the portrait of the famous singer Ferdinando Rinaldi intensifies throughout the story and leads to his encountering the ghost before the murder of Rinaldi is re-enacted. Rinaldi, like Medea da Carpi, has a violent past, as Winthrop learns that he was found stabbed in a nearby house on suspicion of having had an affair with a lady ‘in high favour at Court’.74 Despite this alleged affair, Rinaldi’s feminized qualities as a castrato begin to seduce Winthrop. This elusive, sexual indeterminacy represents Winthrop’s own un­ acknowledged sexual desires which haunt him throughout the story just as much as Rinaldi’s ghost does. In Rinaldi’s sexual ‘betweenness’ Winthrop sees a freedom that he himself wishes to possess. In similar terms, Claire Kahane says that the hermaphrodite is ‘in its symbolic dimension a Gothic emblem of that desired transgression of boundaries . . . within the Gothic space. For [the] response to the hermaphrodite as a literary image derives from ambiguity: from what is virtually obscure yet demands to be seen, from what is impossible but true, from what is wished for and feared.’75 In his insistence on learning about Rinaldi’s past, Winthrop becomes a voyeur, looking at the portrait of Rinaldi in secret when the portrait’s owner is not looking. These secret ‘meetings’ between Winthrop and Rinaldi become a sort of transgressive, inter­generational affair, going on without anyone else’s knowledge. From the beginning, Winthrop feminizes Rinaldi: ‘The features 80

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were irregular and small, with intensely red lips and a crimson flush beneath the transparent bronzed skin; the eyes were slightly up­ turned and looking sidewards, in harmony with the turn of the head and the parted lips, and they were beautiful, brown, soft, like those of some animals, with a vague, wistful depth of look’ (‘Winthrop’, p. 112). His reaction to the portrait intensifies each time he sees it. He talks of being haunted by the face and is confused by his depth of feeling: It returned to my mind as something strange and striking . . . for me it had a queer sort of interest, quite apart from that in the technical execution. There was something peculiar and unaccountable in the look of that face, a yearning, half-pained look, which I could not well define to myself. I gradually became aware that the portrait was, so to speak, haunting me. Those strange red lips and wistful eyes rose up in my mind. (‘Winthrop’, p. 113)

Since Winthrop is projecting his own desire onto the portrait with­ out realizing it, this is where his sense of strangeness comes from. The ‘unaccountable’ nature of the portrait is actually formed by his own self-denial. He cannot admit his attraction to the subject of the portrait and becomes haunted because the face represents his own conflicted sexuality, loneliness and desire. It is reasonable to con­ jecture that Winthrop has the same expression on his face as he looks at the portrait; he is describing his own feelings. In later scenes, Winthrop especially notices Rinaldi’s eyes, and in his reaction, he, like Trepka, projects his feelings onto the portrait: ‘The face had a beauty, a curious, irregular beauty, and in those deep, soft eyes there was something like a magnetic power, which I felt, and which others must have felt before me’ (‘Winthrop’, p. 114). Winthrop describes other parts of Rinaldi’s body in similar, erotic terms. The lips are ‘red, well-cut’ and his hand is ‘a beautiful plump, white, blue-veined hand’ (‘Winthrop’, p. 114). His voice is described in the same way: There came a chord, and delicately, insensibly there glided into the modulations of the instrument the notes of a strange, exquisite voice. It was of a wondrous sweet, thick, downy quality, neither limpid or 81

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain penetrating, but with a vague, drowsy charm, that seemed to steep the soul in enervating bliss; but, together with this charm, a terrible cold seemed to sink into my heart. I crept up the stairs, listening and panting. (‘Winthrop’, p. 130)

Near the end of the story, Winthrop puts his life in danger by spending the night at the abandoned villa where Rinaldi was found stabbed to death. He penetrates the barricaded rooms of the house in order to find the ghost of Rinaldi. This act of penetration is a continuance of the feminization of the deceased singer. The illicit nature of his interest in Rinaldi is heightened at the beginning and end of the narrative when Winthrop tries to hide his interest in and knowledge of the singer’s music. Winthrop’s embarrassed retelling of his story also hints that he feels ashamed for his transgressive past actions. Winthrop’s encounter with the ghost of the singer is described in equally sexual terms. He penetrates the outer door to the villa with ‘a vigorous push’ (‘Winthrop’, p. 128), makes his way further into the interior of the house, and finding another door, he ‘pushed it open gently and by degrees, and stood on the threshold, trembling and breathless’ (‘Winthrop’, p. 130). As he goes deeper into the house, he begins to hear the voice of Rinaldi and ‘listening and panting’ (‘Winthrop’, p. 130), he finally gains sight of Rinaldi. The moment of this encounter is described in climactic language: I stood spellbound, incapable of moving, as if all my blood were frozen and my limbs paralyzed, almost insensible, save that I saw and I heard, saw and heard him alone. The wonderful sweet, downy voice glided lightly and dexterously through the complicated mazes of the song; it rounded off ornament after ornament, it swelled imperceptibly into glorious, hazy magnitude, and diminished, dying gently away from a high note to a lower one, like a weird, mysterious sigh; then it leaped into a high, clear, triumphant note, and burst out into a rapid, luminous shake. (‘Winthrop’, pp. 130–1)

As in ‘Amour Dure’, the final act of transgressive penetration for Winthrop – into the house, into the past, into the private world of Rinaldi – is punished. He falls trying to escape the house and then 82

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develops a prolonged fever. He does, however, regain health and lives to (reluctantly) tell his story to others, unlike Trepka. In Trepka’s retelling of Medea’s story, he also switches to present tense, inventing history in the present, but also creating the future: ‘her magic faculty is to enslave all the men who come across her path; all those who see her, love her, become her slaves; and it is the destiny of all her slaves to perish’ (p. 102). By justifying Medea and her crimes and welcoming his connection to her past, Trepka also creates his own future: ‘The possession of a woman like Medea is a happiness too great for a mortal man; . . . no man must survive long who conceives himself to have a right over her; it is a kind of sacrilege’ (p. 102). He welcomes the intrusion of the past into his present, keeping it alive: ‘This is the meaning of her device – “Amour Dure – Dure Amour”. The love of Medea da Carpi cannot fade, but the lover can die; it is a constant and a cruel love’ (p. 103). His acceptance of this sacrifice on the part of all men who love Medea sanctions his own future sacrifice for her. As his connection to Medea grows stronger, she seemingly feeds on his energy and begins to physically come back into existence. Trepka finds her letters in the archives and imagines the scent of her hair on them. He visits the villa where she was held prisoner before being executed and finds a larger, more lifelike portrait of her. Lee describes Trepka’s discovery of the portrait as if the ghost of Medea is standing directly behind him, stalking and haunting him: Behind my own image stood another, a figure close to my shoulder, a face close to mine; and that figure, that face, hers! Medea da Carpi’s! I turned sharp round, as white, I think, as the ghost I expected to see. On the wall opposite the mirror, just a pace or two behind where I had been standing, hung a portrait. (p. 107)

In fact, Trepka does see a ghost, in terms of the phantom he has constructed through his research, a person who becomes increasingly real to him: ‘for it is Medea, the real Medea, a thousand times more real, individual, and powerful than in the other portraits’ (p. 107). Readers will remember that this ‘powerful’ nature was once also a fatal quality of Medea’s, as her face brought about the downfall of 83

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numerous men. But as with Lee’s other stories, the portrait is also a mirror, reflecting Trepka’s own desires and insecurities. As Mary Patricia Kane says, ‘The emphatic relations that her characters have with the subjects of portraits ultimately reveal more about the char­ acters themselves than about the illusive objects of their gaze; the narrative of haunted portraiture, like a hall of mirrors, tells the story of the constitution of the self through the other’.76 Kane connects this type of haunting to both individual psyche and the cultural moment of Victorian England: ‘The transgressive potential of portraiture in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Amour Dure is the expression of a generalised anxiety in fin de siècle culture about the increasing fluidity of some of the most basic elements of individual identity – gender, class, social status and the crises in methods of representation of the real world.’77 Obsessed with the image, Trepka composes songs about Medea and scolds local children who call her a witch. He effectively resur­ rects her, calls her out of the past, by vocally summoning her, saying, ‘Vieni, Medea, mia dea’ (p. 109). As if these words are the final action needed to bring her ghost back, Trepka is informed by his landlady that a woman has stopped to listen to his song, a woman who turns out to be Medea herself. The fact that the landlady sees the figure allows the ghost to become real for both Trepka and for readers. He has literally brought her back, out of the past. She is no longer a memory but real. She writes letters to Trepka, thereby beginning her next fatal seduction. She instructs him to go to the Church of San Giovanni Decollato and to look ‘for a lady wearing a black mantle, and holding a rose’ (p. 110). His first encounter with Medea is complicated by the fact that she remains at a distance and he cannot touch her: ‘I followed close upon her, but somehow I could not get up with her’ (p. 113). There is a difference in time, a separation between the past and present that still does not allow Trepka to have the physical contact with Medea that he so desires. After his encounter, Trepka questions his own memory. Return­ ing to the church and finding it long-abandoned, he begins to question whether his mind is playing tricks on him: ‘Things, all these, which I may have seen elsewhere, stored unawares in my brain, and which may have come out, somehow, in a dream; I have heard physiologists allude to such things’ (p. 115). Again, Trepka 84

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relies on past memory, in the form of a dream, to justify his present reality: ‘It must have been a dream, a vision, the result of overexcitement. I must leave at once for Rome and see doctors, for I am afraid of going mad’ (p. 115). Ruth Robbins links this anxiety with the Victorian idea that ‘to become unfixed is probably tanta­ mount to his becoming unhinged’.78 Indeed, by losing his ‘place’ as a modern-day, rational historian, his place as respectable university professor, Trepka loses the only reality he has previously known – no matter how unsatisfying that reality may have been – and he chooses an uncertain future where a femme fatale controls his every move. However, Trepka fails to follow his instinct to leave Urbania and puts his trust in a distorted reality, which he continues to think is real. He decides not to doubt his senses and to continue to pursue Medea, whether she is real or ghostly: Those pedants say that the dead are dead, the past is past. For them, yes; but why for me? – why for a man who loves, who is consumed with the love of a woman? . . . Why should there not be ghosts to such as can see them? Why should she not return to the earth, if she knows that it contains a man who thinks of, desires, only her? (p. 115)

The past is not dead for him; she returns for him. However, Trepka blinds himself to the real past of Medea, the murderer and femme fatale, in favour of a romanticized, victimized woman who he im­ agines loves him. As he summons the past, Trepka becomes a part of the past, and his consciousness is trapped in the past. This sur­render­ ing to history and the charms of Medea means that her influence possesses him. As he abandons rationality, Trepka exists more in the past than in the present. For Kane, this is symbolized in the physical senses: ‘The olfactory and auditory senses, traditionally associated with external stimuli, have become functions of the imagination and memory in this narrative universe where the neat Cartesian division between mind and body has been obliterated and the Enlighten­ ment metaphysics of presence is decentred, suggesting the past as the more poignant reality’.79 If Trepka’s actions are read with these ideas in mind, then his death should not be seen as a sudden one at the end of the story; rather, he has been slowly dying (departing) his world gradually throughout the story. 85

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The compression of past and present in Trepka’s world is sym­ bolized in the rose which he finds on a doorstep just after missing Medea outside the church. By the morning, the fresh rose has withered and looks like ‘a thing kept for centuries between the leaves of a book’ (p. 116). He increasingly lives among the dead, as he enters the church night after night and walks among dead priests, who he realizes exist only for him. He receives another letter from Medea, this time telling him to destroy the statue of her rival, Duke Robert, a statue containing a special idol that supposedly preserves Robert’s soul against the evil influence of Medea’s spirit. After this request, Trepka finally succumbs to Medea’s ghost and decides to do her bidding. He finds little comfort in any thoughts of the future and chooses to end his life dedicated to the past and to the memory of Medea. He breaks with the present as something inferior to the world of memory and imagination: ‘We smile at what we choose to call the superstition of the past, forgetting that all our vaunted science of today may seem just such another superstition to the men of the future; but why should the present be right and the past wrong?’ (pp. 117–18). In choosing the uncertain past over his more certain (though to him, unfulfilling) academic future, Trepka is further emasculated by Medea. Robbins says that his decision to abandon the history of Urbania that he set out to write, in favour of creating a fictionalized history of Medea (in fact, he, himself, says that he has turned from historian to novelist) signifies the fact that ‘she unmans him by robbing him of his professional masculine status’.80 Because Medea’s influence causes Trepka to abandon his previous love of history, he experiences what Patricia Pulham calls an ‘intellectual “castration”’.81 This symbolic feminizing of Trepka allows a doubling of him with Medea, as she becomes symbolic of the dominating femme fatale, and Lee is able to call into question notions of defined gender roles. As Pulham says, the fluid sexuality made possible by the process of doubling allows an expression of same-sex desire via a model of erotic exchange that is superficially heterosexual. As ‘castrated male’ and ‘phallic woman’, Trepka and Medea display an androgyny that is in keeping with the latently homoerotic dyadic and triadic relationships encountered elsewhere in Vernon Lee’s fiction.82 86

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Pulham also sees Trepka and Medea’s blurred gender boundaries as reflections of Vernon Lee herself, who frequently used both the castrato and the femme fatale in order ‘to play with a sexual fluidity and eroticism that is denied by the moral, artistic “masculinity” that she adopts’ under the male pseudonym of ‘Vernon Lee’.83 Through her supernatural tales, Lee celebrates a sexual deviance that ‘admits transgressive desires, and permits the negotiation of a fluid identity.’84 With this view in mind, Pulham reads the ending of ‘Amour Dure’ more positively because of its affirmation of a less-constrained defin­ ition of gender and desire: ‘read symbolically in terms of Lee’s negotiation of identity, Trepka’s death could be read as a surrender to the phallic woman: an acceptance of aggressive femininity.’85 Following the same path as the other men who died for love of Medea, Trepka steals a hatchet to use to destroy the statue, be­ coming, he says, a thief for the first time in his life, and comes to terms with the fact that he no longer has a future: ‘all had to die, and I shall die also . . . The love of such a woman is enough’ (p. 119). However, even though he accepts his fate, Trepka somehow still believes that Medea will truly love him above all the other men she destroyed: ‘But she shall love me best – me by whom she has been loved after she has been three hundred years in the grave!’ (p. 119). As connected as he is to the past, he cannot see that the past is, indeed, repeating itself and he is a pawn like the other men Medea has fooled. He also abandons his ‘history of Urbania’, which was the intended research project for his trip, and the night before his task, he begins to think of other memories related to his past and his childhood. At this point, time almost stops for Trepka, giving him one last opportunity to change his future: ‘everything vague and unsubstantial about me, as if time had ceased, nothing could happen, my own desires and hopes were all dead, myself absorbed into I know not what passive dreamland’ (p. 121). He even imagines that he is back in his childhood home and out of his present situation. As he goes to destroy the statue, he is confronted by other ghosts of the past as each of Medea’s victims appears before him and warns him not to go. Again, the theories of Derrida are relevant here. Memory brings us to the reality of the present as well as forewarning us of the future: ‘At bottom, the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come 87

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back’.86 However, Trepka chooses the wrong memory to follow and becomes misguided about his present and future when he suc­ cumbs to Medea’s seductive influence. Lee includes a note at the end of the story which describes a newspaper report about the mysterious destruction of the statue of Robert and secondarily mentions that Professor Trepka was found stabbed to death. In these last lines, Lee provides an ironic comment that Trepka, who was so in love with the past, is already fading into it, little-known and quickly forgotten. Peter G. Christensen also recognizes Trepka’s destruction of the statue as another instance of his ineffectiveness throughout the story: ‘Spiridion proves to be both “rash” and “fanatical” in his destruction of the statue of Duke Robert, but he is at the same time impotent. He does not start any wars and revo­ lutions as a Pole against the Germans. No empire is destroyed, and the prince he symbolically murders has died a long time ago.’87 Likewise, Nicole Fluhr connects Trepka’s failure to write the history of Italy with his inability to live within his own world: ‘the narrators [in Hauntings] are writers or artists, and each produces his story . . . at the same time as he is trying and failing to complete another work . . . In these tales, both scholarly work and artistic endeavors position their practitioners as spectators of, rather than full partici­ pants in, the worlds they describe or observe.’88 In this story, Vernon Lee provides a telling example of the power of desire to haunt the imagination. As Robbins notes, ‘Spectral desire may be dis­ embodied; it is often also, in Vernon Lee’s stories, romantically fatal to those who enter its world.’89 Not only is Medea’s influence dangerous, but Trepka’s insistence on resurrecting the past and his inability to live among the inhabitants of the present world causes him to enter into a deadly relationship with a femme fatale. This ghost comes back with a vengeance and seeks to destroy her rival using Trepka as an instrument towards that destruction. Her seduc­ tive­ness hints at the seductive power of memory and how it can be changed and manipulated to suit one’s interests, needs and inner longings. Ghost literature by Victorian women writers and its connection to the Female Gothic through its critique of hidden desire and sexual transgression is a prime example of Fred Botting’s description of the ‘internalization’ of the Gothic in the nineteenth century: 88

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Ghostly Lovers and Transgressive Supernatural Sexualities The internalization of Gothic forms reflected wider anxieties which, centring on the individual, concerned the nature of reality and society and its relation to individual freedom and imagination. Terror became secondary to horror, the sublime ceded to the uncanny, the latter an effect of uncertainty, of the irruption of fantasies, suppressed wishes and emotional and sexual conflicts. A disruptive return of archaic desires and fears, the uncanny disturbs the familiar, homely and secure sense of reality and normality. The disturbance of psychic states, however, does not signal a purely subjective disintegration: the un­ canny renders all boundaries uncertain and, in nineteenth-century Gothic writing, often leaves readers unsure whether narratives describe psychological disturbance or wider upheavals within formations of reality and normality.90

The ever-present guilt and desire that are linked to these repressed sexualities conjures the ghostly protagonists in the stories and poems of Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti and Vernon Lee. For these writers, memory is more troubling than comforting as the ghosts themselves represent the unwanted or repressed emotions of those they haunt. They take the forms of abandoned lovers and doppel­ gängers and transgress the boundaries which the living have set for them. The return of memory in ghostly form also points to some sort of resolution by the end of the work, though again, happy end­ ings are seldom reached. Because of this spectral presence, char­ acters are forced to learn difficult lessons about their past or present be­haviour, and many must come to terms with their pasts through inter­actions with a ghost. In this way, women authors reinforced the idea of responsibility and they themselves taught lessons to their readership about the consequences of forgetting or ignoring some­ thing best not forgotten, something that will not stay buried in the past. This idea of ghostly ‘attachment’ is at the heart of many Victorian supernatural tales, but most particularly those written by women. In these stories and poems, characters long to distance themselves from some sort of past emotional attachment, and in many ways, this can be seen as an internalizing of the physical, bodily escapes of women in earlier Female Gothic narratives. But since this attach­ ment involves a past transgression, usually in the form of sexual desire or a socially unsanctioned sexual relationship, memory is tied 89

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to personal guilt and shame. Thus, the distancing proves an im­ possible task, as these characters are forced to encounter ghosts and confront the consequences of their relationships with these spectres. In other words, the living must wrestle with their demons. Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti and Vernon Lee all evoke the haunting effects of memory and sexuality in their fiction and poetry. Though their ghosts are the most obvious manifestations of a forgotten or denied sexuality, the living characters also must deal with the effects of memory and its often troubling influence. The Fitzgerald family curse and the threatening sexual double in Gaskell’s story, Rossetti’s revenants who return to their lovers still demanding the love they lost when they died, and Vernon Lee’s Professor Trepka, who succumbs to the charms of the fatal Medea da Carpi, are all examples of how both the living and the dead confront the past and its lasting effects on the present. The return of the past in the form of these ghosts often links with the guilty conscience of the protagon­ists or their need to connect with something in the past to replace some­ thing missing in their present.

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3 ‘Uncomfortable houses’ and the spectres of capital  Within the genre of supernatural literature, there is perhaps no more recognizable trope than the haunted house. John H. Ingram, in the Preface to his popular The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (1884), admitted that ‘Many historic tales of apparitions and supernaturally disturbed dwellings are imbedded in British literature’.1 Earlier in the century, in the equally popular Night Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost Seers (1848), Catherine Crowe begins her chapter on ‘Haunted Houses’ by stating, ‘Everybody has heard of haunted houses; and there is no country, and scarcely any place, in which something of the sort is not known or talked of’.2 The popularity of haunted houses also led to the 1859 extra Christmas issue of All the Year Round being dedicated to ‘The Haunted House’, with each story presenting a ghost in a different part of the house.3 The phenomenon of the ‘modern’ ghost story was remarked upon as early as 1862, in an article in Once a Week entitled ‘The latest thing in ghosts’. According to the author, Modern readers must have modern ghosts . . . spirits have made immense progress. Ruined castles have given way to railway stations; trackless forests to the streets of cities; and ghosts in armour are as much out of fashion as mail-coaches. A modern spectre would no more think of dressing in blue armour and carrying a truncheon than a man of fashion would think of strolling down Pall Mall in sandals and a toga.4

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But for him, it is not the spectres, but the authors of ghost stories who must change with the times: The man who writes an interesting ghost tale is a general benefactor, but he should have mercy upon those poor old ghosts who have walked their legs off in our service, and whose horrors are worn threadbare by this time, and give us in their stead something that may make us shudder and not laugh, something that, in the slang of the day, would be called a Great Novelty in Spirits.5

Victorian women writers of the supernatural did just that. Rather than romanticizing the past or setting their ghost stories in foreign countries, a formula which remained popular throughout the early Gothic period, they took on the present, and their stories of haunted properties and the class, gender and economic anxieties that play out within them present readers with both ‘an interesting ghost tale’ and a critique of modern British life. The use of these haunted houses by nineteenth-century authors therefore can be an extension of economic concerns over property, place and power. A useful classification for these kinds of ghost stories, one which describes them more adequately than the many times too broad ‘Gothic’ and ‘domestic Gothic’, is what Robert Mighall calls the ‘Suburban Gothic’. This encompasses ‘newly built’ houses ‘without history’ and moves Victorian ghosts into a more modern era, away from the ruined castles and abbeys of earlier Gothic fiction.6 Fred Botting sees the haunted cityscapes of nineteenth-century Gothic writing as an extension and reenvisioning of earlier Gothic motifs: Less identifiable as a separate genre in the nineteenth century, Gothic fiction seemed to go underground: its depths were less romantic chasms or labyrinthine dungeons, than the murky recesses of human subjectivity. The city, a gloomy forest or dark labyrinth itself, became a site of nocturnal corruption and violence, a locus of real horror; the family became a place rendered threatening and uncanny by the haunting return of past transgressions and attendant guilt on an every­ day world shrouded in strangeness.7

Likewise, the workings of the modern world could be uncanny. As Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell say in their introduction to The Victorian Supernatural (2004): 92

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‘Uncomfortable Houses’ and the Spectres of Capital It was not simply a matter of stories and storytelling, though, for the material world [the Victorians] inhabited often seemed somehow supernatural. Disembodied voices over the telephone, the super­ natural speed of the railway, near-instantaneous communication through telegraph wires: the collapsing of time and distance achieved by modern technologies that were transforming daily life was often felt to be uncanny.8

Many nineteenth-century ghost story writers focused on the haunted house, but these stories are mainly concerned with the fear, danger and near-escapes experienced by the people who spend time in the houses. The ghosts present are usually evil, grotesque, and often seek to physically harm their visitors. Other authors during this period, and particularly women writers, chose to centre their super­ natural stories on social connections between the ghosts present in these houses and the living subjects who dwell in them. These ‘relationships’ usually bring about a change in the way in which the house is haunted. For instance, some ghosts are less frequently troubled after they are able to communicate a message to the living that enables a change to take place, such as stories of found wills, recovered inheritances or reconnecting to loved ones who are still alive. In these stories, the living characters who encounter ghosts also experience some kind of change or improvement in this social situation. Often, the characters profit financially through found treasure of some sort, or they profit emotionally when their time in these houses leads to a greater sympathy for the deceased person or an awareness of their own personal shortcomings and prejudices. Women writers of the supernatural frequently used the motif of the haunted house to comment on property, class and economic issues. In his discussion of ‘Business Gothic’ in Women Writing about Money (1995), Edward Copeland traces the connection between women, money and the Gothic back to the eighteenth century, say­ing that ‘Gothic terror in women’s fiction is unremittingly eco­ nomic’.9 This emphasis is fre­quently combined with anxieties over losing money, as economic con­cerns inspire plots having to do with lost or stolen inheritances, poverty and lost fortunes. As an example of this tendency, Copeland cites the female authors of Minerva Press, who frequently used ‘the economy, as it is represented by 93

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unpredictable, feckless, improvident, destructive, and tyrannical males’ for ‘the active source of terror for women’.10 This helps describe a more specific strain of patriarchy and financial depend­ ence, which is now a well-established source of Gothic anxiety, and also helps provide another link between themes of late-eighteenth and early nine­teenth-century Female Gothic texts and the Victorian writings that followed. According to Anne Williams, ‘The imposing house with a terrible secret is surely one – possibly the – “central” characteristic of the category “Gothic” in its early years’.11 Haunted house stories by nineteenth-century women writers represent the continuance of this early Gothic motif, as well as two different directions in the Female Gothic tradition. In stories of haunted dwellings and the anxiety over gaining and maintaining ownership of property, women writers of the nineteenth century show a continuance of the Female Gothic tradition that began with Ann Radcliffe. Ellen Moers was one of the first scholars to note the importance of property in Radcliffe’s Gothic fiction. Kate Ferguson Ellis has also commented on how material wealth functions as a major theme in Radcliffe’s novels, remarking that ‘true happiness is attainable, therefore, only when one is adequately protected from [money’s] influence, both mentally and physically. [Radcliffe’s] villains, male and female, crave the stimulation of meteoric profits and conspicuous consumption’.12 Like­ wise, at the more recent end of women’s Gothic studies, Robert Miles reaffirms that Radcliffe was concerned with the ‘1790s agenda of lost genius and property’.13 The importance of money and using it correctly resurfaced in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the ghost stories of writers such as Charlotte Riddell, Mary Louisa Molesworth and Margaret Oliphant. In their supernatural writings, each author confronted lost potential and the social repercussions of money being mis­ handled. Whereas in the previous chapter memory took the form of lost love and the haunting aspects of repressed sexuality, the ghosts of political economy come to the forefront of these stories as the women in this chapter are concerned with mismanaged wealth as a source of haunting. But even as they followed a Radcliffean tradition of foreground­ ing the importance of property, nineteenth-century women’s ghost 94

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stories were also responsible for reversing many traditional notions of the Gothic. Vanessa Dickerson suggests that the growing feminist movement in the second half of the century led women authors of the supernatural to alter certain thematic characteristics which were before thought integral to Gothic, namely the persecuted Gothic heroine. Dickerson states that ‘it was during this period that the Gothic formulation of the pure, innocent persecuted female, depend­ent on some male, usually an uncle who either owns or has appropriated her property and thus her financial and social power, began to be reversed’.14 Of course, I have attempted to show in Chapter 1 how this complication of tradition began much earlier, with the powerful revenants that dominate the Romantic ballads of writers such as Anne Bannerman, Charlotte Dacre and Elizabeth Rolls. However, Dickerson’s argument remains important in any discussion of living (non-spectral) protagonists, as well as if we differ­ entiate between poetic and prose traditions. Indeed, as Dickerson points out, the dramatic changes in women’s social position post1850 led to concerns that were only beginning to be felt earlier in the century. By mid-century, it was quite normal to have a woman editing a literary magazine (as both Riddell and Oliphant did) and as women moved into the public (business) world of Britain, direct concerns about money naturally followed. In other words, money became a more direct concern both inside and out­side the ghost story. Dickerson states: Money undoubtedly drew men and women writers to the super­ natural story, but near the end of the century the money women earned from the sale of such stories would be significant both as a means of acquiring independence and as a means of obtaining a living . . . Publishing their tales during the latter part of the nineteenth century, Oliphant, Riddell, and Marryat – popular female writers who probed the nature of woman’s special relation to the spiritual and the material, which often meant money – were in fact earning their own bread at a time when women were more openly chal­ lenging ideas of female submissiveness and economic powerlessness. (p. 137)

As women became part of the business world, as authors or editors (or both), they became more interested in the immediate effects 95

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of possessing/not possessing wealth: ‘Unsurprisingly, Oliphant, Marryat, and especially Riddell, raising specters of restitution and revenge, wrote supernatural tales strongly preoccupied with money and murders committed for that money. This preoccupation with money is not usually so blatant in the tales of earlier major women authors’ (p. 138). Thus, these later Victorian supernatural tales become ‘fantasies of restoration’ (p. 142). However, in many of these ghost stories, these fantasies are seldom realized by the living or the dead. Andrew Smith relates the wider concerns over restor­ation of property to ideas of dis­ placement: direct displacement from the haunted house as well as social displacement over the loss of material/financial security that is caused by loss of money and property. In his discussion of how the Stock Exchange was demon­ized in the nineteenth-century periodical press, Smith notes how ‘the self is potentially dis­em­ powered by the new economic systems so that money creates social instability’.15 Money itself haunts the texts and its misuse – signified by the ghosts – directly impacts the characters in each of the stories discussed in this chapter. Each main character has to go through a period of social instability (or, at least, uncertainty) in order to learn important lessons about the limits of money. And especially true for the protagonists of Riddell and Oliphant’s ghost stories, they must resist or overcome the problems that ensue when, as Smith says, ‘money generates immorality’ (p. 21). For these authors, as it was for Radcliffe, it is not just about the importance of money, but learning to use money correctly that matters. Riddell, Moles­ worth and Oliphant each present characters who are literally displaced because of economic mismanagement, but only a few of their ghosts are allowed to find peace by the end of the story. In many cases, readers are left with a sense of potential for happiness, but not a fully realized new beginning. Through their interactions with the dead, the living characters are wiser but not always happier. This is directly tied to the trauma that they undergo because of their connection with the restless spirits. It is in this point that women writers of ghost stories in the mid to late nineteenth century differ from another much-debated tenet of the Female Gothic. In distinguishing between Male and Female Gothic, Anne Williams posits: 96

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‘Uncomfortable Houses’ and the Spectres of Capital The Female Gothic heroine experiences a rebirth. She is awakened to a world in which love is not only possible but available; she acquires in marriage a new name and, most important, a new identity . . . But the best that even the survivors of the Male Gothic plot can expect is a kind of spiritual inoculation. They emerge from the concluding apocalyptic orgy of violence with lowered expectations, permanently marked by what they have suffered.16

The stories of Riddell, Molesworth and Oliphant give readers of Gothic the opportunity to expand our traditional notions of what makes a ‘Female Gothic’ plot. Their characters (both male and female) are ‘awakened’, but awakened to a knowledge of the limi­ tations of existence in a material, mortal (flawed) world. They are faced with the consequences of a mishandled life and the tragedies of another’s wasted life. Williams’s classification of the Male Gothic in the last lines of the above quote is a perfect description of the after-effects of the female ghost story plots that are discussed in this chapter. In the stories of Charlotte Riddell, Mary Louisa Molesworth and Margaret Oliphant, the physical place of haunting is intimately tied to financial concerns: spectral trouble is a direct result of monetary trouble. Misdirected inheritances, missing wills, lack of money, stolen money, squandered money and miserliness all summon restless spirits. In ghost stories by women, these ‘uncomfortable houses’,17 as they were popularly called at the time, are troubled because of an injustice or social inequality that persists in leaving the past in­ habit­ants continually seeking help from the current owners of the properties. Indeed, through the presence of their resident ghosts, the very ‘ownership’ of the properties is questioned. These super­ natural stories had their groundings in very real social concerns over property and perceived ‘safe’ spaces within urban and suburban areas. In her study of London’s single-family houses and the rapid growth of the city during the mid-nineteenth century, Sharon Marcus discusses the Victorian haunted house story as reflective of anxieties regarding overcrowding and the failure of the domestic ideal. Working with Edward Cook’s famous statement that ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’, Marcus reads the ghost as an invader of domestic space and as an extension of Victorian concerns over 97

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the growing infringement (invasion) of working-class tenants into traditional middle-class spaces.18 She goes on to say, ‘even for readers who did not believe that ghosts were real, the effects produced by ghosts in haunted-house stories corresponded point by point to the material conditions of middle-class life in London.’19 Often, as in Charlotte Riddell’s ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’ from her collection, Weird Stories (1882), the troubled past comes to the awareness of the present inhabitant in the form of a dream vision, visions which ultimately turn out to be very real to the people who must deal with the ghosts. These dreams lead to tangible results; by the end of the stories, the main characters have learned to change their present ways by taking more responsibility for their actions, and some characters actually find happy endings, as is the case in Riddell’s ‘Walnut-Tree House’. This redemptive impulse alone makes women’s stories of haunted houses something quite different from those authored by their male counterparts. In most stories by men, the apparition doing the haunting is mal­ evolent, and in many cases successfully drives the visitors or tenants out of the house by terrifying them with frightening visions or physical harm. Their presence in these houses and the traumas that led to their unhappy afterlives are usually never fully understood by readers. One of the best examples of this type of story is Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Empty House’ (1906). On the other hand, women tend to focus more on reconciliation within their haunted houses, such as Mary Louisa Molesworth’s ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’, published in her collection Four Ghost Stories (1888). In the story, the narrator, Margaret, ‘Lady Farquhar’, recounts her experiences with a ghost she fondly calls her ‘old lady’, a ghost who was the former owner of a house Margaret’s family is renting. Throughout the story, Margaret never fears the ghost, and instead, sympathizes with her loneliness. Loneliness and isolation are emotions that Margaret herself feels, and the two women find solace and understanding in the presence of each other in a quite literal instance of the ‘social’ supernatural. It is this sense of loneliness that the younger Margaret feels during her stay which makes the house an ‘uncomfortable’ one for her, but she, like the other char­ acters discussed in this chapter, learns the importance of compassion from the ghost and is able to tell her story to others. 98

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In Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’, originally published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1882, a haunted property comes to the attention of its current owners through mysterious voices and moving shades that reside near certain parts of the house and its grounds, parts which represent some past trauma for the former inhabitants. Again, this past trauma leads to reconciliation and a greater understanding between the living and the dead. The stories in this chapter each highlight the interest of the authors not simply to scare, but to teach readers lessons of compassion and empathy that go beyond the narrative. Their ‘uncomfortable houses’ expanded the traditional idea of the haunted house as a place of fear and made it into something more meaningful, a place not only where fear resides but also where there is the potential for individual transformation, as well as a mutual understanding that transcends the boundaries between life and death. ‘A curse rested on the place’: Charlotte Riddell’s abandoned souls Charlotte Riddell (1832–1906) experienced many of the economic problems that she wrote about in her novels and stories. Born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Ulster, Riddell was the daughter of an Irish Protestant father and an English mother. After her father’s death left the family with considerable debts, Charlotte and her mother settled in London around 1855. This stressful period of her life evidently took a lasting toll on Riddell. In her interview with Helen C. Black, first published in The Lady’s Pictorial, and later collected in Notable Women Authors of the Day, Biographical Sketches (1893), Black notes that the author lived in ‘absolute seclusion’ and that she decided ‘to settle down, away from the world, after long and fierce buffeting with the stormy seas of sorrow, disappointment, losses, and bereavement, of which she has had so large a share’. Later in the interview, Riddell fondly remembers her mother and the impact her death had: ‘And she was good as she was beautiful. I wish you could hear how rich and poor who knew her in the old time at The Barn still speak of her. As for me, while I speak, the grief of her death seems sharp and present as on that sixteenth of December when she left me.’20 99

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In London, she began her career as a writer in order to support herself, and her early years of struggling to attain success as an author provided the seeds for the financial anxieties that abound in her novels and short stories. An instance of this frustration is found in an early letter to her publisher, dated 26 April 1858, in which Riddell laments that she is ‘really quite tired of failure’ and goes on to say, ‘I fear I must give up novel writing as a useless enterprise’, interest­ ingly using the businesslike word ‘enterprise’ to describe her career as an author. She also mentions not making money with her novels and talks of her inability to gain monetary and creative ‘success’, remarking that there ‘must be either some defeat in the books them­ selves or else success in my profession depends on a chance & I am not fortunate’.21 After her marriage to J. H. Riddell and her husband’s failed busi­ ness attempts, Charlotte continued to support herself through writing. In her most famous novel, George Geith (1864), Riddell makes economic concerns her main theme, and, according to Robert Lee Wolff in his introduction to Riddell’s Maxwell Drewitt (1865), ‘No other nineteenth-century novelist so precisely conveys to the modern reader . . . the atmosphere in which so much of England’s economic life was conducted.’22 Riddell also expressed this concern publicly in her article, ‘The Miseries of Christmas’ (1867), in which she complained: ‘Is it very merry to feel that what­ever the state of the domestic finances may be, Jack, Tom, and Harry must be suitably remembered? Is there not a ghastly sort of pleasantry in bidding a man be “merry” when the yearly bills are coming in?’23 Though she frequently used ghosts to further her views about financial problems in England, these problems were very much a reality to her.24 Accord­ ing to E. F. Bleiler, in his edition of her ghost stories: The ghost in the fiction of Mrs. Riddell and her contemporaries usually has a reason for appearing. It wants something. It must reveal information, confess to a crime, tell where the will or the love letters are hidden, undo some hurt it has done, or reveal the murderer of its body.25

Indeed, Riddell deserves this distinction for the quality of her work because of the success with which she blended economic concerns 100

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with the haunted house motif, making what otherwise could be dry, didactic economic commentary appealing for mass audiences who could be provoked and entertained at the same time. Riddell’s ability to be informative without being melodramatic is praised in the review of A Struggle for Fame in the Spectator of October 1883. The reviewer criticizes female novelists for relying too much on society in their narratives: ‘Novelists, especially of the feminine gender, content themselves far too much with depicting this kind of life over and over again, weaving in a thin plot of love or crime, and then they call it representing human life at the present day, unable to perceive that they really only scratch the surface of this nineteenth-century life with their pens, and give about as deep a view of human nature as a looking-glass does’. However, accord­ ing to the review, Riddell’s writing does exactly the opposite; she understands the city life she depicts and ‘her characters are always human, there is much humour as well as pathos in her books’. The reviewer concludes by recommending that all would-be novelists read her work: ‘considering that every one who has not published something is apparently dying to do so, this straightforward, un­ varnished history of what A Struggle for Fame really means; who those are who succeed, and those who fail, ought to be read with keen interest by a very large and varied number of educated people’.26 In 1886, a reviewer for the Spectator praised her Mitre Court (1885) in much the same way. However, like other women writers of the supernatural, her ghost story reviews were mixed. While Bleiler praises her ghosts as having productive purposes in the stories, reviewers found that these types of spectres were created at the expense of narrative terror. A reviewer of Weird Stories in the 24 February 1883 issue of the Spectator starts by saying, ‘Manufacturing ghost stories – we suppose these are manufactured – is a profitless occupation. They are not thrilling, and to be thrilling is their raison d’être as stories, unless we suppose them to be veritable records, if not of facts, at least of impressions. Some of Mrs. Riddell’s ghosts, too, seem un­ accountably anxious to promote the happiness of pairs of lovers.’ The reviewer does call ‘Old Mrs Jones’ ‘a good story’ and points to ‘Sandy the Tinker’ as genuinely ‘weird’,27 but what Riddell is praised for in her realist novels, she is blamed for in her supernatural tales. 101

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This criticism carried through into the twentieth century, when, following the publication of Bleiler’s edition of her ghost stories, a reviewer for the 23 December 1977 issue of the Times Literary Supplement summarized her career, saying that ‘her true bent was perhaps for realistic fiction of an unassuming sort’. This realism, however, did not produce terrifying stories. Although the reviewer admits that ‘the readers of the “Christmas numbers” . . . clearly loved [Riddell’s ghost stories]’ and that she ‘developed considerable art in effectively surrounding her uncanny episodes with much of the humdrum of common life, careful character drawing on con­ ventional lines, and well observed and executed backgrounds in both town and country’, her supernatural tales are ultimately found to suffer from too many ‘happy endings’ and are ‘a little dull’.28 However, a careful reader of Riddell’s ghost stories will find that these happy endings are not as prevalent in her supernatural short fiction as the reviewer suggests. Riddell’s ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’ (1882) deals ex­ plicitly with money, as the story centres on a young man who witnesses the ghost of a miserly old woman who is killed by two intruders in search of her hidden gold. Riddell’s story bears a striking resemblance to many of the themes in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), in which, through a series of flashbacks, it is made clear to readers that money cannot buy happiness. From the opening lines, Riddell foregrounds the economic theme at the heart of her ghost story: ‘Houseless – homeless – hopeless!’29 Using the situation of her main character, Graham Coulton, as the basis for this descrip­ tion, Riddell examines the lives of less-fortunate Londoners: Many a one who had before him trodden that same street must have uttered the same words – the weary, the desolate, the hungry, the forsaken, the waifs and strays of struggling humanity that are always coming and going, cold, starving and miserable, over the pavements of Lambeth Parish. (p. 85)

Among these miserable people, Coulton leaves his wealthy father’s house and wanders the streets near Vauxhall Walk in search of shelter. Not being accustomed to being without money, but with less than a penny in his pocket, Coulton accepts an offer from 102

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William, a family friend, to stay in a house that he and his wife are leaving (which, unknown to Coulton, is a departure caused by the presence of a ghost).30 Once he moves in and spends his first night there, Coulton has a vision of Miss Tynan, the wealthy spinster who lived and died in the house in Vauxhall Walk: He turned a little so as to see the person engaged in such a singular and meaningless manner, and found that, where there had been no chair on the previous night, there was a chair now, on which was seated an old, wrinkled hag, her clothes poor and ragged, a mob cap barely covering her scant white hair, her cheeks sunken, her nose hooked, her fingers more like talons than aught else as they dived down into the heap of gold, portions of which they lifted but to scatter mournfully. (pp. 91–2)

Her gold provided no solace in life, and she hoarded her wealth only to turn into an animal-like creature, unloved and alone. Though rich, she ‘suffers a poverty of person and spirit’.31 The old woman embodies what Sharon Marcus calls ‘the urban deformation of the domestic ideal’: ‘[Haunted-house stories] concentrated on houses that were rented, not owned, and on the inconveniences that col­lected around renting; they depicted homes that were un­ comfortable, riddled with noise and dirt; and they set in motion ghosts who attacked the middle-class home’s status as an insular, individuating single-family structure.’32 But Riddell is not content to simply describe the financial desperation that often leads to rent­ ing less-than-appealing houses with curiously low rents; her ghosts represent a further critique on the middle classes because of the financial mismanagement that causes the unsettled ghosts in the first place. Miss Tynan’s empty life is an instance of the many death-in-life scenarios which Riddell employed in her fiction. In his discussion of Riddell’s novels, Benjamin F. Fisher notes that this theme dis­ plays Riddell’s reworking of earlier Gothic traditions, with her characters’ empty lives and psychological paralysis replacing the premature burials and incarceration of earlier Gothic novels.33 In ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’, Riddell’s message to her readers 103

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is that money cannot improve a person’s life unless that person learns how to live generously. Because the old woman separated herself from society, she metaphorically buried herself in the house with gold that provided her no emotional solace. Before he sees the vision of the woman’s murder, Coulton sees the physical manifest­ ation of the miserly nature which led to her death: ‘What a terrible sight she looked, with her thin white locks scattered over the pillow, with what were mere remnants of blankets gathered about her shoulders, with her claw-like fingers clutching the clothes, as though even in sleep she was guarding her gold!’ (p. 94). In the many negative descriptions of Miss Tynan that Riddell includes, Vanessa Dickerson reads the woman as a ‘transgressive female’ (p. 139), a non-nurturing spinster who is more interested in gaining money in place of family.34 Dickerson goes on to say, ‘the focus is not so much on the spiritual condition of the character as on that character’s preoccupation with the disposition of the material. The desire for money has transformed the demure angel into a fury the male can barely control’ (p. 139). The woman denied herself in life even the simplest of pleasures, but she also chose to deny those pleasures to others (including her own brother), as Coulton sees when he wit­ nesses another vision of the old woman: ‘Round that miser . . . they crowded – all those pale, sad shapes – the aged of days, the infant of hours, the sobbing outcast, honest poverty, repentant vice; but one low cry proceeded from those pale lips – a cry for help she might have given, but which she withheld’ (p. 92). After seeing this vision, Coulton is at first motivated by economic concerns and decides to investigate the woman’s death in part to pressure the landlord into getting a cheap lease on a house other people refuse to occupy because of the rumour of the murdered woman’s ghost. Also, Coulton hopes to find the gold left behind by the woman, supposedly hidden somewhere in the house. How­ever, Riddell comments on the possibility of an improved life for Coulton as a consequence of seeing the ghost and learning the story of the miserly woman. After hearing her repeat, ‘Oh! my lost life’ (p. 92), the narrator says, ‘Mingled with all, too, there seemed to have been some lesson for him which he had forgotten, that, try as he would, eluded his memory, and which, in the very act of waking, glided away’ (p. 92). The repeated vision of the woman gives Coulton the 104

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opportunity to learn his ‘lesson’, which eventually leads to his own financial and emotional independence from his father, against whom he rebels at the beginning of the story, leading to his stay at the house at Vauxhall Walk. Thus, Coulton is morally and financially rewarded for his encounter with the ghost. He finds a potential balance between wealth and poverty, learning to avoid extravagance while still living comfortably. The vision of the miserly woman also leads him to question his own life and the consequences of being too rich and too financially dependent on his father. Coulton recog­ nizes that he must distance himself from his father’s wealth if he is to become an independent person. In this way, Riddell gives the old woman’s life some meaning by making her ghost the vehicle through which Coulton, and presumably future occupants of the house, improve their lives, but as Andrew Smith notes, her spirit does not gain redemption. He describes her as ‘a female version of Scrooge’ (p. 73), but who is ultimately denied the happy ending which Dickens gives to his reformed miser. According to Smith, ‘the clear gender implications of this move suggest that the woman is lost, or denied, at the expense of male entry into the public sphere’ (p. 75). Charlotte Riddell’s ‘Walnut-Tree House’ (1882) also discusses connections between the economic and the social in a haunted house setting, as the house becomes a metaphor for the mind and one’s inner life. In the beginning of the story, Riddell links the fall of the house in Lambeth with the deterioration of the former owner: For seven years it had been given over to rats and mice and black­ beetles; . . . for seven years it had remained empty, while its owner wore out existence in fits of moody dejection or of wild frenzy in the madhouse close at hand; and now that owner was dead and buried and forgotten, and the new owner was returning to take possession.35

The new owner, Edgar Stainton, takes possession of his ancestral home, knowing little about the house or his relatives. He is a selfmade man, just returned from the African diamond fields. He rejects much of the British society he is now a part of, declaring that he dislikes hotels and many of the modern amenities that England offers. Because of his association with ‘new money’, Stainton is 105

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looked down upon by the clerks that help him settle the estate at Walnut-Tree House. Additionally, his insistence that he stay in the house as soon as possible, even after learning that it is haunted, only confuses the clerk, who instantly passes judgment on the new owner: ‘A rough sort of fellow . . . boorish; never mixed with good society’ (p. 151). Riddell critiques this view, saying in part that class divisions often exist because people are unwilling to let go of the ideology that has been ingrained in them from childhood, and who are un­ able to see the person behind a particular social class. The narrator says of the clerk’s reaction: He did not in the least understand this rich man, who treated him as an equal, who objected to hotels, who didn’t mind taking up his abode in a house where not even a drunken charwoman could be induced to stop, and who calmly asked a stranger on whom he had never set eyes before – a clerk in the respectable office of Timpson and Co., a young fellow anxious to rise in the world, careful as to his associates, particular about the whiteness of his shirts and the sit of his collar and the cut of his coats – to ‘rough’ things with him in that dreadful old dungeon, where, perhaps, he might even be expected to light a fire. (p. 151)

This is an interesting passage on many levels. Riddell is careful to point out that though Stainton is rich, his money and status do not gain him respect in the eyes of the clerk because he does not ‘act’ rich and instead treats the clerk as an equal. The clerk also disagrees with Stainton’s treatment of him because, in his view, Stainton has the audacity to expect him to lower himself to menial chores such as lighting a fire and possibly damaging his clothes, obviously an important status symbol for the clerk. When the clerk tells Stainton that the house is haunted by a young child, and Stainton takes the story as a joke, the clerk again displays contempt for him and sees his response as governed by Stainton’s unrespectable background away from England. The narrator says that he was ‘driven out of all his former propriety of voice and demeanour by the contemptuous ridicule this “digger” thought fit to cast on his story’ (p. 152). This comment and the overall negative reaction of the clerk symbolize the contempt for the direct colonial presence in England – its 106

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wealth and products are one thing, but its physical presence is a very different matter. Despite his negative characterization by the clerk, the narrator is careful to establish Stainton as a sympathetic man who is different from the rich ancestors that once stayed at Walnut-Tree House. Stainton, despite ‘his hard life and rough exterior’, is nonetheless ‘impressionable and imaginative’ (p. 153), and as he looks at the house for the first time, he comes to the conclusion that it ‘is not so cheerless for a lonely man as the “bush” . . . I fancy I shall sleep more soundly in my new home than I did many a night at the gold­fields’ (p. 153). He has an appreciation for his fortune, something greatly lacking in his ancestors, but he also gains sympathy from readers by expressing his loneliness, with Riddell returning to her theme in ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’ that money cannot buy happi­ ness. Stainton reflects, ‘I cannot help thinking how strange it all is – that I, who went away a mere beggar, should come home rich, to be made richer, and yet stand so utterly alone that in the length and breadth of England I have not a relative to welcome me or say I wish you joy of your inheritance’ (p. 155). Class issues also are brought to the forefront of the story when Riddell introduces the ghost child. Upon seeing him, Stainton immediately notices his poorness of attire and expression. Though he has a home, the boy looks little better than one of the homeless: His little plaid frock, which he had outgrown, the hooks which fastened it; the pinafore, soiled and crumpled, tied behind with strings broken and knotted; in one place the skirt had given from the body, and a piece of thin, poor flannel showed that the child’s under habili­ ments matched in shabbiness his exterior garments. (p. 157)

As in ‘Vauxhall Walk’, the presence of the ghost and the mysteries surrounding his residence in the house cause Edgar Stainton to turn detective and investigate the history behind his family. The element of mystery that Riddell often includes in her ghost stories offers an important connection to the earlier Gothic tradition, with its obses­ sion with secrets. According to Anne Williams, ‘A house makes secrets in merely being itself, for its function is to enclose spaces. And the larger, older, and more complex the structure becomes, 107

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the more likely it is to have secret or forgotten rooms’. 36 And within these forgotten rooms, are forgotten people, represented as ghosts. The narrator’s efforts to uncover these forgotten rooms and people ultimately lead to uncovering moral deficiencies within the family: Williams continues, ‘Most important, this structure is marked, haunted by “history” – the events of its own development. The ghosts – whether real or imaginary – derive from the past passions, past deeds, past crimes of the family identified with this structure’.37 The past events leading to the boy’s mistreatment and subsequent death also provide another comment about the moral value of money and the harm that can follow when one’s finances are not used proportionately for the betterment of society rather than to satisfy individual greed. In learning his family history, Edgar becomes aware of the transgressions of his relatives and is in turn haunted by the ghost of the child: ‘The slight put upon his family tortured and made him wince, and the face of the dead boy who ought to have been the heir seemed, as he hurried along the streets, to pursue and look on him with a wistful reproach’ (p. 163). His inability to solve the mystery behind the boy’s endless searching also connects Edgar to his uncle’s insanity, and the unsettled house again becomes a metaphor for the mind ill at ease. He says to himself, ‘If I cannot lay that child I shall go mad . . . as mad, perhaps, as Alfred Stainton . . . God preserve my senses’ (p. 163). The unsettled nature of the ghost leads to an unsettling of Edgar’s mind, as he comes face to face with this ghostly relative, as well as his family’s haunting past. In a narrative plot device similar to many other ghost stories by women, Stainton must go to the working-class locals for detailed information on the story behind the haunting of his ancestral home. This hints at the fact that, as a source of knowledge, they are more stable than the upper classes. His lawyer, Mr Timpson, gives him the basic, ‘authorized’ story, telling Stainton that Felix Stainton’s daughter ‘made a low marriage, and he cast her adrift. After her death the two children were received at Walnut-Tree House on sufferance – fed and clothed, I believe, that was all; and when the old man died the heir-at-law permitted them to remain’ (p. 159). The lawyer’s advice to Stainton also hints at his inability to see the boy’s suffering because he is more concerned with financial profit: 108

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‘Uncomfortable Houses’ and the Spectres of Capital What is the use of troubling your head about a child who has been lying in Lambeth Churchyard these dozen years? Take my advice, have the house pulled down and let or sell the ground for building. You ought to get a pot of money for it in that neighborhood. If there were a wrong done it is too late to set it right now. (p. 160)

However, Edgar feels that setting things right is possible even after death, and even beyond the grave, with the help of the boy’s ghost. After turning to the locals, Stainton begins to discover the real truth behind his family’s past. The family butcher tells him: Misers, sir, misers; the old gentleman bad, and the nephew worse. A bad business, first and last. But what else could be expected? When people as can afford to live on the fat of the land never have a sirloin inside their doors, why, worse must come of it . . . I only knew there were children by hearing one of them was dead, and that it was the poorest funeral ever crossed a decent threshold. (p. 161)

The butcher’s comments tell of the miserliness which kept the Stainton family separated from their community, much like the miserly old woman in ‘Vauxhall Walk’. His remarks also provide insight into the failure of the Staintons to uphold their place in the local economic system that supports the townspeople; by not buying the good cuts of meat which they could well afford, the Staintons lessened the income of the butcher (and presumably other local merchants as well). The butcher provides Stainton with another source of infor­ mation by suggesting he see a Mr Hennings, who knew the house­ keeper at Walnut-Tree House. Hennings gives Stainton even more detailed information about his relatives: ‘I remember Mr. George Stainton; he used to wear a skull-cap and knee-breeches. There was an orchard then where Stainton Street is now, and his whole time was taken up in keeping the boys out of it. Many a time I have run from him’ (p. 161). Not only did the Staintons possess wealth, but they guarded it fiercely. From Mr Hennings, Edgar is referred to Mrs Toplis, the former housekeeper, and the person with the most detailed knowledge of how the children were treated. However, Edgar must also come to terms with the fact that Mrs Toplis has 109

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been living in Lambeth Workhouse ever since Alfred Stainton dismissed her without providing severance pay. This new infor­ mation makes Edgar further doubt his family’s reputation and the use of their wealth: No one had a good word for or kindly memory of them. The poorest creature he met in the streets might have been of more use in the world than they. The house they had lived in mentioned as if a curse rested on the place; themselves only recollected as leaving everything undone which it befitted their station to do. An old servant allowed to end her days in the workhouse! (p. 163)

The presence of the boy’s ghost provides the link Stainton needs to discover his family’s past, but also provides him with the impetus to spend his inheritance more wisely. He remarks, ‘I will not so misuse the wealth which has been given me’ (p. 163). Mrs Toplis provides her first-hand view of the situation inside the house. She holds the family accountable for what happened to the children after Felix Stainton died and Alfred inherited the house, money, and children: After the old gentleman’s death the children were treated shameful – shameful. I don’t mean beaten, or that like; but half-starved and neglected. He would not buy them proper clothes, and he would not suffer them to wear decent things if anybody else bought them. It was just the same with their food. I durs’n’t give them even a bit of bread and butter unless it was on the sly; and, indeed, there was not much to give in that house. He turned regular miser. Hoarding came into the family with Mrs. Lancelot Stainton, Mr. Alfred’s great grand­ mother, and they went on from bad to worse, each one closer and nearer than the last, begging your pardon for saying so, sir; but it is the truth. (p. 166)

This statement makes it clear that if money can be used for good, its withholding can be a demonstrable use of power and control that replicates itself dangerously through each generation like a disease. This contrast between rich and poor is also forwarded by Riddell through the story of the children’s paternal family and their 110

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aunt May, who comes to adopt the girl and plans to return for the boy. This is a family of more limited financial means than the Staintons, but they are far more generous toward the children. Mrs Toplis remembers that Mrs May blamed Alfred Stainton for killing the boy, suggesting that the poorer side of the family possesses far greater morality, if less income. The boy has his revenge on Alfred, however, when, after his death, his presence causes Alfred’s mad­ ness. Mrs Toplis recalls: We were never without him afterwards, never; that, and nothing else, drove Mr. Alfred mad. He used to think he was fighting the child and killing it. When the worst fits were on him he tried to trample it under foot or crush it up in a corner, and then he would sob and cry, and pray for it to be taken away. (p. 167)

Her emphasis on the personification of the boy as ‘it’ also gives greater significance to the fact that Alfred considered the boy as something animalistic, less than human, and not worth his support, not to mention competition for his inheritance. This reasoning may also provide a hint as to why Alfred was not able to rid himself of the boy’s presence, because he could never accept him as a worthy human being. When the boy’s sister returns to the house as a young woman, her presence provides the peace that he needs to be finally at rest. After she leaves, the narrator says that the house instantly ‘seemed to gladden and light up’ (p. 169). Edgar Stainton also uses his wealth to put life back into the house. He offers Mrs Toplis a home, with servants to wait on her, and fills the house with food, opens the windows to admit fresh air, and reconnects the house with the community, as the narrator says, ‘on the drive grass grew no longer – too many footsteps passed that way for weeds to flourish’ (p. 170). Thus, by the end of the story, life is again allowed to flourish at Walnut-Tree House because finances and the responsibilities of the upper classes to the lower are being correctly used by the house’s new owner. According to Sharon Marcus, ‘the ideal home was required to concretize memories and to dissolve them, by acting to make men forget everything that lay outside their homes. The historic 111

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associations that pervaded the house mediated past and present and created familiarity by virtue of being unchanging and familial’.38 However, Riddell complicates this idea. For the inhabitants of her houses, the past is traumatic and haunted, not reassuring or peaceful. Her characters do not have the choice to reflect on the past; rather, it is forced on them through the figure of the ghost. In the case of Graham Coulton, the past he encounters is new for him, and the miserly old woman teaches him a valuable lesson that will affect his future. For Edgar Stainton, the child’s ghost represents a re­ pressed and abusive familial past that invades his property and his mind, calling into question the very natural of single-‘family’ residences. Both men must use their supernatural encounters to create some­thing more positive, something that breaks with a haunted, limiting past and provides them with the means of living more positive and productive lives, for the benefit of themselves and others. Only then can they begin to build the ‘ideal’, comfort­ able Victorian home. ‘If ever a heart was buried in a house’: the bond between women in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’ Best known today for her children’s stories, Mary Louisa Moles­ worth (1839–1921) also published several ghost stories during a writing career that spanned both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A popular writer in her own time, she is only beginning to be studied again.39 In his brief 1961 biography of Molesworth, Roger Lancelyn Green commented that in the year of her death, her ‘popularity was suffering from a temporary eclipse which even excluded her from The Dictionary of National Biography’.40 In his biography, Green devotes only a short paragraph to her supernatural literature, saying, ‘Her sense of the unseen could lead Mrs. Moles­ worth into her liking for ghost stories, of which she wrote almost a dozen for adults, collected in Four Ghost Stories (1888) and Uncanny Tales (1896)’.41 After this brief mention, Green goes on to declare that ‘her real height in [the supernatural] field’ is based on her fantasy stories for children. This emphasis on her children’s stories remains today, and recent scholarship on Molesworth is centred on her 112

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children’s literature while her ghost stories are essentially ignored by scholars. In her conversations and letters to her close friend J. B. L. Warren, the Third Baron de Tabley, Louisa Molesworth discussed her interest in the supernatural and in second sight, which she felt she possessed, and her great-nephew wrote of his aunt’s ability to predict things in the near future.42 Likewise, Gwen Molesworth remembered that ‘Cousin Louisa’ would gather the family around her and tell them ghost stories, a few of which would later find their way to magazine publication.43 However, Molesworth was careful not to let her interest in the supernatural be clouded by the popularity of mediums and séances. She wrote in a letter to Warren, ‘I am far too sound and healthy to meddle overmuch with those strange mysteries which no doubt we shall understand by & by.’44 In ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’, published in Tinsley’s Magazine in December 1873 and The New York Times in 1874, and later reprinted in her collection Four Ghost Stories (1888),45 Molesworth reveals a ghost’s lasting impression on the narrator through a series of stories told to women by other women.46 In the story, Margaret, the future Lady Farquhar, relates her experience with the ghost, but from her first sight of apparition, she is more ‘puzzled’ than fright­ ened. This connection happens both mentally and physically, as Margaret states, ‘I did brush past her. I felt her. This part of my experience was, I believe, quite at variance with the sensations of orthodox ghost-seers; but I am really telling you all I was conscious of.’47 This ability to ‘feel’ or somehow connect with a ghost is a gift that apparently only Lady Farquhar possesses in the story, and it is this connection that ultimately gives the ghost an identity, as well as providing the young Margaret a purpose in an otherwise boring and mundane life. She takes it upon herself to investigate the reasons for the ghost’s presence: ‘I did not shrink from talking about it, generally, I think, with a vague hope that somehow, some time or other, light might be thrown upon it . . . I always had a misty fancy that sooner or later I should find out something about my old lady, as we came to call her – who she had been and what her history was’ (p. 35). In this brief passage, Margaret is already moving from an abstract understanding of the ghost – ‘it’ – toward a specific gendered identification with the ghost as a female spirit – ‘my old 113

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lady’. In fact, the most memorable parts of Molesworth’s story deal with the impression of the ghost on Margaret and the absence of any fear or anger when the ghost is present. The only troubling or unpleasant feeling Margaret admits to is what she calls the ‘painful sensation of perplexity’ (p. 27) at not knowing who the ghost is or why she is there, and ‘an awful thrill’ (p. 30) when she first comes face to face with it/her. Margaret stresses to her friend the strong bond that exists between the living and the dead and the company which the ghost provided her. Her description of the ghost is far from the frightening portrayals found in the majority of other ghost stories, particularly ones written by men, and Margaret’s need to understand the ghost’s presence becomes much more important than any enter­tainment value within the narrative. The lady who is listening to her story automatically assumes that it will be un­ pleasant for Margaret to tell but is quickly corrected by her friend: ‘Oh, no, it is not nearly so bad as that . . . I cannot really say it is either painful or dis­agreeable to me to recall it, for I cannot exactly apply either of those words to the thing itself’ (p. 4). Hilary Grimes comments on Louisa Molesworth’s tendency to focus on the relationships between living women and female ghosts rather than the fear caused by the supernatural occurrences, saying: the women in Molesworth’s ghost stories demonstrate, alongside a sense of fear of the ghosts that appear within their pages, an affinity with them, a compassion and sympathy for the ghostly. Perhaps this connection is the manifestation of the subtle recognition that the ghosts they see are only reflections of themselves and their own frustrated desires and ambitions.48

Indeed, Margaret has much in common with her ‘old lady’. In their own ways, they are both strangers at Ballyreina and seem to be set apart from their own families by their ability to connect with one another. Margaret’s physical and emotional bond with the ghost is stronger than that of other members of her family and this lends credence to Grimes’s assertion that Molesworth’s characters feel ‘an affinity’ with one another. Grimes also points out that the ghost appears to Margaret during ‘a particularly unhappy or anxious time 114

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in her life’49 and goes on to say that the ghost, as well as Margaret’s inability to speak to the apparition, point to unspoken troubles in her own life. Margaret herself mentions an ‘unusual anxiety of mind’ (p. 8), but stresses to her friend that her imagination did not cause her to make up the ghost. The reader never knows exactly what is causing this distress. Margaret mentions the Crimean War, suggesting that she or her family could have a loved one involved in the conflict, but this suggestion is complicated by Margaret’s claim that she ‘had no very near friends in the Crimea’ (p. 25). The larger issues in the story (and what apparently interests Molesworth more as an author) are the similarities between the two women that go beyond their corporeal, class, and national differences. Though Margaret’s family is apparently wealthy enough to travel to Ireland and she later keeps her comfortable lifestyle as ‘Lady Farquhar’, emotion and sympathy transcend these issues as her sense of loneli­ ness and anxiety at the time of her stay at Ballyreina put Margaret in the same position as the ghost of Miss Fitzgerald. Likewise, the details of their pasts are kept from us so we can concentrate on the present and lasting effect each has on the other. This sense of distress over not being able to help the ghost, as well as Margaret’s own inability to express her similar feelings of loneliness and detachment from those around her, make this story a different variant of the types of uncomfortable houses one might find in a story by Riddell or Oliphant, where financial concerns are usually at the forefront of the narrative.50 Molesworth creates a haunted house that is un­ comfortable because of the narrator’s own pre-existing feelings of despair and anxiety that are made ‘real’ (in the form of her story) by her interaction with the ghost of Miss Fitzgerald, who can be thought of as another version of Margaret herself. As Hilary Grimes correctly notes, Margaret has trouble speaking to the ghost because, through its presence, she is actually seeing her own problems, which she cannot articulate at the time. Her experience with the ghost allows her to express these anxieties to her friends later in life. In speaking about ‘her’ ghost during the telling of the story, Margaret is essentially speaking of her own emotional problems during that period in her life. Because of this similarity, both women (one living, the other dead) are assisted in finding their own voices and ‘speaking’ to each other’s loneliness. 115

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The effects of this social-spectral connection between the two women are what Molesworth is most careful to describe in detail. As a result, readers are not given a physical picture of the old lady’s ghost (little more than what she is wearing), but instead have a vivid sense of the feeling that exists when Miss Fitzgerald first ‘meets’ Margaret in the house and the effect of the ghost’s ‘physical’ presence in her life. Margaret tells her friend: I cannot now describe the features beyond saying that the whole face was refined and pleasing, and that in the expression there was certainly nothing to alarm or repel. It was rather wistful and beseeching, the look in the eyes anxious, the lips slightly parted, as if she were on the point of speaking. I have since thought that if I had spoken, if I could have spoken – for I did make one effort to do so, but no audible words would come at my bidding – the spell that bound the poor soul, this mysterious wanderer from some shadowy borderland between life and death, might have been broken, and the message that I now believe burdened her delivered. (p. 29)

Molesworth continues her chain of female-to-female knowledge transmission when Margaret receives her first clues to the ghost’s identity from an older lady, Mrs Gordon, who is a native of the village.51 She informs Margaret that her ‘old lady’ is mostly likely the eldest of the Fitzgerald sisters who had lived at Ballyreina years before it was rented out but had to sell the house because they could not afford to live there any more. Because of their financial dif­ ficulties, the sisters are forced to become ghostly figures while still living, as they escape the humiliation of poverty by wandering through Europe. Mrs Gordon informs Margaret: They were too proud to remain in their own country after this, and spent the rest of their lives on the Continent, wandering about from place to place. The most curious part of it was that nearly all their wandering was actually on foot. They were too poor to afford to travel much in the usual way, and yet, once torn from their old associations, the traveling mania seized them; they seemed absolutely unable to rest. (p. 38)

This passage is Molesworth’s implicit critique of (forced) female emigration. Although these women seemingly enjoy their travels, 116

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Mrs Gordon’s description hints that they would have preferred to remain in their native home, and at least one of the sisters, Margaret’s ‘old lady’, remained a wanderer until she was able to return to that home in the form of a ghost after her death. This idea is confirmed by Mrs Gordon’s final comment: ‘If ever a heart was buried in a home, it was that of poor old Miss Fitzgerald’ (p. 39). Margaret’s further investigations ultimately help the deceased Miss Fitzgerald reclaim her house as a ghost. Captain Marchmont, who Margaret and her family assumed owned Ballyreina, is in fact only a tenant who leased the house from the Fitzgerald family. Because the Captain’s lease on the property was so long, the Fitz­ geralds ‘had come to be almost forgotten’ (p. 40). The key word here is ‘almost’. Because of Margaret, Miss Fitzgerald is remem­bered, and comes to life again through the words of Margaret’s story. The latter speculates that the eldest Fitzgerald sister left behind family papers, and ‘possibly some ancient love-letters, forgotten in the confusion of their leave-taking; a lock of hair, or a withered flower, perhaps, that she, my poor old lady, would fain have clasped in her hand when dying, or have buried with her’ (p. 41). Margaret even fails to mention the sister’s actual death, prompting the question from her friend as to whether Miss Fitzgerald was dead when Margaret stayed at Ballyreina. She reveals that Miss Fitzgerald died in Geneva exactly one year prior to Margaret settling at the house. Even as a ghost, Miss Fitzgerald is very much alive to Margaret and this shows in how she chooses to tell the story. The distance in time from her spectral experience has not dulled Margaret’s memory or the sense of compassion she felt for ‘her’ ghost. This lasting im­ pression allows Margaret to reveal a final lesson to her listener, ‘Ah, yes; there must be many a pitiful old story that is never told’ (p. 41). Although the reviews for Molesworth’s ghost stories were mostly positive – she was already a respected children’s book writer by the time she published Four Ghost Stories and this respect for her writing shows itself in her reviews – some reviewers did question the abstract­ ness in some of her supernatural tales. In The London Quarterly Review, a reviewer commented that ‘the art and mastery with which [the stories] are told is remarkable’, but went on to say that they also leave readers with ‘a puzzled and unsatisfied mind . . . as to the import and meaning’.52 This kind of review is reminiscent of Anne 117

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Bannerman’s critical reception at the beginning of the century. Reviewers tended to praise the artistry in these women’s super­ natural literature, but were likewise frustrated at the sense of mystery they forwarded and their refusal to provide an explanation for the other-worldly occurrences. Whereas male authors were usually praised for their ability to scare their audiences, the women who tended more toward the psychological and didactic in their supernatural literature risked being criticized more for the lack of fear in their stories more than they were praised for instructing their audiences. An example of this in Molesworth’s case comes from the Literary World: ‘Mrs Moles­ worth’s ghosts are of an unremarkable sort. They do nothing, say nothing, prove nothing; they simply appear and disappear, leaving a disagreeable impression on the minds of the observers, but in no wise serving to clear perplexities from the paths of the living or in any way to instruct them.’53 It must be noted that reviewers of the time did not have the critical framework that we now possess in which to judge men’s and women’s supernatural literature as an estab­lished genre that contained its own nuances according to gender, class and social standing. But even with this in mind, one wonders how much women’s narrative subtlety (as opposed to men’s tendency to write more graphic ghost stories) was to blame for these sometimes negative reviews. ‘Everything is included in pardon and love’: Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’ and ‘Old Lady Mary’ Like Charlotte Riddell and Louisa Molesworth, Margaret Oliphant (1828–97) published numerous stories of the supernatural during her lifetime and was often driven to write in order to support her family (in Oliphant’s case, after her husband’s death).54 She pub­ lished her stories in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, The New Quarterly Magazine, and Long­ man’s Magazine, and several of her ghost stories were also collected in volumes such as A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen (1882) and Stories of the Seen and Unseen (1902). Throughout her life, Margaret Oliphant had an interest in the supernatural and the afterlife. Though Oliphant 118

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never took Spiritualism quite seriously, Elisabeth Jay says that she experienced contact with her dead son, Tids, and wrote about the episodes in her autobiography, calling them a ‘great comfort’ to her, though also admitting that they could have been caused by ‘some trick of the mind’.55 In a 13 November 1884 letter to William Blackwood, in which she mentions the possibility of dedicating ‘The Open Door’ to Blackwood’s mother, Oliphant describes the composition of her supernatural tales, saying, ‘Stories of this de­ scrip­tion are not like any others. I can produce them only when they come to me. I should be glad to do one for the New Year number, but nothing suggests itself’.56 Considering the literary out­ put Oliphant was able to sustain through her long publishing career, this admission is significant for understanding how Oliphant went about writing her ghost stories and the special state of mind she had to be in to create them. In another letter to Blackwood dated 3 December 1884, Oliphant presents ‘Old Lady Mary’ as one of these inspirations: ‘You said I was probably preparing something for Christmas, to come upon you as a surprise. I had no thought of it at the time, but the enclosed has presented itself, and here it is if you like it. It wants the strong effects of “The Open Door” and the others, but still it may not come amiss.’57 Interestingly, she describes the story as very much a ghost itself, ‘present[ing] itself’ to her. Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’, published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in January 1882 (and later reprinted with ‘Old Lady Mary’ in Two Stories of the Seen and Unseen in 1885) was inspired by her visits to William Blackwood’s supposedly haunted Colinton House near Edinburgh. In the story, the mysterious doorway in the Brent­ wood house on the outskirts of the city immediately brings to mind a symbolic ‘doorway’ between two social classes. The narrator says that it was most likely ‘a servants’ entrance, a back door, or an opening into what are called “the offices” in Scotland’.58 This open door comments on the transitory, uncertain lives of the servants, whose fortunes must rise and fall with the status of the house they work for: No offices remained to be entered – pantry and kitchen had all been swept out of being; but there stood the doorway open and vacant, free to all the winds, to the rabbits, and every wild creature. It struck 119

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain my eye, the first time I went to Brentwood, like a melancholy com­ ment upon a life that was over. A door that led to nothing – closed once perhaps with anxious care, bolted and guarded, now void of any meaning. (p. 152)

Though the ‘offices’ of the servants are now physically gone, their influence is still felt by the current occupant’s son, Roland, who hears a mysterious voice repeating the words, ‘Oh, mother, let me in! oh, mother, let me in!’ (p. 157). In an effort to save his son from falling ill because of the mental strain of hearing the repeated ghostly cries for help,59 Colonel Mortimer decides to investigate the exist­ ence of this voice. As in other ghost stories, the investigator immediately looks to the servants for information regarding local lore and superstitions. Mortimer speaks with the groom and his wife, Mr and Mrs Jarvis, who are the longest dwellers near the house. Their decision to keep the ghost story a secret has more to do with economic and social reasons than with any fear they have regarding the ghost. To them, withholding information about the ghost means keeping occupants (and thereby employers) in the house. If they scare away possible tenants, their own existence in the house becomes endangered. Their economic necessity is misunderstood by Mortimer, who comments, ‘My heart was full of bitterness against the stolid retainers of a family who were content to risk other people’s children and comfort rather than let the house lie empty’ (p. 162). Mrs Jarvis also recognizes a certain class consciousness when it comes to relating the story of the ghost to other people who live outside Brentwood. When asked whether she believes in the ghost, she replies, ‘Me! – there’s awful strange things in this world. An unlearned person doesna ken what to think. But the minister and the gentry they just laugh in your face. Inquire into the thing that is not! Na, na, we just let it be’ (p. 163). For an ‘unlearned person’, as she readily calls herself, Mrs Jarvis provides another telling and insightful reason for their putting the family at risk by not telling them of the ghost. Any attempt on the Jarvises’ part to explain the supernatural presence in the house would be met with scorn by the middle and upper classes. Rather than jeopardize their existence at Brentwood, the Jarvises decide to keep their belief in the ghost a secret and not expect any 120

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help or understanding by those above them socially. In Mortimer’s judgment of what he believes to be their selfish actions for wanting to keep the house occupied, Oliphant provides another example to legitimize Mrs Jarvis’s observations on the role of economic and social conditions intersecting with the supernatural world. Yet, as the story progresses, Mortimer begins to change his atti­ tude about the ghost – and the working classes around him. After he visits the ruins of the old servants’ quarters and hears the voice of the mysterious spirit, he starts to feel pity for its suffering. He tries to understand the terrible situation that the ghost is in, wanting to be let in a door that does not exist by a loved one who is no longer there. As Mortimer describes the scene, he recognizes ‘a creature restless, unhappy, moaning, crying, before the vacant door­way, which no one could either shut or open more’ (p. 168). This door­ way begins to reform symbolically because of Mortimer’s in­creased sympathy with the spirit’s continued suffering and his frustration at his own powerlessness to ease this emotional unrest. This doorway between two worlds – not only the living and the dead, but also between the wealthy and the working classes – begins to open as Mortimer says, ‘It seemed to call up visibly a scene any one could understand – a something shut out, restlessly wandering to and fro . . . “Oh, mother, let me in! oh, mother, mother, let me in! oh, let me in!” every word was clear to me’ (p. 169). He later calls the cries ‘heart-breaking to hear’ (p. 169). When Mortimer decides to ask the local minister, Dr Moncrieff, for help in the matter, the minister travels with him to the ruins and discovers that the voice is that of a ‘prodigal’ son (p. 182).60 His mother had been ‘no more than the housekeeper in the old house’ (p. 182), and when the son returned home to find his mother had died, he collapsed outside the door and his ghostly soul remained there, becoming what Margaret K. Gray classifies as one of the author’s ‘earthbound spirits’, 61 until released by the minister’s commands for him to seek his mother not on earth, but in heaven. By making a sympathetic connection with this estranged family, Mortimer saves his own son from an early death brought on from hearing the mysterious voice. In her essay on Oliphant’s super­ natural fiction, Esther H. Schor sees her ‘haunted interpreters’62 as frequently undergoing emotional changes, making Oliphant’s work 121

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more substantial than the standard descriptions of her as ‘a pious domesticator of the supernatural’.63 Though she does not specifically discuss ‘The Open Door’, Schor describes a similar character trans­ formation that is relevant to Mortimer and his son: For Oliphant’s haunted interpreters, confronting the unexplained figure often leads to an uncanny exchange of roles: as the ghostly figure assumes authority, the interpreters take on the aura of the ir­ rational. By means of such transfigurations, these fictions reconfigure . . . familiar relations between . . . interpreters and themselves.64

Like his father, Roland goes from being an aloof boy to someone genuinely concerned with the spirit’s well-being. In his description of Roland’s interactions with the servants, Jarvis tells Mortimer, ‘he’s no a lad that invites ye to talk. There are some that are, and some that arena. Some will draw ye on, till ye’ve tellt them a’ the clatter of the toun, and a’ ye ken, and whiles mair. But Maister Roland, his mind’s fu’ of his books. He’s aye civil and kind, and a fine lad; but no that sort’ (p. 162). By the end of the story, it is Roland’s insistence that his father help the poor being that brings about the encounter between the minister and the wayward young man, which finally frees the ghost from the pain that traps him in what the doctor, Simson, calls a purgatorial state. This idea of an uncomfortable, incomplete ‘between-ness’ is also suggested by Oliphant’s own religious views.65 According to Gray, using the supernatural as a means to bring stalwart men of science and reason into a faith in another spiritual and unexplainable world was a recur­ ring theme in Oliphant’s writing, as she implicitly criticized the growing dependence on scientific reason at the expense of spiritual faith in the latter half of the nineteenth century.66 Likewise, Mortimer becomes a believer in ghosts and changes into a more understanding person. He is transformed from the man whom Oliphant describes at the beginning of the story as a pompous British colonial, who returns with his family from India and spends his days in his London clubs, caring little, if at all, about the people who are caring for his family and running his household in far away Edinburgh. Even on his hurried way home to visit his sick child, Mortimer shows his disdain for both his servants and the 122

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local vagabonds when he becomes upset at the thought of wanderers on his grounds: As we dashed through the park, I thought I heard some one moaning among the trees, and clenched my fist at him (whoever he might be) with fury. Why had the fool of a woman at the gate allowed any one to come in to disturb the quiet of the place? If I had not been in such hot haste to get home, I think I should have stopped the carriage and got out to see what tramp it was that had made an entrance and chosen my grounds, of all places in the world – when my boy was ill! – to grumble and groan in. (p. 154)

The pitiful cries of the vagabond draw no sympathy from Mortimer, but his son’s connection with the ghost at the open door allows the father to feel greater empathy toward an unfortunate person such as the ‘lost’ son. As Gray says of these supernatural stories, ‘Mrs Oliphant’s beings from beyond the grave have a mission to help mortals in some specific way, or attempt to bring humans to a clearer understanding of the inevitable consequence of their present way of life.’67 In this way, Mortimer is exorcized, so to speak, of his narrow views towards the working classes by his encounter with the ghostly spirit that haunts his estate and his family. Even though the door is shut on the past, and the son ceases to haunt the ruined building, the door is at least partially open between the social classes. Both father and son improve their opinions of those socially beneath them because of their encounters with the ghost and their time spent in the servants’ quarters. Margaret Oliphant’s ‘Old Lady Mary’ is another ‘earthbound’ tale based on money, class anxiety, and, ultimately, reconciliation. The story is unique in that it is one of the few ghost stories actually told through the point of view of the ghost.68 Although a likeable character, Old Lady Mary fails to make her lawyer aware of a will that would leave her ward, Little Mary, provided for. After Old Lady Mary dies, she finds herself not in heaven, but in a purgatorial state that is described in the story as ‘more bitter than death.’69 Because of her decision not to reveal the will, she has resigned Little Mary to a life of destitution, an act which makes the mismanage­ ment of money the central concern of Oliphant’s story. Although 123

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she is not on the same level of perversity as Alfred Stainton in Riddell’s ‘Walnut-Tree House’, Old Lady Mary mishandles her money in a similar way: by not being generous and giving Little Mary her inheritance earlier, she has caused the child to have an uncertain financial future, much like the young George Stainton and his sister. After witnessing the suffering of Little Mary, who, because of her lack of money, chooses to work as a governess for a local family, Old Lady Mary finally succeeds in connecting with her goddaughter, if only for a brief moment. Though no words are exchanged, both Marys feel that they have seen one another and this momentary connection, much like the connection between Dr Moncrieff and the wayward son in ‘The Open Door’, finally allows Lady Mary to have spiritual closure. Although Lady Mary and her experiences in the afterlife are the dominant parts of the text, the most important critiques of eco­ nomic and class issues come about when Lady Mary returns to earth to inhabit her former house. Through the new occupants of the house and Mary’s marginal status there, readers see the true con­ sequences of Lady Mary’s decision not to reveal her will before her death. After Mary overhears a conversation about her uncertain financial future, she begins to understand why she is being kept in the house after the vicar’s family moves in: She had thought in her innocence that this was because she had lost her godmother, her protectress, – and had been very grateful for the kindness of her friends. But now another meaning came into every­ thing . . . ‘I have guessed something! and I want you to tell me! Are you keeping me for charity, and is it I that am left – without any provision? . . . She could not finish her sentence, for it was very bitter to her. (p. 88)

It is not only Lady Mary who goes through a spiritual progression, but also Little Mary who undergoes a social awakening throughout the course of the story. Part of this awakening is Mary’s coming to terms with her own financial insecurity and fighting against the notion of her being a charity case for the vicar’s family. Mary’s precarious existence (one which Lady Mary unknowingly created) and Lady Mary’s own blame in the matter are described by the 124

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servants, and through Lady Mary’s presence, readers are allowed to hear an otherwise private conversation between them, one that never would have been heard had she been alive and seen by them. Mrs Prentiss, the housekeeper, comments on Lady Mary’s ‘refined selfishness’ (p. 96): She was one of them . . . as could not abide to see a gloomy face . . . She kept us all comfortable for the sake of being comfortable herself, but no more . . . What’s you or me, or any one . . . in comparison of that poor little thing that can’t work for her living like we can; that is left on the charity of folks she don’t belong to? I’d have forgiven my lady anything, if she’d done what was right by Miss Mary. You’ll get a place, and a good place; and me, they’ll leave me here when the new folks come as have taken the house. But what will become of her, the darling? and not a penny, nor a friend, nor one to look to her? Oh, you selfish old woman! oh, you heart of stone! (pp. 92–3)

Mrs Prentiss’s comments point to the additional disservice done to Mary – she was never trained or educated to make her own way in the world. By being kept safe by Lady Mary, her goddaughter was also kept naïve about the world around her, as the narrator com­ ments that ‘girls, who have never wanted anything in their lives, who have no sharp experience to enlighten them, are slow to think upon such subjects’ (p. 96). Mary begins to recognize a ‘crisis in her life’ (p. 96) when she potentially will become as displaced as the servants of the house, a thought she inwardly resents. Mary is also witness to the class snobbery that comes about because of Lady Mary’s presence in the house. This snobbery shows itself early on, when Lady Mary’s ghost causes Mrs Bowyer, the vicar’s wife, to think someone has come into the house without knocking. She criticizes the unknown person for not being polite enough, condescendingly connecting his or her action with a rural mentality: ‘It must have been some one who does not ring, who just opens the door . . . That is the worst of the country’ (p. 89). This snobbery grows worse as Lady Mary’s presence in the house grows stronger, and class divisions are the most apparent when a nouveau riche family rents the house. On her first, secret visit to her old home, Mary approaches ‘unseen’ (p. 97) and ghost-like herself in order to 125

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get a better look at the new inhabitants. Her opinions of the new family are initially influenced by their class and the townspeople’s impression of them: ‘The people who had taken the house were merely rich people; they had no other characteristic; and in the vicarage, as well as in other houses about, it was said when they were spoken of, that it was a good thing they were not people to be visited, since nobody could have the heart to visit strangers in Lady Mary’s house’ (p. 98). The narrator makes it clear that the family’s ostracized status in the town is just as much because of their class rank as it is their being unwanted newcomers taking possession of a house that in the townspeople’s minds will always rightly belong to Lady Mary. This prejudice is acknowledged by the lady of the house when she tells Mary that she must visit the vicar’s wife herself: ‘I know she doesn’t mean to call upon me, because my husband is a City man. That is just as she pleases. I am not very fond of City men myself’ (p. 99). Mary’s eventual attachment to this family, and her overcoming her own initial prejudices against them, will result in ultimate contentment and forgiveness of her godmother, if not financial rewards. Immediately upon receiving Mrs Turner’s invi­ tation to be a governess to her girls, Mary feels a kind of financial salvation: ‘But it was independence; it was deliverance from en­ treaties and remonstrances without end. It was a kind of setting right, so far as could be, of the balance which had got so terribly wrong. No writing to the Earl now; no appeal to friends, – anything in all the world, much more honest service and kindness, must be better than that’ (p. 102). The ‘city family’ Turners must again defend themselves regard­ing their decision to invite Mary to stay as governess in their house­hold. After Lady Mary’s doctor hears of Mary’s decision, he declares that ‘it can’t be permitted’ (p. 106), feeling that Mary has lowered herself too far. Mrs Turner must defend herself and her family, saying, Do you think I shall not be kind to her, doctor,? . . . We’re not fine people, doctor, but we’re kind people. I can say that for myself. There is nobody in this house but will be good to her, and admire her, and take an example by her. To have a real lady with the girls, that is what I would give anything for; and as she wants taking care of, poor dear, and petting, and an ’ome. (p. 106) 126

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Mary immediately defends Mrs Turner, who the narrator calls ‘her new protectress’ (p. 106), saying, ‘You are a real lady yourself, dear Mrs Turner’, after which the narrator then adds as an aside, ‘And this notwithstanding the one deficient letter: but many people who are much more dignified than Mrs Turner – people who behave themselves very well in every other aspect – say “’ome”’ (pp. 106–7). Later, readers learn that the Turners are also Dissenters, making them even more ‘foreign’ to the locals, as the narrator comments, ‘for the Turners were dissenters, to crown all their misdemeanors, beside being city people and nouveaux riches’ (p. 109). When Connie, one of the Turners’ daughters becomes ill after repeatedly seeing Lady Mary’s ghost in ‘the haunted room’ (p. 117), the doctor readily labels her as ‘one of those creatures with its nerves all on the surface – and a little below par in health, in need of iron and quinine’ (p. 111). This statement is influenced again by his knowledge of the Turners as ‘city people’ who lack the natural good health and disposition of the locals. Class consciousness also extends beyond the grave when the choice of Lady Mary to visit Connie is called into question by the living. The vicar says that it is ‘derogatory to the dignity of’ Lady Mary to ‘show herself to a – to a – little child’ (p. 112). The hesi­ tation in the vicar’s statement hints that he resisted saying something else, most likely a comment on the Turners’ class status; the sentence could just as easily have been, ‘show herself to a city person’. As the fear of Lady Mary’s ghost spreads among the servants of the house, Mrs Prentiss blames Mrs Turner for not handling the situation correctly. In regard to one of the gossiping maidservants, Prentiss says, ‘I would have sent the hussy away at an hour’s notice, if I had the power in my hands, . . . but, Miss Mary, it is easily seen who is a real lady and who is not. Mrs Turner interferes herself in every­ thing, though she likes it to be supposed that she has a housekeeper’ (p. 116). This comment calls into question the perceived pretended refinement of the Turners that the servants and the townspeople find false and illusory. This links the family even more so with the ghost of Lady Mary who is also trying to reach out for under­ standing but cannot be seen/accepted by those she wants to reach. The statement also points to underlying power dynamics within the household that become ‘troubled’ because of the ghost’s 127

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presence. Mrs Turner ‘interferes’ far too much in the area of the house where Prentiss is supposed to ‘rule’, which extends the idea of the unwanted visitor beyond the supernatural figure of Lady Mary. Prentiss’s next comment to Mary explains some of the reasons behind her anger at the servant girl and again is grounded in class prejudice: ‘to think that she would go and talk to the like of Betsy Barnes about what is on her mind!’ (p. 117). By the end of the story, the situation of Mary becomes more troubling to the townspeople than the ghost of Lady Mary: [Connie] followed her so-called governess wherever she went, hang­ ing upon her arm when she could, holding her dress when no other hold was possible – following her everywhere, like her shadow. The vicarage, jealous and annoyed at first, and all the neighbours indignant too, to see Mary metamorphosed into a dependant of the city family, held out as long as possible against the good-nature of Mrs Turner, and were revolted by the spectacle of this child claiming poor Mary’s attention wherever she moved. (pp. 117–18)

Lady Mary’s apparition is replaced in the townspeople’s minds by the ‘spectacle’ of Mary working for, and to their thinking, being abused by ‘the city family’. Connie becomes the stalking ‘shadow’ who saps all of Mary’s energy as Connie’s health improves while Mary’s declines. Like a ghost, Mary then becomes ‘attached’ to the house in her need to stay connected to Lady Mary. The narrator remarks that she ‘felt herself to cling as she had never done before to the old house. She had never got over the impression that a secret presence, revealed to no one else, was continually near her, though she saw no one. And her health was greatly affected by this visionary double life’ (p. 119). The ambiguous ending of the story allows the possibility of some kind of pardon for Lady Mary, but also leaves Mary’s future un­ certain. Although the will is found and Mary’s health improves, the narrator never explicitly says that she gets any of the inheritance. The final emphasis is on Lady Mary and her final expatiation, which may give some hint as to Mary’s future as well. Lady Mary claims that she is forgiven and knows ‘nothing more’ (p. 124). Her com­ ment is followed by the response of the other purgatorial souls, 128

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‘There is no more . . . For everything is included in pardon and love’ (p. 124). Just what this ‘everything’ includes is left up to the reader to decide, but it hints at the possibility that Mary’s forgiveness of Lady Mary means that she will eventually receive the inheritance. But ‘there is no more’ could also imply that there is no money; the ‘everything’ is beyond the material. Elisabeth Jay discusses Oliphant’s emphasis on gender in her supernatural tales, specifically ‘The Open Door’, saying that she ‘used the challenge to conventional assumptions afforded by the supernatural, to investigate Victorian middle-class constructions of gender’.70 But Oliphant’s stories also address economic concerns, especially her haunted house stories. Vanessa Dickerson claims that Lady Mary serves as a lens through which to view the economic ‘invisibility’ of women during the period: ‘[Oliphant] wishes the reader to sympathize with this invisibility, voicelessness, and help­ lessness that may well have constituted a significant part of the experience of many Victorian women who were less literally angels in the house’ (pp. 142–3). Though this description links Lady Mary with the sympathetic Miss Fitzgerald in ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’, Oliphant’s Old Lady Mary shares many of the same character flaws as Miss Tynan in ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’. She refuses to make an official will during her life, thereby keeping all her money and possessions to herself, and leaving her ward, Little Mary, destitute after her death. Like the elderly Miss Tynan in Riddell’s story, Lady Mary succeeds in ‘taking it with her’, so to speak. The stories in this chapter are concerned with the repercussions of such acts of material greed, as Graham Coulton witnesses the selfimposed suffering of the miserly old woman and her eventual murder which is directly caused by her hoarded money, Edgar Stainton learns of his ancestor’s descent into madness (and the subsequent inability to enjoy his misbegotten wealth) because of the haunting presence of Georgie, and Lady Mary is made to suffer in the afterlife by witnessing the struggles of her goddaughter while being unable to communicate with her. Returning to the title of Oliphant’s story, the metaphor of the open door as a liminal space can also be applied to the other women writers in this chapter. Through their stories, they sought to bring about greater understanding and to bridge the gap between genders 129

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and between the socio-economic classes in British society. These authors opened the possibility of greater communication, as well as contributed to discourses of class, gender and religious inequality that many of their readers may have preferred to ignore or simply were unaware of. This heightened social awareness was smartly forwarded through the genre of the ghost story. In giving their audience something entertaining to read, while at the same time examining the personal and public issues that affected their char­ acters, the authors found a workable vehicle for advancing social issues. Like the ghosts that haunt their pages, these narratives served to haunt readers’ consciousness of an imperfect world that existed outside their own homes and brought about a greater public know­ ledge of social issues in Victorian Britain. In Women and Fiction (1979), Patricia Stubbs describes Victorian women’s place in the home as a position which: came about largely in order to protect the home and family as ideals. The bourgeois notion of the home and women’s role within it assumed its extraordinary elevated position in Victorian ideology because it functioned as a retreat from the external world, where utilitarianism and the mechanisms of competition, capital accumu­ lation and profit, made impulses such as compassion or human sympathy an uneconomical luxury.71

Women writers of ghost stories brought this ‘external world’ back into the home. In this sense, the stories included in this chapter repre­ sent a reclaiming. As authors, Riddell, Molesworth and Oliphant inhabit the domestic house – a place traditionally seen as a woman’s realm – and make it an important part of the Female Gothic trad­ ition. Their stories of haunted houses further complicate notions that the Female Gothic is fundamentally conservative because these female authors intentionally disorder their literary houses in an attempt to question women’s place within, not just the house, but in society as a whole. In earlier Female Gothic plots, the pursued and persecuted heroine seeks to escape the stifling confines of the patriarchal house. The characters in nineteenth-century ghost stories written by women, however, do not want to escape their homes, but instead want to re-enter them, want to regain houses and property 130

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(and thereby identity) that have been denied through the socioeconomic mismanagement (symbolized through the hauntings) that drives them out of these dwellings. Instead of the individual male Gothic villain, these stories indict Victorian society’s misuse of wealth, thus making that society’s culturally misguided reliance on money and status the real Gothic villain that pursues the ‘good’ characters in each story. These women writers complicate popular Victorian notions (fantasies) of a house as the centre of peace and domestic bliss. Instead, they ‘furnish’ their Gothic houses with issues that question this Victorian ideal. In so doing, they replace the ‘angel in the house’ with the ‘ghost in the house’, a far less stable and comforting presence which haunts rather than reassures the inner workings of the Victorian household.

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4 Haunted empire: spectral uprisings as imperialist critique  Hauntings are situated within specific places, and the stationary ghost is much more common than a ghost who leaves one place to haunt another. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, this same convention applied to ghost stories themselves. But as the British populace ventured into foreign lands, their ghosts went with them. This allowed for the possibility of an abundance of ‘new’ ghosts, ones that exist because of imperialism. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, this new sense of place joined with the traditional concerns that were common to the typical British super­ natural tale. In A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999), Robert Mighall attempts to expand Gothic literature past its psychological origins, calling these origins a sort of ‘centripetal pull’ that robs supernatural texts of what he calls ‘historical and “geographical” considerations’.1 This critical expansion of the Gothic has been followed in recent years by studies dedicated solely to colonial Gothic texts. In ‘Defining the relationships between Gothic and the postcolonial’ (2003), William Hughes and Andrew Smith stress the historical link between the Gothic and colonialism: ‘The Gothic has historically maintained an intimacy with colonial issues, and in consequence with the potential for disruption and redefinition vested in the relationships between Self and Other, controlling and repressed, subaltern milieu and dominant outsider culture.’2 In these colonial Gothic writings, the safe space of an idealized ‘England’ is

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removed and unreachable, making colonial ghosts ‘horrors beyond, the exoticism of time and space distancing the problematic text from the comfortable, identifiable world of the contemporary and the homely’.3 In the traditional subversive social commentaries that are found throughout the Gothic, Hughes and Smith also find a natural connection between nineteenth-century writings and what would later become postcolonial theory. They claim that ‘the Gothic is, and has always been, post-colonial, and this is where, in the Gothic text, disruption accelerates into change, where the colonial encounter – or the encounter which may be read or interpreted through the colonial filter – proves a catalyst to corrupt, to confuse or to redefine the boundaries of power, knowledge and owner­ ship’.4 Also in their introduction to Empire and the Gothic (2003), Smith and Hughes stress the critical importance of reading colonial texts through a postcolonial lens: ‘The Gothic use of non-human and ab-human figures such as vampires, ghosts and monsters of various kinds is calculated to challenge the dominant humanist discourse, and thus becomes . . . a literary form to which postcolonial writers are drawn, as well as constituting a literary form which can be read through postcolonial ideas.’5 Smith and Hughes also advocate a blending of the colonial and postcolonial which allows undervalued or forgotten nineteenth-century Gothic texts to be recovered through modern theory, stating that ‘Gothic writing which was produced within a colonialist context . . . may be usefully inter­ preted in the light of postcolonial ideas.’6 Yet despite this useful expansion of Gothic critique into the realms of empire, discussion of colonial Gothic tales by women remains in its early stages, and examination of the Female Gothic tradition within Anglo-Indian colonial contexts is almost non­ existent. As discussed in this chapter, Ellen Wood critiques the British presence in India and criticizes the militaristic mentality that sends men off to fight in these distant lands; her ghost stories are as much anti-war as they are anti-imperialist. Likewise, Bithia Mary Croker’s ghost stories centre on imperialistic ‘uncomfortable houses’: the Anglo-Indian bungalows that were so symbolic of the British imperial presence in India. But instead of dwelling on economic issues like the authors in the previous chapter, Croker summons 133

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vengeful Indian and British ghosts who experienced some sort of trauma at the hands of their Indian ‘hosts’. These frequently-termed ‘unhealthy’ bungalows and the ghosts that reside in them spread revenge and unrest that threatens the British far more than the ‘natives’ do. Just as with Wood’s imperial stories, Croker combines imperial critique with class issues, showing the root causes of cultural misunderstandings that result in supernatural trouble. Language barriers, pushy and intolerant memsahibs, and an insistence on controlling the ‘inferior’ Indian natives all result in ghostly activity. The women discussed in this chapter viewed British imperialism from very different perspectives. Ellen Wood never ventured into colo­nial regions, but she nonetheless wrote about the British im­ perial presence in both India and the Crimea. Wood, best known for her novel East Lynne (1861), also wrote short stories that fre­ quently visit super­natural realms, from curses to dream visions and telepathy. Bithia Mary Croker experienced British colonialism firsthand. She spent fourteen years living in various parts of India, and although many of her novels are traditional romances set in India, her short stories deal with murders and other violence caused as a direct result of the British presence in India. These writers offer glimpses into the British imperial world of the nineteenth century, and their ghost stories offer additional insight for modern-day readers about the impact the British colonial presence had on the countries and peoples under the dominion of the Empire at its heights. As a group, women writers were some of the first British authors to deal with the effects of colonialism, but were one of the last groups to have their imperial writings recognized as legitimate and worthy critiques of the British colonial experience in India. A representative example of the tendency to ignore women’s writing about empire in favour of works by male writers can be found in a February 1897 essay in Blackwood’s Magazine, titled ‘The Indian Mutiny in fiction’. The essay concerns the premise that the 1857 Indian Uprising cap­ tured British writers’ interests more than any other historical event in the nineteenth century and ‘has taken the firmest hold on the popular imagination’.7 According to the unnamed author, which many assume to be Hilda Gregg, events such as the Crimean War were quickly forgotten by British writers after the Indian Uprising began. Compared to works about the uprising, the author says, ‘We 134

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cannot at the moment recall more than three or four novelists . . . who have treated of it in their works’ (‘Mutiny’, p. 218). The reason given for this was the unexpected nature of the uprising and the intensity of the violence: ‘The grim fighting and grimmer hardships of the Crimea paled before the tragedy of the Indian massacres and the splendours of Lucknow and Delhi’ (‘Mutiny’, p. 218). The author claims that no writer besides Rudyard Kipling had addressed the uprising in short fiction, surmising that the reason was ‘a sense of the awfulness of the theme, they do not seem to have regarded the Indian troubles as a fitting subject for their art’ (‘Mutiny’, p. 220). This statement, of course, leaves out the women writers who, in fact, did address these ‘troubles’ in their short fiction, such as Ellen Wood and Bithia Mary Croker. The essay goes on to list several male novelists who dealt with the Indian Uprising, but these works are largely romances which seek to distance themselves from the actual historical events. The essay mentions one unnamed novel, which ‘is something of a novelty, in that it is the work of a lady’ and is ‘written from a feminine point of view’ (‘Mutiny’, p. 223). However, the author of the essay comes to the conclusion that the story is spoiled because it has a feminist agenda: That Ada, after her experiences, should be moved to pity by the lives of Hindu and Mohammedan women is natural enough; but in our opinion a very delightful story comes perilously near being spoiled by the way in which she, and the author also, extend their indignant sympathy at unnecessary moments to the women of the West. (‘Mutiny’, p. 224)

This same criticism is given to Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1897), which is now considered one of the most effective nineteenth-century critiques of the 1857 Indian Uprising. Although the essay admits that the novel had been recently praised by one con­temporary review ‘as the novel of the Mutiny’ (‘Mutiny’, p. 228), the author finds a similar problem in the novel’s feminist themes: ‘But if it is a misfortune for an author to find himself doomed to drag the New Woman into all he writes, it is worse than a misfortune for a lady writer to be similarly oppressed by the sex question’ 135

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(‘Mutiny’, p. 228). After listing several of the book’s ‘contradictory deductions’ (‘Mutiny’, p. 229), the reviewer concludes that the book’s greatest confusion lies in its direct engagement with gender: ‘For it is this obtrusion of the sex-problem, and not the mingling of history and fiction, as she fears, that spoils her book’ (‘Mutiny’, p. 229). Although the novel avoids the use of overtly supernatural themes, the author of the essay nonetheless employs ghostly terms to describe the book’s ‘problem’ (and, in so doing, the larger social issues and anxieties of the time): ‘Oh, the pity of it, when we have got rid of so many of the old bogeys of conventionality which darkened the lives of women, to raise up another – this brooding horror of the sex-problem – to overshadow them again!’ (‘Mutiny’, p. 230). Despite the misapprehensions in the essay, women writers did deal directly with British imperialism through the genre of the ghost story. These works did not limit themselves to the ‘sexproblem’ in the form of the New Woman, but expanded their agendas to accommodate discussion of the larger problem of the effects of British imperialism in Asia, India and Africa. Visits from the battlefield: Ellen Wood’s ghostly soldiers Ellen Wood (1814–87), more popularly known to the British read­ ing public as ‘Mrs Henry Wood’, gained fame after the publication of her novel East Lynne in 1861. By the turn of the twentieth century, the book had sold more than 400,000 copies and estab­ lished Wood as a popular domestic novelist.8 She continued this success with several more novels that were equally popular, including The Channings (1862), Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles (1862), and A Life’s Secret (1867). Wood also found fame as a short story writer in such collections as the Johnny Ludlow series (1874–99) and Adam Grainger (1874). Several of the stories in these works display her talent as a writer of the supernatural, and it is in these stories that she also reveals herself as a social critic engaged with the issues of her day, including both the Crimean War and the Indian Uprising. Wood’s interest in history was established early in life. After being diagnosed with curvature of the spine when she was thirteen, Wood was confined to bed rest for four years, and during this time, she 136

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took a great interest in reading books about history.9 In his Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood (1894), Wood’s son Charles recalled his mother’s early self-education: ‘At seven years old she had gone through the studies of girls twice her age. She could repeat whole poems, such as Gray’s Elegy and the Deserted Village; and before she was thirteen knew by heart a great deal of Shakespeare’.10 Whatever spending money was given to her by her family was used to buy books. Along with her love of books and history, Wood developed an active imagination that she would later put to use in her fiction. Her son recalls, ‘The quiet cloisters she crowded with dream people, and at night as she watched the outlines of the [Worcester] Cathedral steeped in moonlight, she would fancy the dark and solemn aisles peopled with all the ghosts of those who reposed there and belonged to the historic past’ (Memorials, p. 13). She continued this interest in political and cultural matters when she purchased and became editor of Argosy magazine in 1867. In addition to the money she earned from the magazine, Wood also supported her family by pub­ lish­ing monthly stories in Bentley’s Miscellany and the New Monthly Magazine.11 Wood was known to be conservative in her political views,12 but in reading her ghost stories centred on the Crimean War or the Indian Rebellion, one can recognize a deep concern over Britain’s involvement in far-flung parts of the world.13 Ellen Wood would lay the groundwork for her later criticism of foreign wars in a series of letters published in the New Monthly Magazine, in which, writing as ‘Ensign Tom Pepper’, she was intensely critical of government mismanagement during the Crimean War. With her interest in the historical, Wood combined her acquired interest in the supernatural. In Memorials, Charles Wood describes his mother’s belief in the other-worldly: In the unseen world she had absolute faith, and thought it probable that spirits were about us, guarding and influencing our lives – if we permitted them to do so. She believed in occasional and direct manifestations from heaven; thought it possible that dreams and visions were occasionally and specially sent; on rare occasions warn­ ings and presentiments – in short, that the link between heaven and earth was nearer and closer than is generally imagined. (p. 199) 137

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According to Charles, Ellen Wood discussed the power of ‘second sight’, the ability to see into the future, with her friend Mary Howitt.14 On one occasion, Howitt told Wood of a specific dream vision she had in which she suddenly found herself in the Australian countryside, watching as a young man was pulled from a nearby body of water. Howitt awakened to find herself seated at a table in her home, but feeling that harm had come to her son. A few days later, she and her husband received news that their son had drowned in Australia (Memorials, p. 202). According to R. C. Finucane, in Appearances of the Dead (1984), this visitation by a spirit at the moment of that spirit’s death was very much in the cultural consciousness of Wood’s time. In discuss­ ing the distinction between these ‘informative’ ghosts with other ‘purposeless’ ghosts, Finucane recounts several instances in Britain in which spectres were said to have returned to the living with a message about their deaths. In 1848, a father looked out his window and saw his son standing outside, only to learn later that his son had died in Australia at the exact time that he was sighted in England. In the early 1870s, the ghost of a sick man’s father supposedly appeared next to his son’s bed, and a nurse who witnessed the visitation later learned that the father had, indeed, also died at that time but was approximately 100 miles away.15 But it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth-century that these ‘informative’ ghosts began appearing from imperial regions. The famous Victorian medium and novelist Florence Marryat claimed to have witnessed a similar occurrence, as she related in her memoir There Is No Death (1891). In the first chapter of her book, ‘Family Ghosts’, Marryat relates her encounter with the wife of a fellow officer in the 12th Madras Native Infantry, a regiment stationed in Rangoon. The woman’s husband, Major Cooper, was ordered to Canton to assist British troops during the attack on that city. While he was away, Mrs Cooper stayed near the Marryat residence in Rangoon and one night claimed that she saw her husband in her bedroom. When Marryat questioned her about the sighting, Mrs Cooper said: Mark is dead . . . he sat in that chair . . . all last night. I noticed every detail of his face and figure. He was in undress, and he never raised his eyes, but sat with the peak of his forage cap pulled down over his 138

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Haunted Empire: Spectral Uprisings as Imperialist Critique face. But I could see the back of his head and his hair, and I know it was he. I spoke to him but he did not answer me, and I am sure he is dead.16

Cooper wrote in her journal that her husband appeared to her for three nights on 8–10 July. Shortly after this vision, Mrs Cooper’s newborn baby died, and then Marryat received a letter relating the news that Cooper’s husband had died. Although Marryat tried to keep the news from Mrs Cooper, she insisted that she already knew her husband’s fate, that he had died on 10 July, a fact confirmed by the letter that had been received.17 Roger Luckhurst locates the high point of public interest in these stories of supernatural sightings from the different regions of the British empire during the 1880s, a period which saw the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, the same year as the British occupation of Egypt and the Berlin Conference in 1885, thus linking public interest in the spirit world with the imperial one. During these years, the SPR published many reports of ‘crisis apparitions’ who appeared to loved ones from the far reaches of empire.18 In her story of a dead soldier who returns from imperial regions, Wood anticipated by more than twenty years the popularity of imperial second sight. ‘A Mysterious Visitor’, published in Bentley’s Miscellany in October 1857 and later included in Adam Grainger and Other Stories, directly addresses the events of the Indian Uprising. The opening line of the story observes, ‘On Monday morning, the 11th of May, 185719 – the year, as the reader may remember, that England was destined to be shaken to its centre with the disastrous news of the rising in India – there sat in one of the quiet rooms of Enton Parsonage a young and pretty woman, playing with her baby.’20 That woman turns out to be Louisa Ordie, an Englishwoman with ties to India. Her mother, Mrs Ling, is a native Anglo-Indian, whose family had a tradition of serving ‘in the civil or military service of Bengal’ (p. 361). After marrying Captain Ordie, Louisa’s health declines, and she is sent back to England, with plans to return to India once her health improves. The child is Louisa’s second, after losing her first child in India, and, consequently, she is extremely concerned over its well-being. Thinking the baby is sick, Louisa quickly becomes upset and calls on Mrs Beecher, her former governess. Mrs Beecher 139

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sees nothing seriously wrong with the baby, but Louisa insists that her daughter is ill. She exclaims that if her daughter dies, she, too, will die. Mrs Beecher scolds her for saying such a thing, to which Louisa makes the oath that will come back to literally haunt her: ‘Oh yes, I have a right, for it is truth. I would rather lose everything I possess in the world, than my baby’ (p. 363). Following this statement, the narrator comments on Louisa’s propensity to have an overactive imagination: Mrs. Ordie had always been of most excitable temperament. As a girl, her imagination was so vivid, so prone to the marvellous, that story books and fairy tales were kept from her. She would get them unknown to her parents, and wake up in the night, shrieking with terror at what she had read. Hers was indeed a peculiarly active brain. It is necessary to mention this, as it may account, in some degree, for what follows. (pp. 363–4)

Indeed, ‘what follows’ is Louisa’s vision of her dead husband. She sits in her bedroom reading and at 11.25 p.m., she hears the sound of footsteps approaching on the lane outside her house. Wood describes Louisa’s view of the event: He had come in at the further gate, had passed along the front of the house, and was now underneath her window. She saw him distinctly in the light cast on the path from the kitchen. There was no mistaking him for any other than Captain Ordie, and he wore his regimentals. He lifted his face, she saw it clearly in the light, and looked at her. Then he went on and stepped inside the porch. (p. 368)

Though she sees her husband clearly, he does not answer her calls to him. Louisa is convinced that her husband has returned from India and goes to open the door, but when she arrives at the door, no one is there. In the reaction of the other characters to Louisa’s insistence that she saw her husband outside the house, Wood stresses the physical impossibility of this supposed return. The servants insist that the gates leading to the house are locked, and when she accuses them of leaving these gates open, the house servant Martha says, ‘I locked both gates at sundown . . . and the key’s hanging up in its 140

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place in the kitchen’ (p. 370). After seeing the locked gate for her­ self and shaking it with anger, Louisa still refuses to believe she imagined her husband, simply saying, ‘I know he did get through it, and that’s enough . . . Soldiers are venturesome and can do anything’ (pp. 373–4). Here, she says more than she knows. As a ghost, more than as a soldier, her husband can indeed ‘do anything’, such as passing through a locked gate and appearing to his wife at the moment of his death in another country. Mr Beecher also mentions the impossibility of her husband’s return: ‘I fear it must be all a mistake. Captain Ordie would not arrive here on foot, even if he landed unexpectedly; and he could not have got through a locked gate . . . I do not think it possible to have been anything but a delusion’ (pp. 380, 381). Louisa, however, insists that she saw her husband and even puts an advertisement for him in the local papers: ‘he was in England, she said, and it would be proved so’ (p. 381). A few weeks pass by, and with them ‘the disastrous news had arrived of the outbreak in India of that dreadful mutiny’ (p. 382). James Beecher, the brother of the curate who lives near Louisa, returns from India with more detailed news of the uprising. Louisa asks him about Captain Ordie, and he tells her that her husband attempted to rescue several of the English men, women and children trapped during the uprising near Delhi and was killed in these efforts. He also tells her of other deaths, including her sister Constance Main and her baby: ‘The first thing I saw distinctly was, that one of them had caught Mrs. Main’s infant, and was tossing it on the point of his bayonet. He next seized her . . . And killed her. Killed her instantly. Be thankful’ (p. 390). When Louisa questions why she should be thankful for the death of her sister, Beecher replies, ‘Be ever thankful . . . Others met with a worse fate’ (p. 390). Grisly events like this did take place during the uprising, especially during the massacre of British women and children at Cawnpore in June of 1857, and Wood provides a graphic description of these horrors to her readers, thereby connecting a supernatural haunting with real-life atrocities. In this section of the narrative, Wood reflects Victorian society’s concern and fear of sexual violence in colonial regions, while at the same time mirroring Victorian misconceptions of violence against women at the hands of Indian natives. Though they often had no 141

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factual basis, stories of the rape and murder of Anglo-Indian women during the Indian Uprising spread throughout Britain. As Jenny Sharpe notes, these were indeed ‘stories’, fictionalized accounts of the violence that teased readers by not giving specific details of any events and retelling events that were rarely ever seen first-hand. As these stories found their way into periodicals and newspapers, the British public was able ‘to share in the terror’ of the uprising, and the way in which they were told ‘invited readers to visualize the unspeakable acts that could only be disclosed in fragments’.21 Like­ wise, by setting her story of the 1857 Indian Uprising within the context of the supernatural, Wood allows two layers of terror, that of historic horror and ghostly terror, through the experiences of Louisa and the visitation of her husband in spectral form. Another useful term which links Wood’s story to the cultural consciousness of the time is what Roger Luckhurst calls the imperial rumour. He discusses this idea in relation to the ‘crisis apparitions’ of second sight, but also connects rumour to deeper anxieties about British rule in India and elsewhere. ‘Supernormal communications’ from empire (i.e. ghosts appearing in Britain at the time of their deaths) were seemingly able to spread faster than any manmade form of communication, and ghosts which told of deaths from imperial violence became representative of British fears and rumours over failed governmental control in these regions. In the mind of the British public, if such violence could happen, but the public was not being ‘officially’ told about it in detail, what else could be going on in India or Africa? This naturally led to more rumours and false ‘eye witness’ accounts. According to Luckhurst these quickly spread­ ing rumours, visitations from the dead, ‘suggests a mechanism of projection in which anxieties about the fragility of colonial rule and scanty communication could conjure occult doubles which mysteri­ ously exceeded European systems’.22 Luckhurst goes on to cite Hans-Joachim Neubauer in The Rumour (1999), as saying that the speed by which the false stories spread after the Indian and Zulu uprisings, and the influence these stories had over the public, ‘have a supernatural feel’.23 In the story, Wood notes the significance of the event for Louisa: ‘Mrs. Beecher was thinking of her random words – that she would rather lose everything in the world than her child. But her thoughts 142

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had not grasped the dreadful possibility of losing her husband’ (pp. 391–2). Louisa does make the connection between her vision and her husband’s death by asking when he died. Beecher tells her, ‘It must have been near half-past eleven. When Captain Ordie came in, we asked him the time . . . and his watch said a quarter-past eleven; and we were talking, after that, perhaps ten minutes. It must have been about twenty-five minutes after eleven when he was killed’ (p. 392). Louisa then recognizes her vision as a sign of her husband’s death: ‘There! There! Do you believe me now, Mrs. Beecher? Ah! you all ridiculed me then; but you hear it! It was my husband that came down the path here – appearing to me in the moment of his death’ (p. 392). Despite the current popularity of supernatural stories, Wood leaves her readers to draw their own conclusions about the events in the story: The reader must judge of this mystery as he pleases. It happened; at least, to the positive belief of the lady, here called Mrs. Ordie; as her friends can testify. They reason with her in vain. They point out that twenty-five minutes after eleven in Delhi would not be twenty-five minutes after eleven here: they believe that it was, and could have been, nothing but her own vivid imagination, that her thoughts were probably running on her husband through the ‘George’ in the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’. But Louisa Ordie nevertheless believes, and will believe to the end of time, that it was her husband in the spirit who showed himself to her that unhappy night. (pp. 392–3)

After painting Louisa as a person with an imaginative mind near the beginning of the story, Wood offers a rhetorical counter-argument that her character was dreaming of her husband. But the symbolic trade-off at the centre of the story makes the question of whether or not the other characters believe her of little consequence. As Wood reminds her readers, Louisa’s wish to lose anything in the world besides her child seemingly becomes her husband’s death sentence. This is the event that should receive more attention than the apparent presence of her husband’s ghost. That Louisa or the other characters do not recognize this fact makes the ghost story even more disturbing and more of a political comment by Wood. Her characters’ inability to see the connection 143

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between these events and the loss of their soldiers’ lives in a foreign land makes the point that the present British generation is being sacrificed for the future imperial domination of Britain. The presence of the British in India, as well as any greater significance behind Captain Ordie’s death, is not questioned or remarked upon by any of the characters, and Louisa’s insistence on being ‘right’ in seeing her husband’s ghost overshadows the fact that he has been killed in an act of retributive violence caused by the British occu­ pation of India. By setting her ghost story during the time of the Indian Rebellion, an event which the Indian Civil Service officer, Malcolm Darling, described in a 1906 letter as ‘“a kind of phantom standing behind official chairs”’,24 Ellen Wood brings that event, and its consequences, vividly home to the British public. Bithia Mary Croker and the ghosts of India While Ellen Wood chose to focus her ghostly tales on the colonial home front, Bithia Mary Croker (c.1850–1920) used her fourteen years in India and Burma as the wife of a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Scots and Munster Fusiliers to her literary advantage. Until recently, however, Croker’s work has been overlooked by critics. There are slight mentions of her in reminiscences and memoirs in the early twentieth century. Bhupal Singh included a description of her work in A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction (1934) in a chapter titled ‘Novels of Anglo-Indian Life’. Her work is listed first in the chapter, followed by that of Maud Diver, Mrs G. H. Bell (‘John Travers’), Alice Perrin, Mrs. E. W. Savi, Shelland Bradley, and various other brief mentions of now little-known and neglected Anglo-Indian writers. Singh describes the quality of these writers’ works as ‘not very high’, especially when compared to ‘the master’ of Anglo-Indian fiction, Rudyard Kipling. He provides the follow­ing description of Croker’s work, taking into account only her romance novels, not her short fiction: Mrs. Croker’s Indian books take the reader practically all over India; they show great powers of observation, and a vast range of experience. She knows the small and big Anglo-Indian stations well and can hit 144

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And though Patrick Brantlinger opens his discussion on Imperial Gothic in Rule of Darkness (1988) with a mention of Croker’s ‘The Little Brass God’ (1905), he quickly relegates her story to the category of ‘featherweight tale’,26 and claims that ‘Croker un­ wittingly expresses a social version of the return of the repressed characteristic of late Victorian and Edwardian fiction, including that blend of adventure story with Gothic elements – imperial Gothic.’27 If we look closer at Croker’s career as an Anglo-Indian writer, however, her repeated use of ‘the return of the repressed’ is anything but ‘unwittingly’ employed, and the cross-cultural violence that she frequently uses in her ghost stories becomes a clearly intentional narrative technique to draw her contemporary audience’s attention to the haunted aspects of British and Indian socio-historical relations. Croker wrote numerous romance novels and short stories based on her experience within the British Empire, from her arrival in India in 1877 to her return to England in 1892.28 In an interview with Douglas Sladen,29 Croker recalls her entry into fiction: My very first attempt at writing was in the hot weather at Sec­ underabad. When my husband was away tiger-shooting, and I was more or less a prisoner all day owing to the heat, I began a story, solely for my own amusement. It grew day by day, and absorbed all my time and interest. This was Proper Pride. With reluctance and trepidation I read it to a friend, and then to all the other ladies in the regiment – under seal of secrecy. Emboldened by this success, I wrote Pretty Miss Neville, and when I returned home with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, I had two manuscripts among my luggage . . . I attribute my good fortune to the fact that my novels struck a new note – India and army society – and that I received very powerful help from unknown reviewers. I like writing, otherwise I could not work. I believe I inherit the taste from my father’s family, who were said to be ‘born with a pen in their hands’!30 145

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Interestingly, Croker’s account of her writing’s initial transmission among the women of the army regiment closely resembles the woman-to-woman transference of the ghostly rumours in her super­natural tales, and, indeed, much of the woman-to-woman spectral communication in stories and poems discussed earlier in this book. To Let (1893) contains several stories set in India and Burma in the 1880s, including the story which gives the collection its name, as well as ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’.31 Both stories are told from the viewpoints of native Englishwomen travelling alone through the uncharted (i.e. non-British) territory of India.32 These women are forced by various unforeseen circumstances to take refuge in abandoned bungalows, and during their respective stays at these ironically named ‘rest houses’, witness the presence of ghosts of former British officials who have either been murdered by Indian natives or have otherwise died while serving Britain in India. These portrayals of mysterious deaths allow Croker to critique the British presence in India through the motif of the haunted house story. Just as the previous inhabitants of these dwellings met with unhappy ends, the female narrators of her stories find themselves driven out of their supposed refuges, and their spatial disorientation leads to further uneasiness about their position as unwanted out­ siders in India. Croker uses the ghosts not only as warnings of the problematic effects of empire, but she also establishes her female narrators as witnesses to these ghosts. These women, therefore, become privileged critics of British imperial power. In ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’, Croker’s narrator quickly establishes the Anglo-Indian town of Karwassa as a refuge amidst the surrounding Indian wilderness. The narrator, Nellie Loyd, the wife of an English forest officer, especially likes Karwassa because of its Englishness. She calls the station ‘an oasis of civilization, amid leagues and leagues of surrounding forest and jungle’.33 The town that has been built in Karwassa is an England in microcosm, with a post office, public gardens, tennis courts and a church. Croker also comments on the contrived aspects of Anglo-Indian settlements by having Nellie mention the station’s ‘ice machine’ (p. 96), which creates what she calls the English ‘season’ even during the hottest Indian months. Nellie’s life in Karwassa is almost as non-Indian as 146

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the Indian town in which she lives; her daily routine involves ‘tennis at daybreak, moonlight picnics, whist-parties’, and ‘little dinners’ (p. 96). As Nellie and her friend, Julia Goodchild, the wife of a British police officer, prepare to visit their husbands who are stationed in the distant town of Chanda, they are warned about their journey by Mrs Duff, an older Englishwoman who seldom leaves Karwassa. Mrs Duff’s warning to the two younger women first introduces readers to the ghost story at the centre of Croker’s tale: ‘Chanda – Chanda . . . Isn’t there some queer story about a bungalow near there – that is unhealthy34 – or haunted or some­ thing?’ (p. 97). Julia ignores Mrs Duff’s vague warning and seeks a rational explanation behind such a story. She tells Mrs Duff that the bungalows in the farther regions are often in disrepair, and visitors may well leave because of sickness or lack of rest; but she doubts they are scared away by ghosts. The first two days of the trip are met with no problems, but as soon as Nellie and Julia become imperial adventurers themselves and turn off the main road onto ‘the old Jubbulpore Road’, or in other words, away from their ‘England’ and into the true India, their problems begin. After their oxen go lame or run away, they decide to walk sixteen miles to the next rest house, where they plan to meet their servant, Abdul, with a fresh supply of oxen. As the women walk along the road toward Chanda, Croker uses the re­ actions of the natives to comment on the women’s anomalous presence in the Indian landscape: the few people we encountered driving their primitive little carts stared hard at us in utter stupefaction, as well they might – two mem sahibs trudging along, with no escort except a panting white dog. The insolent crows and lazy blue buffalos all gazed at us in undisguised amazement as we wended our way through this monotonous and melancholy scene. (pp. 99–100)

At the next village of Dakor the women are faced with another warning about their presence in the village. Just as with Mrs Duff, the warning comes in the form of an ‘old woman’, who shakes her hand ‘in a warning manner’ (p. 100) and tells the women some­thing they cannot understand (presumably because of the language barrier). 147

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As they approach the travellers’ bungalow, it becomes clear that the once distinctly British structure is being slowly reclaimed by its native Indian surroundings: we discovered that the drive was as grass-grown as a field; jungle grew up to the back of the house, heavy wooden shutters closed all the windows, and the door was locked. There was a forlorn, desolate, dismal appearance about the place; it looked as if it had not been visited for years. (pp. 100–1)

Croker also carefully positions her story around an architectural element of the Indian landscape that held symbolic significance for both the British and Indians after the 1857 Uprising. According to Margaret MacMillan in Women of the Raj (1988), these dwellings often had inflammatory remarks painted on their walls, such as ‘Revenge your slaughtered countrywomen! To——with the bloody Sepoys!’35 Because of their violent pasts, these places were often thought to be haunted. Iris Portal, a member of a civil service family who lived in Meerut in the twentieth century, remarked that several bunga­ lows had plaques commemorating the violent deaths of their former inhabitants. She also recalled: There was one bungalow near by where they had to take their beds out into the garden, not only for the heat but because things happened, like doors blowing open when there was no wind. Dogs would never stay in the house, and it was emphatically haunted. They all felt it and they all hated it, and that was one of the Mutiny bungalows with a plaque on it.36

In Croker’s story, the local caretaker of the bungalow refuses to let Nellie and Julia use the building for the night, so they break the lock in order to gain entrance. Later, when the women are settling in for the night, Nellie sees the man staring at them through the window: It was the face of some malicious animal, more than the face of a man, that glowered out beneath his filthy red turban. His eyes glared and rolled as if they would leave their sockets; his teeth were fangs, like 148

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Haunted Empire: Spectral Uprisings as Imperialist Critique dogs’ teeth, and stood out almost perpendicularly from his hideous mouth. He surveyed us for a few seconds in savage silence, and then melted away into the surrounding darkness as suddenly as he appeared. (p. 103)

Not only is the man described as an animal, but he is also a threaten­ ing presence. Nellie describes him as looking like a dog, while Julia finds a British equivalent for the caretaker, calling him the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland, another story of a disoriented visitor in a strange land. The bungalow is subsequently fortified, with the shutters ‘well barred and the doors bolted’ (p. 103). Shuchi Kapila notes about Croker’s use of physical space in her novels, that ‘domestic interiors mimic racial and cultural hierarchies’37; indeed, the women are placed within the bungalow, and Abdul sleeps on the verandah, signifying his marginal status in both the British and Indian worlds. In the middle of the night, Nellie is awakened by a sudden light in the room and sees a man, whom she recognizes as a fellow ‘travel­ ler’. He does not take notice of the women and sits at a table in the middle of the room writing a letter. Though this man occupies the same room as the women, instead of staring at them through the window, making him actually a greater threat to them than the caretaker (in addition to his belongings, Nellie notices that the traveller carries a gun case), her description of the stranger is in stark contrast to the previous description of the caretaker: He was young and good looking, but very, very pale; possibly he had just recovered from some long illness. I could not see his eyes, they were bent upon the paper before him; his hands, I noticed, were well shaped, white, and very thin. He wore a signet-ring on the third finger of the left hand, and was dressed with a care and finish not often met with in the jungle. (pp. 103–4)

Croker’s placement of the ghost of the murdered man in the centre of the room is significant, as this implies something that becomes central and vital to Nellie’s consciousness. The dominate placement of this apparition in Nellie’s mind, mirrored by his placement in the room, is symbolic of the effect of this ghost story on the mind 149

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of the public, as well as the story’s comment on the placement of the British and the Indians within the mind of the reading public. As Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs discuss in their study of the significance of the Australian postcolonial ghost story, in tales of haunting the supposedly marginal object, the ghost, who is repre­ sen­tative of a marginal people (the colonized) becomes just the opposite, something that moves from the periphery to the centre, and who can disrupt the ‘sense of the nation’s well-being’.38 By having ghosts who are British and Indian in her stories, Croker calls into question this idea of marginality. In their dependence on the Indian natives and their presence as a minority in India, the British were, in many ways, marginal, though they tried not to think or act this way in public. By moving British ghosts to the centre of her supernatural tales, Croker is implicitly commenting on the danger­ ous instability of colony. The ghost’s influence thus extends beyond the local, beyond the specific site of empire. Nellie witnesses the man’s murder, as his Indian servant sneaks up behind him and stabs him. Before he dies, the man looks at Nellie (his only recognition of her) with what she describes as ‘a sad, strange look! a look of appeal’ (p. 104). When Nellie wakes, it is daylight. Just as with the flash of light that accompanied the presence of the ghost, daylight presents her with an enlightened view of her own situation and surroundings. Nellie’s ‘awakening’ to her precarious situation is a clever reversal of what Roger Luckhurst describes as a colonial region in which the British were the ones supposedly doing the ‘enlightening’: ‘The locale, a hostel on the elaborate travel network that existed across the Indian empire, is significant. The systems of road, railway, postal, and telegraphic com­ munications were often held to be the means by which enlighten­ ment would be brought to ignorant and superstitious natives’.39 By the story’s end, it is Nellie and Julia who are enlightened to the effects of British colonization and to the very real danger that is represented in a fleeting ghostly encounter.40 Croker’s story also provides an early example of how Gelder and Jacobs describe the postcolonial ghost story, as one which is ‘often quite literally about “the return of the repressed” – namely, the return of the “truth” (or a “truth effect”) about colonization’.41 Likewise, the use of the ghost in Croker’s story further exemplifies Margaret L. Carter’s 150

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description of Gothic fiction as a genre which ‘confers greater “real­ ism” on the story by giving the impression of a secondary world, discovered rather than constructed’.42 In this way, Nellie and Julia’s ‘secondary world’ provides them with greater truth about their everyday world. The women, in turn, must then educate others about what they have witnessed. Though her ‘tongue seemed paralyzed’ (p. 104) when she tries to scream, Nellie finds her voice in time to warn Julia about the ghost and the murder. However, just as she dismissed Mrs Duff and the old woman in the village, Julia refuses to believe the supernatural story and tells Nellie her vision was brought about by purely rational causes: ‘“Ghosts! murders! walk to Chanda!” she echoed scornfully. “Why, you silly girl, did I not sleep here in this very room, and sleep as sound as a top? It was all the pâté de foie gras. You know it never agrees with you”’ (p. 105).43 The next night, Nellie refuses to sleep in the bungalow, saying that one more night there would kill her. Croker suggests the similarity in the two travellers by making it clear that the murdered Englishman was the guest who, seven years before, wrote in the bungalow visitor’s book that the caretaker was ‘an insolent, drunken hound’ (p. 102), a comment reminiscent of Nellie’s description of the caretaker after she sees him outside the window of the bungalow. Her positive and sympathetic reaction to the traveller also shows that she chooses to look past his insulting description of the caretaker or perhaps that she simply agrees with his characterization of the man. Nellie’s absence in the bungalow leaves Julia alone to face the ghost, and the following night, she, too, sees the murdered traveller. After Julia sees the ghost, she questions a local woman about the haunted bungalow. The woman will only admit that it is haunted by ‘devils’ (p. 106), leaving an ambiguous comment as to who the ‘devil’ actually is, the English­man, the Indian or perhaps both. The nightly repetition of the crime calls the reader’s attention back to the epigraph of the story, in which Croker quotes a stanza from Sir Alfred Lyall’s ‘The Hindu Ascetic’44: When shall these phantoms flicker away, Like the smoke of the guns on the wind-swept hill; Like the sounds and colours of yesterday, And the soul have rest, and the air be still? (p. 96) 151

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Lyall, an English administrator in India, wrote many poems based on his experiences in the region, and these lines are spoken by an Indian native. However, the lines could just as easily be spoken by an Englishman who has witnessed the continuing violence caused by the British occupation of India (especially the bloody Sepoy Rebellion of 1857). The ghost of the traveller also could question when his soul would ‘have rest’; presumably because of his murder, he cannot find that rest. The retributive violence he experiences on a nightly basis is suggested by the admission of a local woman that ‘in spite of the wooden shutters there were lights in the window every night up to twelve o’clock’ (p. 106). The man’s suffering also is heightened by Nellie’s description of his ‘sad, strange . . . look of appeal’ (p. 104), a description which further suggests a recognition of the eminent danger in his role as oppressor of the native Indian citizens. This look of appeal is symbolic of the connection the women now have to the ghost of the man (and to the past). By setting her stories within the domestic, rather than a military or governmental space, Croker is nevertheless able to involve her female characters in the central power systems of imperialism. In her essay, ‘Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-house’, Carol Margaret Davison makes a connection between Female Gothic and Empire Gothic, saying that the ‘manor/Great House’, as the traditional space for the female, functions as a reminder of imperial aims.45 It is also a site of friction between colonizer and colonized: ‘the manor/ Great House is a site of historical and cultural, conscious and un­ conscious, collisions and collusions’.46 The supernatural battle within Croker’s bungalows is the imperial conflict in microcosm. As much as she seeks to place some of the blame on the British in her stories, Croker is still a British woman looking at India from an outsider’s perspective, and the Indian caretaker remains the embodiment of the mysterious, unpredictable and potentially dangerous native who has domestic advantage over the colonists. And Croker exploits this situation to suit her Gothic aims, which, according to Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, frequently consisted of writers ‘turn[ing] the colonial subject into the obscene cannibalistic personification of evil’ which ‘could bring revulsion and horror into the text, there­ by mirroring political and social anxieties close to home’.47 The murder of the Englishman and the description of the animalistic 152

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qualities of the Indian caretaker, then, serve as both Gothic and political horror. Julia’s treatment of the caretaker and her criticism of his man­ agement and lack of hospitality also are reminiscent of the murdered man’s written insults in the visitor’s book, which makes her position among the Indian natives just as dangerous as the previous traveller’s situation. Croker’s portrayal of Julia as a quintessential ‘memsahib’ figure highlights her uncertain existence among those whom she supposedly controls. For Jenny Sharpe in Allegories of Empire (1993), this literary character was used frequently by women writers as one reason to explain native Indian hostilities towards the British. Sharpe notes that this ‘notorious female figure’ became most popular among authors after the 1857 Uprising.48 The term, meaning ‘lady master’ and referring specifically to wealthy British women, describes the ‘small-minded, social snob who tyrannically rules over a household of servants and refuses to associate with Indians’,49 except, of course, as servants. In other words, this is the imperial femme fatale, who uses her gender to get what she wants and whose insecure class snobbery ultimately causes unrest. Sharpe also cites Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who came to the conclusion in his historical study, Ideas about India (1885), ‘that the Englishwoman in India during the last thirty years has been the cause of half the bitter feelings there between race and race’.50 The problem of the memsahib’s presence was also the subject of an October 1886 article by J. E. Dawson in the Calcutta Review (one of the most respected Anglo-Indian journals of the time), which held Englishwomen accountable for upholding domestic order in India: Each Englishwoman, in her own Bungalow, is the centre of an influence, and the cynosure of an argus-eyed criticism, even to her most insignificant acts, to which her English life offers no parallel. The smallest establishment will contain from ten to a dozen, the larger, from a dozen to twenty or thirty servants. With every one of these the Mêm Sahib is more or less in contact, and the happiness and comfort of their lives depends largely on her supervision.51

Dawson classes Englishwomen under three groups: the wellestablished ‘Anglo-Indian’, whose family has been a part of Indian 153

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society for a few generations, ‘maturer’ ladies (i.e. unmarried, single women), who enter the country with a set attitude and ‘character’, and, finally, the ‘young bride’, who is completely naïve to the country that is her new home (‘Woman in India’, p. 348). Though perhaps not quite yet the memsahib who exhibits domineering tendencies, these classes of women are often busybodies, whose descriptions fit well with Croker’s female characters, both young and old: ‘The youngest addition is herself a welcome ingredient, for she affords a fresh topic for discussion. The frailties of the Jones and Smiths are, alas! worn threadbare. All the rents and fissures in the domestic and social relationships of every one in the station, are common property’ (‘Woman in India’, p. 354). The article also cites these women’s failure to learn the Hindi or Urdu languages as one of the reasons why there was frequent miscommunication between the British and the Indians: ‘Ignorance of the language means ignorance of the people, and ignorance of the people, if it be productive of no positive harm, must at least render attempts at good abortive: but where knowledge and good will go hand in hand, the good within the scope of all cannot be overrated’ (‘Woman in India’, p. 366). In Croker’s supernatural stories, the female characters never speak the local language and show little interest in learning any new, non-British ways of communicating. As the article suggests, this ‘ignorance’ of both language and people leads to confrontations between people like Julia and the Indians she encounters, and makes Englishwomen unwelcome outsiders in the non-Anglicized Indian country­side. According to the article, the Englishwoman is ‘the centre of an influence’ and even ‘her most insignificant acts’ have con­ sequences among the Indian natives (‘Woman in India’, p. 363). Related to this, she is criticized for the manner in which she governs her ser­vants. Dawson says, ‘It must be observed that very many mistresses in India indulge in a tone of irritation and com­ mand when addressing their native servants, that would not be tolerated by our household servants at Home’ (‘Woman in India’, p. 364). Indeed, Julia’s behaviour in Croker’s story provides ad­ equate reason to understand why the Englishman was murdered or why she and Nellie are in such a precarious situation among the Indian natives. 154

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Interestingly, it is the Indian caretaker who gives the women the first and only specific warning about the bungalow and urges them to proceed to Chanda. He tells them that the building is ‘out of repair’, ‘full of rats’, and is ‘unhealthy’ (p. 101). In response to this advice, Julia scolds the caretaker: ‘“Drawing government pay, and refusing to open a government travellers’ bungalow!” . . . “Let us have no more of this nonsense; open the house at once and get it ready for us, or I shall report you to the commissioner sahib”’ (p. 101). After the caretaker fails to return with the key, Julia grows angrier at the thought of the man’s disobedience: ‘“I shall certainly report that old wretch! The idea of a dâk bungalow caretaker refus­ ing admittance and running away with the key! . . . I shall not forget to tell Frank about the way we were treated at Dakor bungalow”’ (p. 102). Julia’s similar stubbornness in regard to the ghost story and the haunted bungalow anticipates the critical response of the women’s husbands when they arrive at Dakor: ‘they were loudly, rudely incredulous, and, of course, we were very angry; . . . they merely laughed still more heartily and talked of “nightmare”, and gave themselves such airs of offensive superiority, that Julia’s soul flew to arms’ (p. 107). At this point in the story, Nellie and Julia, as witnesses to the crime, are left to relate the circumstances of the traveller’s death to their husbands and convince them that the crime did, indeed, happen. They become privileged interpreters of the history of colonial tension that exists in the village and therefore are more informed than the British officials. Likewise, Nellie is left to memorialize and name the murdered traveller, who is identified as Gordon Forbes. They discover that Forbes, like Julia’s husband, was a police officer. This information draws historical continuity be­ tween the living colonial officials at Dakor and the official who died when Croker suggests that Frank, as a fellow British ‘sahib’, could have been the recipient of violence and native revenge, had he stayed in the bungalow seven years earlier. According to Shuchi Kapila, in her article on Bithia Mary Croker’s Anglo-Indian romance novels, ‘Croker’s fiction depends heavily on formal closure – one of the inescapable features of popular romances inextricably tied to reader satisfaction’.52 However, in ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’, as in other supernatural stories in To Let, Croker leaves readers with an uneasy, oftentimes ambiguous ending 155

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representative of the characters’ own uneasiness about their marginal position as outsiders in India. As Gelder and Jacobs point out, ‘To settle on a haunted site is to risk unsettlement’,53 with a double meaning of the word ‘unsettlement’. The inhabitants of colonial haunted houses are physically displaced and emotionally unsettled by the end of the stories. The last paragraph of ‘The Dâk Bungalow’ describes Nellie and Julia’s decision to withhold the details of their experience from Mrs Duff: Mrs. Duff was full of curiosity concerning our trip. We informed her that we spent Christmas at Chanda, as we had originally intended, with our husbands, that they had provided an excellent dinner of black buck and jungle fowl, that the plum-pudding surpassed all expectations; but we never told her a word about our two nights’ halt at Dakor bungalow. (p. 108)

The two women return to their proper and safe British enclave within India, but their evasive description of the adventure, which sounds very much like someone talking about superficial things in order to avoid an unpleasant subject, is encapsulated in an awareness of their real experience. Before seeing Mrs Duff again in Karwassa, the women place a cross at the grave of the traveller and send his belongings to his family. After seeing Mrs Duff, Nellie and Julia are left with the memories of the ghostly scene and murder which they choose to keep to themselves but which, nonetheless, remain with them. When the body of the traveller is recovered, Julia exclaims, ‘I shall never, never forget last night as long as I live’ (p. 106). Alison Sainsbury, in ‘Married to the Empire: The Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel’, claims that Anglo-Indian novels ‘enfranchise middle-class English women, making them partners – even central agents – in the enterprise of empire’.54 However, in her short stories, Croker moves away from simply making her female readers ‘partners’ or ‘agents’ within an imperialistic social and political network. In her ghost stories set in India, Croker not only makes her readers aware of the potential negative effects of empire on both native peoples and the British, but also, through her frequent use of female narrators who resemble her readership, makes those women 156

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question from within their own position as parts of an imperialist enterprise. The serious political commentary in what might appear on the surface to be a simple colonial ghost story lends credibility to Kapila’s discussion of the lack of critical scholarship on these women writers as commentators on the imperial situation: Women romancers have not received the same serious critical atten­ tion as canonical figures such as Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster, who have always been studied for the seriousness and complexity of their Indian experience. The canonization of Kipling’s work has made the masculine genre of adventure writing the representative ‘literature of empire’. Domestic dramas and romances have been treated as at best a historical curiosity and at worst ‘bad writing’ that would never attain the status of great literature.55

Those who would value canonical works by male authors over lesser-known women writers of empire or who would relegate women’s colonial writing to the status of ‘historical curiosity’ fail to take into account the unique view of women who also spent time within the British colonies, learning about the customs of the places and seeing first-hand the long-term effects of the British presence in these regions. Bithia Mary Croker’s ‘To Let’ is another haunted house story with an imperial setting. By beginning the story in Lucknow, Croker implicitly hints at the tensions caused by the British East India Company’s annexation of the Awadh province in 1856 and the city’s involvement in the violence of the Indian Rebellion the following year. The narrator, Susan Shandon, is a single, wealthy Englishwoman who fits the Victorian definition of a ‘redundant woman’.56 She moves to India to live with her brother, Tom, his wife, Aggie, and their two small children, Bob and Tor. As an unmarried woman, Susan realizes her dependence on the kindness of her brother and his family. In the opening paragraph, and pages before the ghost story is introduced, she admits, ‘I do not think my mother was sorry to have one of her four grown-up daughters thus taken off her hands’.57 As with Croker’s description of Karwassa in ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’, the Indian station at Lucknow displays many British characteristics. Susan finds great ‘novelty’ in 157

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her new environment, but the description of her daily routine is far removed from anything associated with authentic cross-cultural interaction. Her ‘paradise on earth’ comes complete with ‘early morning rides, picnics down the river, and dances at the “Chutter Munzil”’ (p. 347). It is precisely for this reason that Susan finds Lucknow ‘a melancholy spot’ in the summer after the majority of the British leave: ‘the public gardens were deserted, the chairs at the Chutter Munzil stood empty, the very bands had gone to the hills!, the shops were shut, the baked white roads, no longer thronged with carriages and bamboo carts’ (p. 347). This reliance on English social conventions in a foreign land is also mentioned in Dawson’s Calcutta Review article, which recommends that an Englishwoman’s interest in ornate, overly expensive dresses, tennis and waltzes should ‘be regarded not as the recreations of existence, but as its objects’ (‘Woman in India’, p. 367). The article warns that women who take these frivolous things too seriously will not themselves be taken seriously or respected by anyone around them. In this atmosphere, Aggie fulfills the role of proper English­ woman. Behind closed doors, she has the power, as Susan confides to the reader, ‘Strictly between ourselves she is the ruling member of the family, and turns her lord and master round her little finger’ (p. 346). This description hints at the fact that Tom’s outward status as ruling Englishman in India is due to Aggie’s ambitious efforts on his behalf: Aggie rouses him up, and pushes him to the front, and keeps him there. She knows all about his department, his prospects of promotion, his prospects of furlough, of getting acting appointments, and so on, even better than he does himself. The chief of Tom’s department – have I said that Tom is in the Irrigation Office? – has placed it solemnly on record that he considers little Mrs Shandon a surprisingly clever woman. (p. 346)

Far from the apparent ignorance of the wives in ‘The Dâk Bunga­ low at Dakor’ regarding their husbands’ positions within the British government, Aggie has a direct role in the business of empire and makes sure that her husband properly performs his duties. The trouble begins when Aggie refuses to leave Tom alone in Lucknow during the summer months. Because they delay their trip 158

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to the cooler mountains with the rest of the British women and children, Aggie, Susan and the two children must await word about renting a bungalow. To their surprise, a friend, Edith Chalmers, finds them a ‘charming’ bungalow for only 800 rupees (p. 348). Like the women in ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’, their journey to the bungalow is full of problems as they try to transport all their belongings, including pets, up the mountains. Susan finds the trip tiring and oppressive because of the heat, and Croker comments on their status as wealthy Englishwomen and their social distance from the Indian natives around them when she notes the women’s method of transportation: We accomplished the ascent in dandies – open kind of boxes, half box half chair, carried on the shoulders of four men. This was an entirely novel sensation to me, and at first an agreeable one, so long as the slopes were moderate and the paths wide; but the higher we went, the narrower became the path, the steeper the naked precipice; and as my coolies would walk at the extreme edge, with the utmost indifference to my frantic appeals to ‘Bector! Bector!’ – and would change poles at the most agonizing corners – my feelings were very mixed, especially when droves of loose pack ponies came thundering down hill, with no respect for the rights of the road. (p. 349)

Susan’s fear comes from the fact that the men could drop her at any moment, but her sense of danger also stems from her loss of control in the situation. Her ‘appeals’ to the carriers are met with ‘utmost indifference’ by the natives, who are at once beneath them, both literally and in social terms, while at the same time superior to them in their control of the dandies and their knowledge of the mountainous terrain. Also similar to ‘The Dâk Bungalow’, as the women venture further into unfamiliar, non-British territory, the more dangerous their environment becomes. Indians gain greater control over their lives, and the Indian landscape on the whole becomes wilder and less predictable. Susan’s uncertainty during their transport to the bungalow, and the narrative emphasis on the dislocation that she feels, complicates the reader’s notion of who the ‘Other’ actually is in this situation. The instability of the women in regard to their position also lends itself well to how Croker’s ghost stories are positioned within post­ 159

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colonial Gothic. According to Smith and Hughes in Empire and the Gothic, the questions and uncertainties raised by colonial Gothic help to critique the colonizing nation as a whole: Gothic tales, their contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences, provide a dense and complex blend of assertion and doubt, acceptance and defiance, and truth and falsity and in this way they provide a space in which key elements of the dominant culture become debated, affirmed and questioned. It is because of this that a postcolonial mode of enquiry, one underpinned by a poststructuralist scepticism, is able to open up the political dimension of these narratives without deny­ ing their fundamental complexities. Postcolonialism helps to isolate images of Self and Other in such a way that they identify how a particular brand of colonial politics works towards constructing difference, whilst at the same time indicating the presence of the inherently unstable version of the subject on which such a politics rest.58

In Croker’s story, this notion of instability is enacted by both the living and the dead, the colonizer and the colonized. The British are outsiders and exist as Other within India, yet Croker’s British perspective as an author inevitably casts the Indian natives (and their violent ghosts) as the mysterious foreign Other. Furthermore, there are differences in the degree of ‘otherness’ of the British as cultural group in India. Frequently in Croker’s stories, one finds a British newcomer who must be initiated into the culture by another British man or woman who has been in India longer. This sense of instability and disorientation exists because of the foreign place described in the story’s narrative but also extends beyond place into the historical ‘place’ of Anglo-India. Readers find themselves disoriented in Croker’s stories because she makes it clear that the British do not naturally belong in India. This foreignness makes them perpetual outsiders. The difference, then, is one of reader sympathy. If the women exist as outsiders, then they are more vulnerable outsiders than the Indian Other. This is especially true of the more likeable characters in Croker’s stories, who are meant to excite the empathetic emotions of the reader. These women are victims of both the shallowness and indifference of the memsahibs who lead them into their unpleasant supernatural encounters, as 160

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well as the vengefulness of the Indian natives and spirits who reside in these bungalows. But there are clear limits to Croker’s empathy; she makes it possible to sympathize with her female characters (again anticipating her reading audience) but not with the Indians who were wronged in the first place. Their victimization remains too vague and distant for the reader to understand, thereby guaranteeing that the women will always be the most sympathetic characters, even though Croker seeks to hold them accountable for their actions in the larger imperial network by the terrible visions they witness. Both Aggie and Susan are relieved when they arrive at their rented bungalow, named Briarwood, with its British name and British landscaping, as Mrs Chalmers has already reported: ‘a mile and a half from the club . . . two sitting-rooms, four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a hall, servants’ go-downs, stabling, and a splendid view from a very pretty garden’ (p. 348). Inside, the bungalow is likewise furnished in an English style. It has wardrobes, mirrors, armchairs, glasses, Spode china, lamps, pots for coffee and tea, dishes, candle­ sticks, wine coasters and mustard spoons (p. 351). The women also go about arranging the empty bungalow to appear even more orderly and British; as Susan says, ‘We set to work to modernize the drawingroom with phoolkaries, Madras muslin curtains, photograph screens and frames, and such like portable articles. We placed the piano across a corner, arranged flowers in some handsome Dresden china vases, and entirely altered and improved the character of the room’ (p. 351). They also waste no time in walking to the nearest station to enter their names at the library and ask for letters at the nearby post office. When the women question why the rent is so low, Susan jokingly remarks that ‘perhaps it has a ghost’ (p. 350). The answer to their question is given by a Mrs Starkey, who hints that their joke may not be far from the truth. Croker describes Mrs Starkey as a quint­ essential Englishwoman, who, upon meeting Susan, instinctively ‘appraises’ the young woman’s ‘chances in the great marriage market’ (p. 352). This appraisal is followed by a plain and simple warning that the bungalow is haunted. However, Aggie makes light of the comment, and flippantly exclaims, ‘Is that all? I was afraid it was the drains. I don’t believe in ghosts and haunted houses’ (p. 352). When asked what they will see, Mrs Starkey claims that they will see no 161

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ghosts, ‘but you will make up for it in hearing’ (p. 352), after the monsoon begins. When the women continue to praise the quality of the house and say that the beautiful verandah alone ‘is worth half the rent of the house’, Mrs Starkey responds, ‘And in my opinion the house is worth double rent without it’ (p. 353). After this exchange, class and status issues begin to cloud Aggie’s judgment. She quickly labels Mrs Starkey a ‘horrid old frump’ and considers her ‘dismal prophecy’ nothing more than anger and jealousy over the women having something better than she has (p. 353). As they continue to live in their English India, Susan attends a picnic and becomes friends with Mr Chalmers’s brother, Charlie, a captain in the British army. Croker hints at a possible romantic match for the two young people, but this potential for happiness is soon overshadowed by the presence of ghosts at Briarwood. Although she was the first to disregard the rumour, Aggie becomes the first person to hear the haunting sound of a man on horseback falling through the verandah railing during a violent rainstorm. The former inhabitants of the bungalow were a retired army officer, his wife and their young niece, Lucy. The niece was engaged to a young officer in the British Guides, and in his rush to see Lucy, the man fell off the verandah to his death. This situation parallels the present inhabitants’ family and provides a warning related to Susan’s own uncertain future as an unmarried woman in India. Before she learns of the story, Susan is escorted home in a violent rainstorm by Captain Chalmers, and when she first hears the ghostly sounds, she thinks it is Charlie who is in danger. Croker’s placement of the supernatural disturbance on the veran­ dah is also telling. A bungalow’s verandah held symbolic importance within the empire. Mary A. Procida notes that the verandah was the place where British officials would meet with Indian petitioners and goes on to say that the bungalow often combined ‘domesticity and imperial rule’ and that ‘home and office occupied the same space’.59 The verandah is also a liminal place, neither inner nor outer, public nor private. It is the site where, quite literally, the business of empire was transacted. The haunting of such a space adds another layer of meaning within the story, as it functions as a place of literal ghostly ‘troubling’, while at the same time, the frustrated hopes of women like Susan points to the often ‘troubled’ placement of women 162

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within the imperial network. In her discussion of the female pictur­ esque in women’s imperial writing, Sara Suleri points out, In the homosocial world of the early nineteenth century, the AngloIndian woman manipulates the picturesque into a complex cultural expression of ambivalence about her role as a segregated and a segre­ gating presence . . . During an era obsessed with public displays of authority and spectacles of power, the Anglo-Indian woman locates a language in which to disempower such authority, focusing instead on the domestic limitations of the picturesque. In the seclusion of its aesthetic, she constructs a discursive equivalent to the Indian woman’s zenana, that space which both draws and repels her, and about which she is obsessively impelled to write.60

The description of the Anglo-Indian woman as writer and inter­ preter of her surroundings helps to shed light on the continuing appeal of India as a source of fiction. Through their writing, espe­ cially their published works, women authors were able to set them­ selves apart as privileged interpreters of empire and its workings while also using the supernatural as a way to describe both their fascination with their Indian environment, as well as their anxiety within a foreign land. Their ghosts symbolically call into question the stability of British (male) rule and women’s even more fragile status as female and colonizer. Just as with the lingering memory of the murdered Englishman that haunts Nellie and Julia in ‘The Dâk Bungalow’, Aggie is haunted by the sounds of the ghostly accident, which replay over and over again in her head. She tells Susan that ‘it always happens just before dark’, and, when asked if she will ever be able to forget the sound, Aggie exclaims, ‘Never!’ and also admits that she hears ‘the most terrible weeping and sobbing in [her] bedroom’ (p. 358). They later find out from Mrs Starkey that after her fiancé died, Lucy ‘went out of her mind and destroyed herself’ (p. 359), and the officer and his wife died shortly thereafter. As with the ending of ‘The Dâk Bungalow’, the husband arrives but does not believe the women’s story until he witnesses the sounds for himself, thereby once again making the women the bearers of the ghostly knowledge to other Englishmen and continuing the story that began with Mrs Starkey. 163

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The presence of the ghost also frees the Indian natives from their roles as servants for the Shandon family. Aggie reports to Susan that ‘the ayah Mumà has heard it, and the khánsámáh says his mother is sick and he must go, and the bearer wants to attend his brother’s wedding. They will all leave’ (p. 358). Likewise, the bungalow returns to its natural setting: ‘The flowers are nearly all gone; the paint has peeled off the doors and windows; the avenue is grassgrown. Briarwood appears to have resigned itself to emptiness, neglect and decay, although outside the gate there still hangs a battered board on which, if you look very closely you can decipher the words “To Let”’ (p. 359). Rosemary Cargill Raza, in a brief biographical entry on Bithia Mary Croker, remarks that Croker’s ‘view of colonial society is for the most part conservative’.61 Although this statement may be true for her novels set in India, Burma and Ireland, Croker’s supernatural short stories complicate this classification and show Croker to be more than simply a ‘female Kipling’, as Roger Luckhurst calls her.62 In ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’ and ‘To Let’, the ghost stories serve as an impetus for the female protagonists to recognize their complicity as participants in an imperialist cultural enterprise. They may not be fully reformed as a result of their experience, but they begin to appreciate that their presence in India has greater signifi­ cance than ‘moonlight picnics’ and ‘whist-parties’. In writing about the ghosts who haunt Indian bungalows and the subsequent reaction of the British women who witness these hauntings, Croker makes a purposeful statement about the potential dangers of British colon­ ization and imperialism and the harm that such an occupation inflicts on both the living and the dead. According to David Punter, ‘Gothic represents a specific view of history . . . [and] deal[s] with the impossibility of escape from history, with the recurrent sense in Gothic fiction that the past can never be left behind, that it will reappear and exact a necessary price.’63 Empire-based Gothic, then, presents a certain kind of past. It is ‘history written according to a certain logic: a logic of the phantom, the revenant, a logic of haunting, and it is here that the connection with the postcolonial comes most clearly into view. The very structure of the term “postcolonial” itself, its appar­ ent insistence on a time “after”, on an “aftermath”, exposes itself 164

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precisely to the threat of return, falls under the sign of repetition.’64 The imperial landscape, like the ghosts that haunt it, thus becomes something unrecognizable and confusing. The British characters in such stories have difficulty orienting themselves within both the landscape and the larger historical moment in which they are caught. Alexandra Warwick asserts, ‘In colonial Gothic both landscape and people are seen as uncanny, beyond the possibilities of explanation in European terms.’65 Likewise, Ken Gelder claims that ‘postcolonial Gothic narratives usually remain caught somewhere in between reconciliation and difference. The postcolonial place is partly fami­ liar, and partly unfamiliar – partly resembling home . . . and yet also evoking something quite unrecognisable and strange.’ He goes on to state, ‘Postcolonial nations can re-animate the traumas of their colonial pasts to produce Gothic narratives. Ghost stories can certainly be built around this process.’66 Colonial ghost stories by women are texts of (dis)possession and disorientation. The women in the stories are confronted by spectres and are possessed by the dread which the ghosts represent. While at the same time, these women, and their authors, are dispossessed, socially distanced from the colonial enterprise because of their female (subaltern) status within the imperial framework. As women, they are unable to exact a definite change in imperial policy, but like the ghosts in their stories, they are able to subvert and question the human costs of such policies. These ghost stories also disorient and complicate the reassuring nature of our supposedly ordered world. Nineteenthcentury women authors of empire recognized the political use of the supernatural in their writings. By summoning the past comingled with the spirit world, they frequently call into question problematic aspects of the political and social practices of the past and present that will continue into the future. This is where Female Gothic writing becomes a strategy of social critique that is based on gender anxiety but at the same time goes beyond it. Writers such as Ellen Wood and Bithia Mary Croker used colonial ghosts and the female characters which figure so promin­ ently in their stories as a way for women to regain some say in the male-dominated world of imperial policy by implicitly criticizing the damage – for both men and women, colonizer and colonized – that such policies will ultimately cause. In imperial ghost writings, 165

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the presence of the British Raj and the problems instigated by the British dominance in such places as India become spectral forms, and these troubles are both of the past and of the present. British colonial subjects are, abroad and at home, haunted by the consequences of imperialism as the unrest becomes its own revenant, a spectre which must be dealt with.

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 In The Night Side of Nature, Catherine Crowe became one of the first authors to recognize and describe women’s close relationship with the supernatural. Though her description does not do much to advance contemporary feminist ideals, especially with regard to women’s emotional stability, it does provide a way of framing the connection between women and the supernatural: The circumstance . . . that phenomena of this kind are more fre­ quently developed in women than in men, and that they are merely the consequence of her greater nervous irritability has been made another objection to them – an objection, however, which [the German physician] Dr. Passavent considers founded on ignorance of the essential difference between the sexes, which is not merely a physical but a psychological one. Man is more productive than receptive . . . Thus the extatic woman will be more frequently a seer, instinctive and intuitive; man, a doer and a worker; and as all genius is a degree of extacy or clear-seeing, we perceive the reason where­ fore in man it is more productive than in woman . . . the feminine instinct . . . and intuitive seeing of truth, is frequently more sure than the ripe and deliberate judgment of man.1

In addition to the ability to perceive spectres in the everyday world, women authors of the nineteenth century promoted this otherworldly connection through their poems and stories dealing with

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the supernatural. In their ghost literature, women also used their instinct and intuition in order to summon spectres for the reading public. Although women’s use of ghost stories as a vehicle for social critique remained consistent throughout the nineteenth century, supernatural literature in general was changing with the times. Anstey Guthrie’s essay, ‘The Decay of the British Ghost’ (1884), points to the omnipresence of the spectre in British culture as he expresses his concern over the ‘decay’ of traditional apparitions, meaning the loss of public belief in the presence of ‘real’ ghosts. Since Crowe’s The Night Side of Nature in 1848, historical ghosts, he asserts, had succumbed to scientific ghostly hoaxes and overly inventive literary apparitions that distance, rather than engage, the public in the tradition of spectres. Because of the scientific advances in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the current gener­ ation lives in ‘an age incapable of appreciating [ghosts]’.2 Guthrie also comments on the past importance of the Christmas annuals and the seasonal ghosts which were a part of print culture. Because these stories had lost popularity by the end of the century, the British public had, he believed, lost some of its nationalistic holiday trad­ itions and part of its cultural identity. In much the same way as his contemporary, Andrew Lang, critic­ ized the methods of the Society for Psychical Research in Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894), Guthrie also takes issue with the SPR, which remained popular in Britain well into the beginning decades of the twentieth century. Rather than increasing the public’s belief in ghosts, he thought that the Society actually lessened belief be­cause they placed too much importance on gathering scientific evidence: their method is, the present writer ventures in all humility to suggest, a grave mistake, and calculated to defeat the very ends they pre­ sumably have in view. For, unless he is greatly misinformed, the Society, in pursuing their inquiries into this branch of the super­ natural, aim at establishing such a complete investigation into the claims of an alleged apparition that the result, if satisfactory, will go far to give it, as it were, a registered title for ever. Unhappily, to attain this, they have thought it requisite to impose so severe a process of evidence-sifting and cross-examination, that the most straight-walking spectre can hardly be expected to emerge from it without a stain.3 168

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To remedy this situation and to avoid the extinction of the British ghost, he playfully advises that the Society, ‘at least, when the next apparition is brought before them in imminent danger of having to retire for want of credit, refrain from insulting it in its extremity by a cold and cruel suspicion, and in common humanity assist it rather to recover something of its former position’.4 However, like the apparitions that were its trademark, the British ghost story continued to transform itself, gaining popularity once again by the turn of the century, and branching into such alternate forms as fantasy and science fiction. Indeed, the ghost story provided a way for authors to directly communicate with the past while also taking their literary ghosts into modern times. As Julia Briggs says, the stories were a type of communication between one world and another that authors turned to in uncertain times: ‘Ghosts were a traditional medium of communication between the past and the present, the dead and the living, and thus the ghost story might be used to assert continuity at a time when it seemed threatened on many fronts’.5 A representative example of this shift can be found in the work of Vernon Lee, whose own life and writing career spanned both centuries and blended Romantic and Victorian super­ natural traditions while also prefiguring Modernist concerns by complicating issues of gender and identity. Many of the traditions which Lee inherited came from women writers who themselves adapted and invented a wide variety of ghosts meant to reflect gender, sexual, economic and racial inequalities. It is this emphasis on social critique and the social significance of these supernatural writings that ultimately rescues the stories and their authors from the traditional characterization of being ‘light’ literature written by hack writers concerned only with turning a quick financial profit. These writers were serious artists, and though not every story in the genre is masterfully done, as a whole, supernatural writings by women have much more to offer than light entertainment and a simple scare. They themselves weaved a sort of spell on their reading publics, veiling their own social concerns in the guise of the popular ghost story. Subsequently, these works, which appeared in numerous mass-circulation magazines and collections throughout the entire nineteenth century, taught their audiences something more than what appeared on the surface. Because these stories are still engaging 169

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readers today, they continue to provide a telling social register of the anxieties of the time, whether these anxieties were related to women’s issues of power and inequality or financial and imperial concerns as the British Empire expanded and Great Britain struggled to accommodate these changes. Yet despite their immense popularity in nineteenth-century Britain and a flood of women’s ghost story anthologies in the late 1960s–1980s,6 critical attention to these works remained sparse throughout the twentieth century. It is interesting to note E. F. Bleiler’s comment in the introduction to his collection of Charlotte Riddell’s ghost stories: ‘Today, if anyone wants to read a ghost story, he can buy a collection of ghost stories, like this one, very easily, or with a little effort he can find a magazine on the newsstands.’7 Unfortunately, that ‘today’ was in 1977, and his collection is now out of print. So, too, is Richard Dalby’s 1988 collection of ghost stories by Victorian women writers. Other well-known ghost story collections overlook women’s supernatural writing, but this under­ valuation is slowly being remedied by more recent anthology editors. Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert’s Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (1991, reissued 2003) includes a more balanced sam­pling of ghost stories by women, and Roger Luckhurst’s Late Victorian Gothic Tales (2005), though mainly concerned with male writers, includes stories by Bithia Mary Croker and Vernon Lee. As mentioned in the Introduction to this book, Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s What Did Miss Darrington See? (1989) remains an important contribution to women’s supernatural fiction, as does Richard Dalby’s Virago Book of Ghost Stories, which has gone through several editions since the late 1980s. Dalby’s work is complemented by A. Susan Williams’s The Lifted Veil (1992) and Michael Ashley’s Unforgettable Ghost Stories by Women Writers (2008). More recently, there have been several publications dedicated to republishing original collections by single authors. Richard Dalby’s invaluable seven-volume ‘Mistresses of the Macabre’ series, published by Sarob Press between 1999–2005, republished rare and nearly forgotten collections by nineteenth and early twentieth-century women writers of ghost stories. These include Lettice Galbraith’s The Blue Room and Other Ghost Stories, Mary E. Penn’s In the Dark and Other Ghost Stories, B. M. Croker’s Number Ninety and Other Ghost Stories, Theo Gift’s Not for the Night170

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Time, Alice Perrin’s The Sistrum and Other Ghost Stories, G. M. Robins’s The Relations and What They Related & Other Weird Tales and Catherine Crowe’s Ghosts and Family Legends. Victorian Secrets is also making women’s ghost stories more widely available, in­ cluding Emma Liggins’s edition of Charlotte Riddell’s Weird Stories and Rhoda Broughton’s Twilight Stories, as well as my edition of Alice Perrin’s East of Suez. This increased accessibility of women’s ghost literature will elicit further studies and appraisals of the genre’s place within the larger Gothic tradition and the importance of women’s voices within that tradition. Like the spectres that haunt its pages, the Female Gothic con­ tinues to elude the parameters that some try to set for it. Once a genre that was supposedly clearly defined by definite borders: the Female Gothic was written by women and almost always involved a distressed heroine who was relentlessly pursued (usually within a castle or decaying monastery) and who sought escape from an oppres­ sive male villain. It was seen as a conservative strain of the Gothic and depended on the conventional happy ending. It eschewed graphic depictions of violence or sexual desire, tending more toward internal terror rather than external horror. Supernatural endings were always explained. Throughout this study it has been my goal to show how nineteenth-century ghost literature written by women complicates all of these notions (or ‘rules’) regarding the Female Gothic. From early Gothic ballads to turn-of-the-twentieth-century super­natural writings on empire, women expanded the Female Gothic into something much more complicated and nuanced than traditional parameters of the genre allow. Growing out of the prime years of Gothic fiction in the beginning decades of the century, women writers gave readers vengeful revenants that resemble the scandalized women of earlier Gothic texts, but unlike many female victims in earlier Gothic, these revenants speak and act in order to exact revenge on their enemies and to actively warn other women who are in danger of the same fate. These spectral women deal out death on their own terms. As the Victorian era began, writers of the Female Gothic turned to more overtly sexualized themes and the repressed desires that haunt and ultimately destroy both men and women. And as the Victorian era progressed and the gulf between economic and gendered classes in Great Britain increased, authors 171

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of the Female Gothic turned their concerns outward, critiquing the ‘cost’ of financial mismanagement. The ghosts that inhabit their haunted houses, like their earlier revenants, refuse to be silent. The centrifugal force of Female Gothic in the nineteenth century later expanded into the realms of empire, as women brought colonial ghosts home to their readers through descriptions of violent deaths which represent the cultural battle between native and occupying forces, as well as the colonial front and the home front. These ghosts symbolize anxieties over the presence of the British in places such as India and examine women’s place within such an imperial culture. The works by women authors which were selected for this study attempt to give a representative picture of how Female Gothic writing continued to evolve during the nineteenth century as it became even more closely connected to social critique. Nineteenthcentury ghost literature by women writers adds yet another dimen­ sion to the Female Gothic by offering texts that allow the genre to be broadened and reassessed. In this way, the Female Gothic keeps returning and is, fittingly, its own revenant.

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Notes

 Introduction  1

 2

 3  4  5

 6  7  8

 9

10

11

Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert (eds), Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. xiv. Anne Bannerman to Mr [Thomas] Hood, Edinburgh. Autograph letter signed. 17 October 1804. British Library, Manuscripts, Evelyn Papers, 1:12, MS 78686. Mary Shelley, ‘On Ghosts’, London Magazine 9 (March 1824), 253. Shelley, ‘On Ghosts’, 254. Vernon Lee, ‘Preface’, Hauntings (London: William Heineman, 1890), pp. vii–viii. Lee, ‘Preface’, Hauntings, p. ix. Lee, ‘Preface’, Hauntings, pp. ix–x. Crowe, ‘Introduction’, The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers, 2 vols (London: T. C. Newby, 1848), p. vi. Charles Dickens, Letters, Pilgrim Edition, Madeline House and Graham Storey (eds), 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 546. F. Anstey, ‘The Decay of the British Ghost,’ Longman’s Magazine 3 ( January 1884), 251. ‘F. Anstey’ was the pseudonym of Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856–1934), an English writer best known for his humorous novels and stories. He also wrote comedic pieces for Punch magazine. Flora Annie Steel to William Morris Colles. 1895. Autograph letter signed. British Library, India Office Select Materials, MSS Eur C865.

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13 14 15

16 17

18

19 20

21

22 23

24

25

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), pp. 164–5. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 165. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 166. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. xix. Subsequent references are incorporated into the text. Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 4, 177, see also ‘injunctions of marx’, note 2. Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story, 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Man­ chester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 4. Sub­ sequent references are incorporated into the text. Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel’, Genre 10 (1977), 560. Doody, ‘Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters’, 560. Diana Wallace, ‘Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic’, in Gothic Studies 6/1 (May 2004), 57. Subsequent references are in­ corporated into the text. Srdjan Smajic, ‘The Trouble with Ghost-seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story’, ELH 70 (2003), 1107. Smajic, ‘The Trouble with Ghost-seeing’, 1107–8. Smajic, ‘The Trouble with Ghost-seeing’, 1108. According to Smajic, the only exception to this rule is Dracula. In this book, I hope to build on (and not repeat) Dickerson’s work in Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide. Dickerson discusses Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’, the witches of Elizabeth Gaskell, as well as a survey of several short stories by Florence Marryat, Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Riddell. She does not explicitly concern herself with the Female Gothic tradition, and her interpretation of the meaning of a ghost, especially in her reading of Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Gaskell’s ‘Lois the Witch’, is a bit more liberal than my interpretation in this present book. My definition centres more on ‘physical’ and ‘concrete’ appearances of spectres, who appear after death to affect some change in the present state of the living; the raising of a ghost in the supernatural literature that I include is directly tied to raising awareness of an injustice or social problem. Vanessa D. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996), pp. 6, 7. Subsequent references are incorporated into the text. 174

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Notes 26

27

28 29 30 31

32 33 34

35

36

37 38

39

40

41

42

Smith’s chapter on the female ghost story includes discussions of Charlotte Riddell and Vernon Lee, two authors whose supernatural writings will be examined later in this book. Clare Stewart, ‘“Weird Fascination”: The Response to Victorian Women’s Ghost Stories’, in Emma Liggins and Daniel Duffy (eds), Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts: Divergent Femininities (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001), p. 125. Stewart, ‘Weird Fascination’, p. 114. Stewart, ‘Weird Fascination’, p. 112. Stewart, ‘Weird Fascination’, p. 125. Nickianne Moody, ‘Visible Margins: Women Writers and the English Ghost Story’, in Sarah Sceats and Gail Cunningham (eds), Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 77. Moody, ‘Visible Margins’, pp. 87–8. Moody, ‘Visible Margins’, p. 88. See S(tewart) M(arsh) Ellis, ‘The Ghost Story and Its Exponents’, in Mainly Victorian (London: Hutchinson, 1925), pp. 322–31. (First published in The Fortnightly Review [December 1923], 999–1003). Richard Dalby, ‘Preface’, Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988), p. vii. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ‘Preface’, What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989), pp. ix–x. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p. 90. Lauren Fitzgerald, ‘Female Gothic and the Institutionalisation of Gothic Studies’, in Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (eds), The Female Gothic: New Directions (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 21. Juliann Fleenor (ed.), The Female Gothic (Montreal and London: Eden Press, 1983), p. 4. Diana Wallace, ‘“The Haunting Idea”: Female Gothic Metaphors and Feminist Theory’, in Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (eds), The Female Gothic: New Directions (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 27. Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (eds), ‘Introduction’, The Female Gothic: New Directions (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p 1. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 10. 175

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain 43

44

45

46 47

48

Although Jackson’s discussion of women’s supernatural literature is very useful, she, like Vanessa Dickerson, tends to limit her discussion to gender issues, sexual politics, and the ‘in between’ or ‘spectral’ social status of women in the nineteenth century. In this present book, I seek to expand this examination of women’s ghost literature by com­ bining women’s literary involvement in gender issues with broader social matters, such as Britain’s imperialistic role in the latter half of the nineteenth-century and political and economic concerns not specifically tied to women, but to all of Great Britain. Rosemary Jackson, ‘Introduction’, in Jessica Amanda Salmonson (ed.), What Did Miss Darrington See?, p. xviii. Hélène Cixous quoted in Salmonson, What Did Miss Darrington See?, p. xviii. Wallace and Smith, The Female Gothic, p. 6. Because her work has received more critical attention in recent years, and to allow room for discussion of lesser-known women writers of the supernatural, I have chosen not to discuss the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon at length. For examinations of her use of the supernatural as social critique, see especially two essays by Eve M. Lynch, ‘Spectral Politics: M. E. Braddon and the Spirits of Social Reform’, in Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert and Aeron Haynie (eds), Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), and ‘Spectral Politics: The Victorian Ghost Story and the Domestic Servant’, in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For a more general discussion of Braddon’s life and works, see also Robert Lee Wolff’s Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York and London: Garland, 1979). Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones, ‘Introduction’, Popular Victorian Women Writers (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 5.

1: Female Revenants and the Beginnings of Women’s Ghost Literature   1

 2  3

E. J. Clery, Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley, 2nd edn (Horndon, Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House Publishers, 2004), p. 2. Clery, Women’s Gothic, p. 2. Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 8. 176

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Notes  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

11 12

13

14 15

16 17

18

19

Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, p. 17. Diana Fuss, ‘Corpse Poem’, Critical Inquiry 30 (Autumn 2003), 1. Fuss, ‘Corpse Poem’, 2. Fuss, ‘Corpse Poem’, 3. Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, p. 1. Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, p. 2. Lieselotte E. Kurth-Voigt, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci: the Revenant as Femme Fatale in Romantic Poetry’, in Gerhart Hoffmeister (ed.), European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), p. 247. Kurth-Voigt, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, pp. 249–50, 252. These poems were also reprinted in Bannerman’s collected Poems, published in 1807. This scandalous element in Bannerman’s work also found its way into the illustrations accompanying her Tales of Superstition and Chivalry. The engraving for ‘The Prophecy of Merlin’ shows the nude ‘Queen of Beauty’ standing before a kneeling Arthur. In Fatal Women of Romanti­ cism (2003), Adriana Craciun notes that in the relatively few extant copies of Bannerman’s Tales, this page is usually removed – perhaps by those who wanted to suppress the image, or just as likely by those who wanted a personal copy. Edinburgh University Library, Anderson Letters, MS La.II.598. Thomas Percy, The Percy Letters: The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Robert Anderson, W. E. K. Anderson (ed.) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 126. Robert Anderson, The Percy Letters, p. 140. Anderson, The Percy Letters, p. 221. Bannerman would also include an ode, ‘To Robert Anderson, M.D., With a Copy of the First Edition of the Author’s Poems’, expressing her appreciation for his continuing support. Walter Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad’, in T. F. Henderson (ed.), Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1902), pp. 16–7. Although contemporary reviewers often praised Bannerman’s poetic talents, the mysterious nature of many of the poems in Tales typically led to criticism and negative evaluations of her Gothic works. For instance, in January 1803, the British Critic called Tales a ‘beautiful little book’ that belongs ‘to the family of Tales of Wonder’, but went on to say that although Bannerman’s writing ‘abound[s] with fancy’, ‘it is fancy perverted to the purpose of raising only horror, and raising it by preternatural agency’ (p. 78). The January 1803 review in the Poetical 177

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain Register was more positive, although the reviewer also hints at the problem of ‘obscurity’ in the collection: These tales contain many passages of no common merit. The language is frequently in a high degree poetical, and the incidents well imagined. One fault, however, runs nearly through the whole of the volume. It is obscurity. The author solicitous, as it would appear, to produce a striking effect, has often left so much to be imagined by the reader that he is turned aside from the general beauty of the poem to discover the connexion or the meaning of particular parts. (p. 431–2) 20

21

22

23

24

25

Anne Bannerman, ‘The Perjured Nun’, Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (London: Vernor and Hood, 1802), pp. 39–48, lines 14, 17, 19. All subsequent references are from the 1802 edition and are hereafter cited within the text. Andrew Elfenbein, ‘Lesbianism and Romantic Genius: The Poetry of Anne Bannerman’, ELH 63/4 (1996), 950. For an account of the ‘other side’ and the full consequences of a man’s moral crimes, see Florence Marryat’s novel, The Dead Man’s Message (1894), which includes the following quote by Charles Mackay as its epitaph: ‘Is Heaven a place or state of mind?/Let old experience tell./ Love carries Heaven where’er it goes,/And Hatred carries Hell’. The ‘dead man’ of the novel’s title, Henry Aldwyn, dies early on in the story and must answer for his crimes (particularly the mental abuse of his two wives and children, along with his abuse of animals as a vivi­ sectionist) in the afterlife. This Romantic emphasis on emotional bonds that exist beyond the grave prefigures the interest in Spiritualism that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, and there are many intriguing con­ nections between early nineteenth-century revenant poems and Victorian séances. In her book, Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Trans­ formation in Victorian Spiritualism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), Marlene Tromp discusses Spiritualism and the messages brought by mediums as ‘re-envisioning both marriage and courtship through spiritual contact’ (p. 50). Bannerman, ‘The Penitent’s Confession’, Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (London: Vernor and Hood, 1802), pp. 51–61, lines 29–30. All subsequent references are from the 1802 edition and are hereafter cited within the text. Thomas H. Fick, ‘Authentic Ghosts and Real Bodies: Negotiating Power in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Ghost Stories’, South Atlantic Review 64/2 (Spring 1999), 90. 178

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Notes 26 27

28 29

30

31

32

33

34

35 36

Fick, ‘Authentic Ghosts and Real Bodies’, 95. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 15, 34. Also quoted in Fick, ‘Authentic Ghosts and Real Bodies’, 90. Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, p. 159. Craciun, ‘Romantic Spinstrelsy: Anne Bannerman and the Sexual Politics of the Ballad’, in Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (eds), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 209. Bannerman, to Mr [Thomas] Hood, Edinburgh. Autograph letter signed. 17 October 1804. British Library, Manuscripts, Evelyn Papers, 1:12, MS 78686. This is the only known extant letter written by Bannerman. Charlotte Dacre, ‘The Aireal Chorus; or, The Warning’, Hours of Solitude (London, 1805), pp. 79–81, lines 2–4. All subsequent references are from the 1805 edition and are hereafter cited within the text. James A. Dunn, ‘Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 53 (December 1998), 326–7. Charlotte Dacre, ‘The Skeleton Priest; or, the Marriage of Death’, Hours of Solitude (London, 1805), pp. 67–75, lines 1–3. All subsequent references are from the 1805 edition and are hereafter cited within the text. This poem is also reprinted in the Broadview Press edition of Zofloya. Ann H. Jones, ‘Charlotte Dacre’, in Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers in Jane Austen’s Age (New York: AMS Press, 1986), p. 225. Like Bannerman, Dacre remains a somewhat enigmatic figure due to the relative lack of biographical information on her. Until more information is dis­ covered, the best sources of information on her life are studies by Ann Jones and Adriana Craciun. The majority of criticism is centred on Dacre’s most famous work, the Gothic novel, Zofloya (1806). There is still much work to be done on her poetry. Jones, ‘Charlotte Dacre’, p. 225. As with Anne Bannerman, contemporary critics often simultaneously praised and berated Dacre in reviews of her Gothic works. While they some­times appreciated her tendency to provide readers with moralistic tales about the dangers of excessive emotion, critics found fault in Dacre’s overly wrought writing style. For instance, following the publication of Confessions of the Nun of St Omer, the British Critic ([December 1805], 671) described the novel as ‘A very fine, sentimental, and improbable story, written in turgid and affected language’, but then praised the novel’s ‘moral’, which ‘teaches the mischiefs which arise from the neglect and violation of the social duties’. Regarding Zofloya, however, 179

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain several reviews failed to recognize any redeeming moral in the novel. One reviewer states, ‘By our present remark we mean to assert that Zofloya has no pretension to rank as a moral work . . . Its merits as a whole or entire composition are very slender’. For the reviewer, the story is so far from being a moralistic work, that he labels the novel a ‘vice’ itself, concluding: Thus ends this mass of unqualified vice and unqualified mischief, began without plan, continued without preparation, and terminated by death in all its several parts, with little of contrast and still less of judicious arrangement. It must be confessed, however, that the author tells her tales of indiscriminate horror in many instances with great force, and if the plot had been more original, we doubt not that this Novel would have obtained an higher rank in the public estimations than it is now likely to acquire. (General Review of British and Foreign Literature [ June 1806], 590–93)



37

Likewise, a reviewer for the Literary Journal ([June 1806], 631–5) scolds Dacre for both her storyline and her style: ‘The fair Rose Matilda . . . has laid a variety of crimes to the charge of the devil which, it is more than probable, never entered into his infernal brain, or into any other brain but her own.’ The reviewer then accuses Dacre of being mentally ‘diseased’ and dangerous because of her writing: ‘But the influence of the disease appears not only in libelling the devil, but also in murdering the English language, for how, alas, could the afflicted patient be expected to talk or write rationally? . . . We must wonder at the power of the maggoty disease in applying extravagant language to common things, and in overwhelming all meaning in a multitude of words.’ As with biographies of Bannerman and Dacre, there is relatively little published about Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls’s life and work. Franklin D. Telle, in The Magazine of Poetry and Literary Review ([July 1895], 312), gives a brief biography of her under her married name ‘Elizabeth Harcourt Mitchell’, before the magazine’s publication of her poem, ‘The Battle of Trafalgar’. According to Telle, she was born on 15 December 1833 in London, to John E. W. Rolls (an actor and singer) and Elizabeth Mary Long Rolls. In her youth, she composed songs and prologues for her father’s ‘private theatricals’. Her family was apparently well-off, as Telle states that Rolls travelled aboard the family yacht to places such as Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Norway, and kept ‘illustrated journals’ of her travels. Rolls’s first collection of poetry, published as ‘E. H. R.’, was entitled First Fruits (1857), and the majority of her work is devotional in nature. Among 180

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Notes

38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50

other prose works, Telle credits her for writing ‘A Short Church History’, ‘which has been made the standard text book for pupil teachers’. Rolls’s married Frank Johnstone Mitchell, Esq., in 1860. Telle describes Mitchell, who was raised near Caerleon, as ‘a gentleman of varied scientific attainments and a magistrate for Monmouthshire’ where he later became high sheriff in 1868. The couple travelled to Italy, Holland, and Belgium, and they had two daughters (p. 312). In addition to providing some helpful background for Rolls, Telle’s mention of her lifelong interest in travelling helps to account for the setting of ‘The Ballad of Sir Rupert’. Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls, ‘The Ballad of Sir Rupert: A Ghost Story’, (Monmouth: T. Farror, 1854), p. 1. All subsequent references are from the 1854 edition and are hereafter cited within the text. Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, p. 75. Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, p. 75. Daniel Defoe, ‘Preface’, The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos’d. Defoe, ‘Preface’, The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos’d. Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, p. 75. Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, p. 76. Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, p. 12. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide, p. 8. Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, p. 108. Glennis Byron, Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1993), p. 17. See Diana Wallace’s article, ‘Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic’, in Gothic Studies 6/1 (May 2004), 57–68. In many oral traditions, women have been associated as supernatural interpreters and natural storytellers. Transmission of knowledge from one woman to another was also an important part of Victorian Spiritual­ ism in the latter half of the century and shows an emphasis on female power and freedom that had its beginnings in the revenant poems of the Romantic era. One specific example from the medium Kate Cook (Florence Cook’s sister) involves the story of Jennet Maclean, a young woman who died at the hands of her father and brother, and who haunted the family estate until stolen papers proving her rightful claim as heir were discovered. Although this story sounds like one of the plotlines of a fictional ghost story, the relevant point here is that the story is entirely in the control of women. Jennet Maclean tells her story through ‘Lillie Gordon’, the spirit control of Kate Cook. Those present at the séance, who witnessed the appearance of Lillie and who heard the story of Jennet were women. Thus, through this line of 181

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain



female communication, Jennet is finally able to ‘voice’ the wrongs done to her, or, in Marlene Tromp’s words, ‘Jennet’s story is rendered visible’ (Altered States, p. 58).   This emphasis on female-to-female communication continues into the supernatural literature of the present day. In her discussion of women’s ghost stories from the twentieth century, Nickianne Moody says that ‘The vital and most recurrent theme is communication; telling and listening become imperative’ (‘Visible Margins: Women Writers and the English Ghost Story’, p. 87).

2: Ghostly Lovers and Transgressive Supernatural Sexualities   1

 2  3

 4  5

 6

  7  8  9

10 11 12

13

14 15

Toni Reed, Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988), p. 2. Reed, Demon-Lovers, p. 56. Peter D. Grudin, The Demon-Lover: The Theme of Demoniality in English and Continental Fiction of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987), p. 20. Grudin, The Demon-Lover, p. 24. Helen Stoddart, ‘The Demonic’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1998), p. 45. Karen F. Stein, ‘Monsters and Madwomen: Changing Female Gothic’, in Juliann E. Fleenor (ed.), The Female Gothic (Montreal and London: Eden Press, 1983), p. 123. Stein, ‘Monsters and Madwomen’, p. 124–5. Stein, ‘Monsters and Madwomen’, p. 126. Eugenia C. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of NineteenthCentury Gothic (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 153–4. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night, p. 156. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night, p. 156. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (eds) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), Letter 48, p. 81. Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993), p. 228. Gaskell, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, Letter 260, p. 260. A. W. Ward, ‘Introduction’, The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, Knutsford Edition, 8 vols (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1906), p. xxiv. 182

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Notes 16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

It is interesting to note that contemporary critics often overlooked the social elements in Gaskell’s supernatural stories. For instance, Edna Lyall, in her Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appre­ ciations (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1897), readily praises Gaskell, saying, ‘Of all the novelists of Queen Victoria’s reign there is not one to whom the present writer turns with such a sense of love and gratitude as to Mrs. Gaskell’ (p. 119). However, she later states, ‘Mrs. Gaskell’s shorter stories are scarcely equal to the novels, yet some of them are very beautiful’ (p. 139). Only one of Gaskell’s supernatural tales is mentioned by Lyall, who calls ‘The Crooked Branch’ ‘the most striking . . . among the short tragic stories’ (p. 140). Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977), p. 12. Michael Ashley, ‘Preface’, Mrs. Gaskell’s Tales of Mystery and Horror (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), pp. 15, 95. Felicia Bonaparte praises ‘The Poor Clare’ for prefiguring one of the most famous literary doubles of all time, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but although she considers the mirror scene in Jane Eyre as a possible influence on Gaskell, she forgets that Gaskell could well have been influenced by the well-known Gothic double of the Romantic era, James Hogg’s Gil-Martin in Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Margaret Homans sees this doubling as Lucy’s representing both her mother and father. Read this way, Lucy’s double springs from her mother’s wild, carefree nature, and Lucy herself displays her father’s rational, orderly characteristics (Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing [Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986], pp. 249–50). Vanessa Dickerson recognizes the curse as a motif used mainly by women writers of the time (Victorian Ghosts, p. 131, n. 45), and the ancestral curse is a recurring theme in what now are considered Gaskell’s ‘Gothic’ tales, though only a few of these tales concern actual ghosts. In many of these stories, Gaskell considers the gender and class anxieties that she described so well in her novels. Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘The Poor Clare’, The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, A. W. Ward (ed.), vol. 5 (New York: AMS Press, 1972), pp. 360, 361. All subsequent references are from the Ward edition of Gaskell’s works and are here­after cited in the text. Rosemary Jackson, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvi, and Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge Chapman and Hall, 1981), pp. 87–8. 183

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain 24

25 26

27

28

29 30 31

32 33

34

35

36

Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston and Toronto, Little, Brown, 1976), p. 208. Moers, Literary Women, p. 107. Claire Kahane, ‘The Gothic Mirror’, in Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether (eds), The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 336. In her essay, ‘Violence and Disorder in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Short Stories’ (Gaskell Society Journal 19 [2005], 14–24), Shirley Foster sees Lucy’s demonic features as a reflection of her mother and grandmother’s pas­ sion­ate natures and her family’s ‘intrinsic’ violence (p. 21). She says that ‘the physical manifestation of the consequences of such violence is shown in Lucy’s ghastly Other, imaged as “a loathsome demon soul look­ing out of the grey eyes, that were in turns mocking and voluptuous”’ (p. 22). Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey (ed.), vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), pp. 234, 236. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 241. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 241. Christine Berthin, Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 4. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, pp. 247–8. Felicia Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs. Gaskell’s Demon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. 50. Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 66. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 250. In her article, ‘Female Sexuality in “The Poor Clare”: The Demon in the House’ (Studies in Short Fiction 21 [Summer 1984], 259–65), Maureen T. Reddy likewise says that the Lucy Gisborne plotline ‘should be a center of interest in the story’ and rightly asserts that ‘one is left with the sense that Gaskell could not finally decide exactly what sort of tale this should be, or even who it is really about, Bridget or Lucy’ (p. 261). Reddy also points to Ellen M. Laun’s assertion in ‘A Missing Gaskell Tale Found’ (Studies in Modern Fiction 15 [1978], 177–83) that the middle section of ‘The Poor Clare’ was written ten years prior to the rest of the story (cited in Reddy, ‘Female Sexuality’, p. 261, n. 5), which could also account for the story’s unevenness. 184

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Notes 37

38

39 40 41

42

43

44

45

46

47 48 49

Elizabeth Gaskell began two ghost stories which now exist only as short fragments. One story concerns a female traveller, Hannah Johnson, who recalls the ghost of a woman and baby which she sees during an overnight stay in Birmingham. We can only guess at the remainder of the plotline, as Gaskell ends the story when Hannah first sees the ghost, but this could possibly have been another supernatural tale dealing with women in society (‘Two Fragments of Ghost Stories’, in The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, A. W. Ward (ed.), vol. 7 (New York: AMS Press, 1972). Carol A. Martin, ‘Gaskell’s Ghosts: Truths in Disguise’, Studies in the Novel 21 (Spring 1989), 38. Martin, ‘Gaskell’s Ghosts’, 38–9. Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor, p. 48. My discussion focuses on what I classify as Rossetti’s ‘visible’ ghost poems, which are often overlooked in favour of her more famous ‘ghostly speaker’ poems, most notably ‘After Death’ and ‘Song’. Suzanne Waldman, The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), p. 41. Waldman also admits that scholarship on Christina Rossetti’s Gothic poetry is lacking and rightly asserts that her ‘version of the gothic is worth studying, especially because of the stark emphasis on the maleficence of its contents – and emphasis that many other Victorian writers of gothic efface’ (p. 50). Waldman’s discussion of Rossetti’s Gothic poems focuses briefly on ‘The Hour and the Ghost’, ‘Love from the North’, ‘A Chilly Night’ and ‘A Coast Nightmare’. Thomas Burnett Swann, Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti (Francestown, NH: Marshall Jones Company, 1960), p. 69. Christina Rossetti, ‘The Hour and the Ghost’, in R. W. Crump (ed.), The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 2 vols (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), pp. 40–2, lines 1–7. Subsequent references are from the 1979 edition and are hereafter cited in the text as ‘Hour’. Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life (New York: Viking, 1995), p. 258. R. W. Crump, ‘Textual Notes’, MS 15, The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, vol. 1, p. 243. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 191. Crump, ‘Textual Notes’, Complete Poems, vol. 1, p. 271. Rossetti, ‘The Poor Ghost’, in R. W. Crump (ed.), The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 2 vols (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana 185

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50 51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64

65

66

67

68 69 70

71

State University Press, 1979), pp. 120–1, line 4. Subsequent references are from the 1979 edition and are hereafter cited in the text as ‘Poor Ghost’. Crump, ‘Textual Notes’, Complete Poems, vol. 1, p. 271. Crump, ‘Textual Notes’, Complete Poems, vol. 1, p. 271. All quotations from Landow come from his essay, ‘The Dead Woman Talks Back: Christina Rossetti’s Ironic Intonation of the Dead Fair Maiden,’ Victorian Web 23 (October 2002), http://www.victorianweb. org/authors/crossetti/gpl1.html. Waldman, The Demon and the Damozel, p. 57. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 257. Susan Conley, ‘Rossetti’s Cold Women’, in Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (eds), The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (Athens, Ohio: Ohio Uni­ versity Press, 1999), p. 280. Tromp, Altered States, p. 52. Mount Temple quoted in Tromp, Altered States, p. 52. Tromp, Altered States, p. 53. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 199. Rossetti, Letters, vol. 4, p. 237. Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 225. Colby, Vernon Lee, p. 225. E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 35. Review of Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales, Athenaeum (31 December 1904), 903. Review of Pope Jacynth and More Supernatural Tales, The Canadian Forum (1956), 118. Horace Gregory, ‘Introduction’, in Horace Gregory (ed.), The Snake Lady and Other Stories (New York: Grove Press, 1954), pp. 21–2. Vernon Lee, ‘Amour Dure’, in Horace Gregory (ed.), The Snake Lady and Other Stories (New York: Grove Press, 1954). p. 89. Subsequent references are from the 1954 edition and are hereafter cited in the text. Colby, Vernon Lee, p. 231. Here, Lee clearly has in mind the mythical Medea as well. Vineta Colby traces Lee’s visual source for Medea to a portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi by Bronzino, located in the Uffizi Gallery (Vernon Lee, p. 232). Ruth Robbins, ‘Apparitions Can Be Deceptive: Vernon Lee’s Andro­ gyn­ous Spectres’, in Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (eds), Victorian 186

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Notes

72 73

74

75 76 77 78 79 80

81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90

Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 198. Robbins, ‘Apparitions Can Be Deceptive’, p. 197. Mary Patricia Kane, Spurious Ghosts: The Fantastic Tales of Vernon Lee (Rome: Carocci, 2004), p. 28. Vernon Lee, ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’, p. 115. Subsequent references are from the 1988 Dalby edition of Victorian Ghost Stories of Noted Women Writers (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988) and are hereafter cited in the text as ‘Winthrop’. Kahane, ‘The Gothic Mirror’, p. 347. Kane, Spurious Ghosts, p. 23. Kane, Spurious Ghosts, p. 30. Robbins, ‘Apparitions Can Be Deceptive’, p. 198. Kane, Spurious Ghosts, p. 80. Robbins, ‘Apparitions Can Be Deceptive’, p. 198. A similar idea is discussed by Peter G. Christensen in his essay, ‘The Burden of History in Vernon Lee’s Ghost Story “Amour Dure”’ (Studies in the Humanities 16 [June 1989], 33–43). Christensen uses Nietzsche’s theory of ‘monu­ mental history’ to analyse Spiridion Trepka’s downfall in the story, and asserts that Trepka’s denial of ‘real’ history in favour of an imagined past isolates him from his present world and allows him to fall prey to Medea’s influence: ‘Spiridion has lost the perspective of antiquarian history, which has a sense of the urban community or a whole people, and critical history, which judges the weaknesses and errors of the past. Medea is divorced from the culture around her, and Spiridion fails to criticize adequately the violence of the Italian Renaissance’ (p. 42). Patricia Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Super­ natural Tales (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), p. 125. Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object, p. 126. Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object, p. xv. Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object, p. 146. Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object, p. 128. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 39. Christensen, ‘The Burden of History’, pp. 33–43. Nicole Fluhr, ‘Empathy and Identity in Vernon Lee’s Hauntings’, Victorian Studies 48/2 (Winter 2006), 287. Robbins, ‘Apparitions Can Be Deceptive’, p. 187. Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 7.

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3: ‘Uncomfortable Houses’ and the Spectres of Capital  1

  2   3

  4   5   6

  7   8

  9

10 11

12

13

14

15

16 17

John H. Ingram, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (London, Allen and Co, 1884), p. iii. In the same year as Ingram’s publication, the Society for Psychical Research was in the process of collecting data from its ‘Committee on Haunted Houses’. Crowe, The Night Side of Nature, p. 273. This issue also saw the first publication of Gaskell’s story, ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’, which was later renamed ‘The Crooked Branch’. ‘The Latest Thing in Ghosts’, Once a Week 6 (18 January 1862), 100. ‘The Latest Thing in Ghosts’, 103. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 118. Mighall discusses how this term applies to sensation fiction, specifically the writings of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins. Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 7. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell, ‘Intro­ duction’, in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge and New York: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2004), p. 1. Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1995), p. 45. Copeland, Women Writing about Money, p. 41. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 39. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 101. Robert Miles, ‘“Mother Radcliff ”: Ann Radcliffe and the Female Gothic’, in Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (eds), The Female Gothic: New Directions (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 50. Vanessa Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide, pp. 132–3. Sub­ sequent references are incorporated into the text. Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story, p. 21. Subsequent references are in­ corporated into the text. Williams, Art of Darkness, pp. 103, 104. The term ‘uncomfortable houses’ was used throughout the nineteenth century to describe houses and dwellings that were possessed by ghosts or other evil spirits (and later expanded into imperial regions, as the 188

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Notes term was often used to describe haunted bungalows after the Indian Uprising of 1857). The term also had a religious connotation. For example, Matthew Henry, in The Miscellaneous Works of the Rev. Matthew Henry (London, Joseph Ogle, 1833), includes the following description in his ‘Sermon on Family Religion’: Terrible stories have been told of houses haunted by the devil, and of the fear people have had of dwelling in such houses; verily those houses in which rioting and drunkenness reign, in which swearing and cursing are the language of the house, or in which the more spiritual wickednesses of pride, malice, covetousness, and deceit have the ascendancy, may truly be said to be haunted by the devil, and they are most uncomfortable houses for any man to live in; they are holds of foul spirits, and cages of unclean and hateful birds, even as Babylon the great will be when it is fallen, Rev. xviii. 2. (p. 594)

18

19 20

21

22

I have adopted the term for this chapter because it captures the thematic emphasis on emotional discomfort, which is such a part of Riddell, Molesworth and Oliphant’s ghost stories. Rather than simply being concerned with scaring their audiences, the characters in these women’s stories ultimately feel more discomfort than fear, and the ghosts often prove to be more pathetic than threatening. Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 91. Marcus, Apartment Stories, p. 126. Helen C. Black, Notable Women Authors of the Day, Biographical Sketches (Glasgow: D. Bryce and Son, 1893), pp. 12, 13, 15. Charlotte Riddell. Autograph letter signed. 26 April 1858. Charlotte Riddell Letters, 1858–1901. 1997-0070R VF Lit. Rare Books and Manu­scripts, Special Collections Library, University Libraries, Penn­ sylvania State University. Quoted with the permission of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State Uni­ versity Libraries. Robert Lee Wolff, ‘Two Irish Novels by Mrs. J. H. Riddell’, in Robert Lee Wolff (ed.), Maxwell Drewitt. vol. 1. Ireland: From the Act of Union to the Death of Parnell, 1800–1891 (New York: Garland, 1979), p. vi. In her article on Charlotte Riddell’s changing critical reception by con­temporary reviewers, Patricia Thomas Srebrnik finds that she was both condemned and praised for her ability to describe London business life. Srebrnik quotes an 1865 review by Anne Thackeray in the Cornhill Magazine which congratulates Riddell for being one of the few women writers who avoids the traditional female tendency to focus on emotion 189

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23

24

and feeling in her writing, in favour of an emphasis on ‘analysis of character’ and ‘the history of events’ (quoted in Srebrnik, ‘Mrs. Riddell and the Reviewers: A Case Study in Victorian Popular Fiction’, Women’s Studies 23/1 (1994), 79). Srebrnik also discusses Riddell’s popularity among her intended middle-class audience, and the problems she faced being reviewed by the ‘urban gentry’. Riddell quoted in E. F. Bleiler, ‘Introduction’, The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), p. xxv. Nickianne Moody gives a similar estimation of the Christmas season, ‘a period when most strain is put on the family, marriage, budget and homelife’ (‘Visible Margins’, p. 87). This tradition continues because these stories still speak to our anxieties and allow us to feel that we are not alone in our troubles and uncertainties, and is another enduring connection between the supernatural and social concerns. In an 18 February 1890 interview in the Pall Mall Gazette, Riddell commented on her affinity with London city life and the need for her stories to ‘teach’: All the pathos of the City, the pathos in the lives of struggling men, entered into my soul, and I felt I must write, strongly as my publisher objected to my choice of subject, which he said was one that no woman could handle well . . . Yes, I suppose I do know more about the City and City ways than most women; but do you not think that nowadays ladies seem to take an absolute pride in not knowing or caring about City matters. Oh! how much trouble and misery and destitution might have been saved had wives but interested themselves in and understood their husbands’ business matters a little more than they have done. But there is quite an incapacity in a woman for all that lies east of Temple Bar, and the worst of it is that you cannot teach her. (‘Lady Novelists, – A Chat with Mrs. J. H. Riddell’)

25 26 27 28

29

30

Bleiler, ‘Introduction’, p. xxii. Review of A Struggle for Fame, The Spectator (October 1883), 1285–6. Review of Weird Stories, The Spectator (24 February 1883), 267. J. I. M. Stewart, ‘Fits of the Horrors’, Times Literary Supplement (23 December 1977), 1493. Charlotte Riddell, ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’, in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), p. 85. Subsequent references are from the 1977 Bleiler edition and are hereafter incorporated into the text. It is interesting to note the similarity of Coulton’s situation with that of the young Charlotte Riddell. In her interview with Helen C. Black, Riddell recounts her first days in London with her sickly mother: 190

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Notes We did not know a single creature! During the first fortnight, indeed, I really thought I should break my heart. I had never taken kindly to new places, and, remembering the sweet hamlet and the loving friends left behind, London seemed to me horrible! I could not eat; I could not sleep; I could only walk over the ‘stony-hearted streets’ and offer my manuscripts to publisher after publisher, who unanimously declined them. (pp. 16–7)

31 32 33

34

35

36 37 38 39

Later in the interview, while describing a visit she made to one of her former publishers, Riddell describes the desperate financial situations she found herself in after her husband’s business interests failed: ‘The years came and the years went, till after the crash came in our affairs; when I was looking about me for every five-pound note I could get, I bethought me of this and another old book, which I can never suf­ ficiently regret republishing. Well, I found I could sell both of them . . .’ (p. 24). Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts, p. 141. Marcus, Apartment Stories, p. 122. Benjamin F. Fisher, ‘Mrs. J. H. Riddell and Late Victorian Literary Gothicism’, in Felice A. Coles (ed.), In Memory of Richard B. Klein: Essays in Contemporary Philology (University, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), pp. 181, 183. Dickerson also connects the depiction of Miss Tynan with the character of Miss Gostock in Riddell’s ‘Nut Bush Farm’ (1882), as well as with the violent female ghost in ‘The Open Door’ (1882). These stories represent greedy women as ‘monsters’ and concern themselves with how the misuse of money corrupts both emotionally and physically. Charlotte Riddell, ‘Walnut-Tree House’, in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell. (New York: Dover Publi­ cations, 1977), p. 149. Subsequent references are from the 1977 Bleiler edition and are hereafter incorporated into the text. Williams, Art of Darkness, p. 44. Williams, Art of Darkness, p. 45. Marcus, Apartment Stories, p. 92. For more on Molesworth’s current critical reception, see Jane Darcy’s essay, ‘“Worlds Not Realized”: The Work of Louisa Molesworth’, in Popular Victorian Women Writers (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004), edited by Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones. Darcy rightly asserts that Molesworth’s stories for children are only beginning to be appreciated among today’s scholars, but herself tends to ignore Moles­ worth’s influence as a writer of the supernatural, choosing to focus on 191

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain the importance of her children’s literature: ‘A fuller picture of Moles­ worth as a writer must include not only a rereading of her many books and stories for children, but also a (re)consideration of her non-fictional writing and an investigation of her writing practices’ (p. 126). Despite this, Darcy’s article is a valuable discussion of Molesworth as a pro­ fessional writer, and several of her analyses of Molesworth regarding the themes of her juvenile literature are relevant for readings of her supernatural fiction, such as Darcy’s assertion that ‘Louisa appears to have been a happy enough child though perhaps rather lonely on account of a large age gap between herself and her siblings. Certainly the isolation and loneliness of the child, even within a large household, is a recurring theme in her fiction’ (p. 111). This statement also pertains to Molesworth’s ghost stories, and particularly to the portrayal of the narrator in ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’. 40 Roger Lancelyn Green, Mrs. Molesworth (New York: Henry Z. Walck, 1964), p. 9. 41 Green, Mrs. Molesworth, p. 63. 42 Jane Cooper, Mrs Molesworth (Sussex: Pratts Folly Press, 2002), p. 102. 43 Cooper, Mrs Molesworth, p. 241. In her biography, Cooper also notes that Molesworth kept up with the current ghost literature of the day, including supposed real-life occurrences. She says that ‘The Story of the Rippling Train’, which appears as the last of her Four Ghost Stories, was suggested by a book published by the Society for Psychical Research in 1886. Thus, Cooper asserts, ‘We see from this that she steadily maintained her interest in the psychic and supernatural to the extent of studying current, heavy, academic books on the subject.’ (p. 269) 44 Molesworth quoted in Cooper, p. 102. 45 It is interesting to note that Molesworth originally suggested ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady and Other Ghost Stories’ as the title for the col­ lection (for more on the publication history of Four Ghost Stories, see Cooper, p. 269). Both this preference and the positioning of the story as the first in the collection suggest that it was possibly Molesworth’s favourite among her supernatural tales.   Though Molesworth enjoyed writing her fantasy stories for children, she shared the opinion of Elizabeth Gaskell that her ghost stories were for a selected (adult) audience. In a November 1887 letter to her editors at Macmillan, Molesworth stressed the importance of making it clear that her supernatural stories were meant for adults: ‘I think it important to show by the title that it is not at all a child’s book as my name is so much associated with such, & I shd. be very sorry for anyone to give ghost stories unknowingly to children.’ (quoted in Cooper, p. 270) 192

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Notes Likewise, in the 29 October 1887 issue of the Pall Mall Gazette (also briefly cited in Cooper’s biography), Molesworth went on to say: I consider, moreover, that the question of the best books for very little people – namely, children under ten or twelve – is peculiarly complicated. For in many cases one single book may contain stories admirably suited for children, and others which one would be sorry for them to read. Hans Anderson’s tales, the translations of the Brothers Grimm’s stories, and the greater number of the juvenile magazines of the day, may be cited as instances of this.  My own experience has been that one should have two libraries for one’s children – one of books ‘to read to ourselves’, and another of books to be read aloud to them by their mother or some one competent to select, omit, or explain. . .  The list of the best books for reading aloud to children would be an extensive one, for I have always held that they can understand and bene­ fit by much not written expressly for them, when a wise parent or teacher is the vehicle. (p. 5)

46

47

48

49 50

Molesworth seems to have upheld this rule in her own publications, which were strictly divided into collections for children and collections of ghost stories (although even in her stories for adults, Molesworth includes children as main characters, such as ‘The Shadow in the Moon­ light’, published in Uncanny Tales, 1896). According to Jane Cooper, in her biography of Mary Louisa Molesworth, the idea for ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’ was based on a story told by Molesworth’s friend, Margaret Paton, making the real life story also one passed down from woman to woman. Likewise, Jane Darcy notes that Molesworth also used this ‘female tradition of tale telling’ in her children’s stories. She goes on to say, ‘Her fantasy worlds are also feminised and can be viewed as part of a recognisably female tradition’ (p. 113). Mary Louisa Molesworth, ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’, Four Ghost Stories (London: Macmillan, 1888), p. 33. Subsequent references are from the 1888 edition and are hereafter incorporated into the text. Hilary Grimes, ‘The Haunted Self: Visions of the Ghost and the Woman at the Fin-de-Siecle’, Victorian Newsletter 107 (March 2005), 3. Grimes, ‘The Haunted Self’, 3. Although financial concerns did not affect Louisa Molesworth as much as they did Charlotte Riddell or Margaret Oliphant (who both frequently wrote about economic anxieties in their ghost stories), both Jane Cooper and Jane Darcy note that Molesworth may have been affected 193

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51

52

53 54

55

56

57 58

59

financially after her separation from her husband in 1879, an event that possibly caused her to begin writing for both creative and financial purposes in order to support herself and her children. This version of woman-to-woman communication is quite different from the dangerous and foreboding messages passed from one woman to another in Charlotte Dacre’s Romantic-era poems. Molesworth’s women help each other gain knowledge by telling stories, whereas Dacre’s female narrators often foretell death and retribution related to some bad decisions or wickedness in the woman’s past. Obviously, Dacre was concerned with warning women about the dangers of excess emotion in a time when women were less empowered to speak of such matters, especially in published work. However, it is interesting to note the change in women’s roles that this comparison brings to mind. The (living) women in Molesworth’s story are no longer symbolic of female weakness and possess a more stable presence in the narrative as purveyors of knowledge and women of financial and societal status. Review of Four Ghost Stories, London Quarterly Review (April 1888), 186. Review of Four Ghost Stories, Literary World (26 May 1888), 170. In his brief biographical note on Oliphant in Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction, 1820–1950 (Boston Spa and London: The British Library, 2000), Neil Wilson sees her financial concerns as a help to her literary career and output as an author: ‘The premature death of her husband in 1859 followed by that of her brother left her with two families to support and substantial debts to repay. Oliphant rose to the challenge, attempting to maintain her high literary standards while increasing her output, eventually writing over one hundred and thirty novels and non-fiction works as well as numerous magazine pieces’ (p. 394). Margaret Oliphant quoted in Elisabeth Jay, Mrs Oliphant: ‘A Fiction to Herself’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 149. Margaret Oliphant, The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant, Mrs. Harry Coghill (ed.) (Edinburgh and London, 1899), p. 321; also quoted in Jay, Mrs Oliphant, p. 158. Oliphant, Autobiography and Letters, p. 322. Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Open Door’, in Richard Dalby (ed.), Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988), p. 152. Subsequent references are from Dalby’s 1988 edition and are hereafter incorporated into the text. The boy’s illness as a result of hearing the ghost, in other words, coming into contact with him, also connects to Victorian concerns over the 194

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Notes

60

61

mingling of the upper, middle and working classes. These concerns frequently were centred on health problems brought about by exposure with other classes. Ghosts represented ‘contagion and illness’ among the middle classes which were also problems in housing for the poor in more populated areas of England, and as Sharon Marcus notes in Apartment Stories, ‘in many stories illness and death follow as con­ sequences of seeing a ghost’ (p. 125). Mary E. Braddon contributed to this particular genre of supernatural fiction with ‘The Ghost’s Name’, published in the Mistletoe Bough (1891). In her story, the sinister ghost that kills everyone who inhabits one particular room turns out to be typhoid fever. Elisabeth Jay sees a connection between Oliphant’s anxiety concerning her sons and her growing interest in the supernatural (p. 21). This interest can be seen in the many parents and children that populate her supernatural tales and ghost stories. And, indeed, there seems to be something of her own wayward sons and the ‘lost’, spectral son in ‘The Open Door’. Gray, Margaret Oliphant, p. 250. Prior to Oliphant’s publications, Catherine Crowe discussed the idea of earthbound spirits in both The Night Side of Nature (1848) and Ghosts and Family Legends (1859). The latter work contains six stories under the title, ‘Legends of the Earth­ bound’, and in the Conclusion to the second volume of The Night Side of Nature, Crowe states: if we have misused our talent and sunk our souls in the sensual pleasures or base passions of this world, we shall carry our desires and passions with us, to make our torment in the other; or perhaps be tethered to the earth by some inextinguishable remorse or disappointed scheme, like those unhappy spirits I have been writing about; and that perhaps for hundreds of years; for although evidently freed from many of the laws of space and matter, whilst unable to leave the earth, they are still the children of time, and have not entered into eternity. (pp. 378–9)

62

63 64 65

Esther H. Schor, ‘The Haunted Interpreter in Oliphant’s Supernatural Fiction’, in D. J. Trela (ed.), Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1995), p. 91. Schor, ‘The Haunted Interpreter’, p. 90. Schor, ‘The Haunted Interpreter’, pp. 91–2. Margaret K. Gray says in her Introduction to Margaret Oliphant: Selected Short Stories of the Supernatural (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985) that Oliphant’s own changes in religious thinking led her from 195

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66 67 68

69

70 71

being an early follower of the Free Church of Scotland, to having ‘strong leanings towards the Catholic Church’ (p. x). Gray, ‘Introduction’, Margaret Oliphant, p. xi. Gray, ‘Introduction’, Margaret Oliphant, p. xi. The American writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) contributed a similar story nearly a decade earlier. ‘Since I Died’ (1873) is told from the point of view of a deceased woman who looks down at her body and struggles to come to terms with her new being, out of space and time. Margaret Oliphant, ‘Old Lady Mary: A Story of the Seen and the Unseen’, in Margaret K. Gray (ed.), Margaret Oliphant: Selected Short Stories of the Supernatural (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), p. 124. Sub­sequent references are from Gray’s 1985 edition and are hereafter incorporated into the text. According to Elisabeth Jay, Oliphant was greatly influenced by William Gladstone’s Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler (1896), in which he discusses the possibility of an inter­mediary place after death. In her review of the book, Oliphant said this temporary placement in afterlife would benefit people who had good intentions while living but still had sins to expatiate. Through the doing of good deeds in this transitory state, spirits were then able to fully cross over into a more peaceful rest (Mrs Oliphant, p. 175). Oliphant no doubt felt akin to this line of thinking, as she had already described something very much like it through the character Old Lady Mary and her journey in the afterlife. Jay also notes that this idea would have been appealing to the Protestant Oliphant, giving her a way of ‘believing in an intermediate state of consciousness, without subscribing to the doctrine of purgatory’ (p. 175). Jay, Mrs Oliphant, p. 167. Patricia Stubbs, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel, 1880–1920 (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 5–6.

4: Haunted Empire: Spectral Uprisings as Imperialist Critique  1

 2

 3

Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xi. William Hughes and Andrew Smith, ‘Introduction: Defining the Relation­ships between Gothic and the Postcolonial’ Gothic Studies 5/2 (November 2003), 1. Hughes and Smith, ‘Defining the Relationships between Gothic and the Postcolonial’, 1. 196

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Notes  4

 5

 6  7

 8

 9

10

11 12

13

Hughes and Smith, ‘Defining the Relationships between Gothic and the Postcolonial’, 1. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: The Enlighten­ ment Gothic and Postcolonialism’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds), Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 2. Smith and Hughes, Empire and the Gothic, p. 4. Hilda Gregg, ‘The Indian Mutiny in Fiction’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 161 (February 1897), 218. Hereafter cited in the text as ‘Mutiny’. Although she sustained an enthusiastic reading audience throughout her career, Ellen Wood’s female contemporaries were divided over her writing. According to Malcolm Elwin, in his chapter on Wood in Victorian Wallflowers: A Panoramic Survey of the Popular Literary Periodicals (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1934, repr. 1966), Harriet Martineau wrote favourably of her novels, but Charlotte Riddell was one of the most disparaging, remarking to Harry Furniss that Wood was ‘simply a brute; she throws in bits of religion to slip her fodder down the public throat’ (quoted in Elwin, p. 241). Along a similar line, Eliza Lynn Linton remarked, ‘Mrs. Wood is to me a very, very shallow writer, a shallow observer of society, and a puerile and a vulgar one’ (quoted in Elwin, p. 246). James L. Campbell, Sr, ‘Mrs. Henry Wood’, in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), Supernatural Fiction Writers, 2 vols (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), p. 280. Charles W. Wood, Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood (London: Bentley, 1894), p. 11. Hereafter cited in text as Memorials. Campbell, ‘Mrs. Henry Wood’, pp. 280–1. Campbell, ‘Mrs. Henry Wood’, p. 281. Though he does not consider the supernatural themes in her writing, Malcolm Elwin claims that Wood was not interested in writing ‘propaganda’. Apart from the obvious social critique of Danesbury House, he cites Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles, Mildred Arkell, and A Life’s Secret as the only works which have social undertones, as these works discuss industrial concerns and the effect of strikes on the working classes (Victorian Wallflowers, p. 252). These stories deviate from Wood’s other short stories and novels in their emphasis on the immaterial. For a discussion of Wood’s focus on the material as it relates to her domestic literary agenda, see Deborah Wynne’s essay, ‘See What a Big Wide Bed It Is!: Mrs Henry Wood and the Philistine Imagination’, in Emma Liggins and Daniel Duffy (eds), 197

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14

15

16

17 18

19

20

21

22 23

24

25

26

27 28

Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 89–107. According to Charles Wood, Ellen’s mother, Elizabeth Evans Price, also had second sight. She supposedly saw the ghost of her maidservant at the moment of her death and ‘had many supernatural and spiritual­ istic experiences. With dreams that came true she was also occasionally visited’ (Memorials, p. 27). Ronald C. Finucane, Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), pp. 194–5. Quoted in Florence Marryat, There Is No Death: My Eyewitness Experi­ ences with the Great Mediums (New York: Causeway Books, repr. 1973), p. 15. Marryat, There Is No Death, p. 16. Roger Luckhurst, ‘Knowledge, Belief and the Supernatural at the Imperial Margin’, in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 202, 204. By setting the events of the story on 11 May, Wood is alluding to the violence in Meerut on 10 May 1857, the beginning of the Indian Rebellion. Ellen Wood, ‘A Mysterious Visitor’, Adam Grainger and Other Stories (London: Macmillan, 1900), p. 361. Subsequent references are from the 1900 edition and are hereafter cited within the text. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 61, 62. Luckhurst, ‘Knowledge, Belief and the Supernatural’, p. 205. Neubauer quoted in Luckhurst, ‘Knowledge, Belief and the Super­ natural’, p. 205. Quoted in Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 104. Bhupal Singh, A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1934; reprinted by Curzon Press, London, 1975), p. 111. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), p. 227. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 227. Croker followed the success of her first two novels, Proper Pride (1882) and Pretty Miss Neville (1883), with several collections of short stories, including To Let (1893), Village Tales and Jungle Tragedies (1895), In the Kingdom of Kerry (1896), Jason and Other Stories (1899), A State Secret (1901), and The Old Cantonment (1905), with the first two collections containing the majority of her Anglo-Indian ghost stories. At the same time as these stories were being published, Croker continued to publish 198

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Notes

29

30 31

new novels almost every year throughout the 1890s and into the first decade of the twentieth century. By the time of her death in 1920, she had written over forty novels in addition to her six collections of short stories. In his memoir, Twenty Years of My Life (London: Constable, 1915), Douglas Sladen includes a chapter on ‘Lady Authors’ and says Croker, Alice Perrin, and Flora Annie Steel ‘have all been valued friends for many years’ and praises their literary output as Anglo-Indian writers: ‘It is natural to mention Mrs. Steel, Mrs. Perrin and Mrs. Croker together, for they long divided the Indian Empire with Rudyard Kipling as a realm of fiction. Each in her own department is supreme’ (p. 120). Sladen’s appraisal of these women is unique in that he places their writing on the same plain, or ‘realm’, as Kipling, when most other reviewers and critics of the time placed Kipling on a pedestal as the pre-eminent writer of Indian fiction of his day. Quoted in Sladen, Twenty Years of My Life, p. 121. Contemporary reviews of Croker’s short stories reveal that critics felt she deserved her popularity. Two recurring characteristics of her writing noted by reviewers were her ability to tell a realistic Indian story and to consistently entertain readers with her narrative technique. After the release of Croker’s first collection of short stories, the Athenaeum declared her an ‘unpretentious author’ and praised her approach to the supernatural in To Let, saying that the tales ‘are not ghost stories of the rationalized and explanatory order; they leave one to digest the pure supernatural as well as one may be able, or to invent new theories to account for impossibilities on a natural basis’ (pp. 352–3). In an advertisement preceding The Kingdom of Kerry (1896), a reviewer for The Queen commented that in To Let, Mrs. Croker is a writer who deserves to be widely popular. She writes with grace and ease, is never dull, and never tries to interest her readers by unworthy or unnatural means. There is a freshness and a cheerful daylight about her stories which asserts itself even among the ghosts and other terrors which occupy most of the present volume . . . Mrs. Croker’s knowledge of India assures the excellence of her local colour, and she has added a worthy contribution to the romance of that wonderful land.



American critics also liked Croker’s use of the supernatural, as a reviewer in The Book Buyer remarked that The stories in To Let, by B. M. Croker, deal with ‘departmental’ life in India, the characters introduced being the officers, their wives, members of their families, natives, etc., so familiar in narratives of this sort. The 199

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain descriptions of Oriental customs are entertaining, and there are some good sketches of Indian scenery. The distinctive and most interesting feature of the book, however, is the introduction, in the stories, of an element of the supernatural. (p. 367)

32

33

34

The Canadian Bookseller likewise confidently asserted that ‘No woman writer of fiction has a stronger hold upon a large circle of readers in Great Britain and Canada than Mrs. B. M. Croker’ (p. 66). This discussion focuses on only two of Croker’s haunted bungalow stories; however, she wrote several other Indian ghost stories with similar themes. ‘The Red Bungalow’ is comparable to ‘To Let’, but much more disturbing because the curse on the house continues into the present. Instead of witnessing a past violent act, the family in ‘The Red Bungalow’ directly suffers from the malevolent spirits inhabiting the house. However, it is the children who see the ghost (or ghosts, since Croker does not provide readers with a clear description of the spirit doing the haunting) and the women protagonists are powerless to stop the damage done to the children. The women suppose that the children’s ayah is looking after them, but when she goes outside, the ghost appears to the children, causing the boy’s death and the girl’s mute­ ness. This silence on the part of the children causes a disconnect in the line of knowledge and learning about the cause of the ghost, which differentiates the characters in ‘Dâk Bungalow’ and ‘To Let’ from the women in ‘The Red Bungalow’. Each of the bungalows is ultim­ately abandoned, but the latter story ends much more mysteriously and ominously, with the seemingly innocent children of the English falling prey to a vengeful Indian apparition. Bithia Mary Croker, ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’, in Roger Luck­ hurst (ed.), Late Victorian Gothic Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 96. Subsequent references are from the 2005 edition and are here­after cited within the text. The fear of ‘unhealthy’ bungalows recurs throughout Croker’s super­ natural Indian fiction, and can be read as a symbolic fear of close contact with the Indian locals, a fear which had its beginnings long before Croker’s time. In her article on colonial and postcolonial Gothic, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert cites Edward Long’s critique of the ‘dangers’ of colonialism in Candid Reflections. . .On What is Commonly Called the Negro Cause (1772), in which he warns against the genetic mixing of ‘lower class’ Englishwomen and black immigrants (‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean’, in Jerrold E. Hogle [ed.], The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction [Cambridge and New York: 200

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Notes Cambridge University Press, 2002], p. 230). This is an early version of the fear of atavism and degeneration that became more prevalent in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but also points to the grow­ ing concern over colonists failing victim to contagious diseases in foreign countries. This fear ‘mutated’ again in the idea of ‘unhealthy’ houses which spread disease to colonists. A more direct example of this fear can be found in Croker’s ‘Her Last Wishes’, in which the ghost takes the form of a young woman who died of cholera: ‘The black cholera was raging round, and the coolies, and servants, and every living soul, fled the place – just ran for their dear lives – never stopped to pack a bundle, or to turn a key. It was awful bad in these hills, that season! Miss Nellie got it from nursing her ayah – she was took herself in a couple of hours.’ (Number Ninety and Other Ghost Stories, Richard Dalby [ed.], Sarob Press, 2000, p. 56).   The anxiety over unhealthy residences is a recurring theme in Victorian haunted house stories as well, and is again related to class issues. In her study of London single-family homes and the problems of overcrowding, Sharon Marcus sees an added social component in the literary houses of the time: Ghosts also conferred on middle-class houses the contagion and illness that urban investigators . . . associated with the housing of the poor . . . In Victorian ghost stories, haunted middle-class houses in London become, like the lodging houses of the poor, scenes of crime and familial dis­ solution, with specters often replaying the murder of a spouse, sibling, or child. Indeed, corpses litter middle-class houses in supernatural fiction as they did the houses of the poor in public health investigations. (Apartment Stories, p. 125)

35 36 37

The theme of unhealthiness connects to more ‘mainstream’ Victorian haunted houses as well. In his chapter on haunted houses in A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, Robert Mighall discusses hereditary disease as a curse on the house, playing on the double meaning of ‘house’ as physical place and ‘house’ as family line (p. 78ff.). See also Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: ‘That the house embodies the family history reminds us that the word “house” has two meanings relevant to Gothic fictions – it refers both to the building itself and to the family line’ (p. 45). MacMillan, Women of the Raj, p. 102. Portal quoted in MacMillan, Women of the Raj, p. 103. Shuchi Kapila, ‘The Domestic Novel Goes Native: Bithia Mary Croker’s Anglo-India’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 26/3 (September 2004), 227. 201

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain 38

39 40

41 42

43

44

45

46 47 48

Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, ‘The Postcolonial Ghost Story’, in Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 188. Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, Late Victorian Gothic Tales, p. xxv. Edward Thompson, in his account of the 1857 Uprising, The Other Side of the Medal (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), describes Indian hostility toward the British as a vengeful ghost. In the early twentieth century, the rebellion was still in the collective memory of the people of north­ ern India as the unfinished business of empire haunted both the British and the Indians. The unresolved anger became its own spectre: ‘Right at the back of the mind of many an Indian the Mutiny flits as he talks with an Englishman – an unavenged and unappeased ghost’ (p. 32, 1926 edn). Readers must bear in mind that Thompson’s account was written during another tense time in Anglo-Indian relations after re­ newed violence in Amritsar in 1919. The anxiety in the above passage thus speaks to the past as well as to Thompson’s own time. Gelder and Jacobs, ‘The Postcolonial Ghost Story’, p. 188. Margaret L. Carter, Specter or Delusion?: The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction (London: UMI Research Press, 1987), p. 17. Indigestion was often blamed for supernatural sightings, and, in ghost stories, is mentioned repeatedly by non-believers as evidence that ghosts are not real. In his essay, ‘Ghosts and Right Reason’ (Cornhill Magazine 75 [May 1897]), Andrew Lang lists it as one of the common excuses for denying the existence of ghosts: ‘“Ghosts are the results of indigestion.” In that case, they ought to be very much more common phenomena than they are. Besides, in scientific works on hallucination we do not find that hallucinations are frequently caused by dyspepsia’ (p. 630). From ‘Studies at Delhi, 1876’ and later included in Verses Written in India (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1889). Carol Margaret Davison, ‘Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)house: Revolution and Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds), Empire and the Gothic, p. 138. Davison, ‘Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-house’, p. 138. Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic’, p. 231. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, p. 91. For a sympathetic reading of English­ women in India, see Pat Barr’s The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (London: Secker and Warburg, 1976). She contends that the ‘fictional image’ of the memsahib as ‘a frivolous, snobbish and selfish creature who flitted from bridge to tennis parties “in the hills” while 202

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Notes

49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56

57

58 59

60

61

62 63

64 65

66

her poor husband slaved “on the plains”’ is an ‘historical cliché’ (p. 1) founded by Kipling and other Anglo-Indian writers. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, p. 91. Quoted in Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, p. 91. J. E. Dawson, ‘Woman in India: her Influence and Position’, Calcutta Review 83 (October 1886), 363. Cited hereafter in the text as ‘Woman in India’. Kapila, ‘The Domestic Novel Goes Native’, 230. Gelder and Jacobs, ‘The Postcolonial Ghost Story’, p. 188. Alison Sainsbury, ‘Married to the Empire: The Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel’, in Bart Moore-Gilbert (ed.), Writing India 1757–1990: The Literature of British India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 181. Kapila, ‘The Domestic Novel Goes Native’, 219. Susan also fits within the categories of Englishwomen from Dawson’s ‘Woman in India’, as Croker’s description places her as one of the ‘maturer’ ladies who make their new homes in India. However, Susan displays few memsahib tendencies (unlike her sister-in-law, Aggie) and is for the most part a likeable character. Bithia Mary Croker, ‘To Let’, in Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert (eds), The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (New York: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1991), p. 346. All subsequent references are from the 1991 edition and are hereafter cited in the text. Smith and Hughes (eds), ‘Introduction’, Empire and the Gothic, pp. 3–4. Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947 (Manchester and New York: Manchester Uni­ versity Press, 2002), p. 59. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 80. Rosemary Raza, ‘Bithia Mary Croker’, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 14 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 272. Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, Late Victorian Gothic Tales, p. xxiv. David Punter, ‘Arundhati Roy and the House of History’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds), Empire and the Gothic, p. 193. Punter, ‘Arundhati Roy and the House of History’, p. 193. Alexandra Warwick, ‘Colonial Gothic’, in The Handbook to Gothic Literature, p. 262. Ken Gelder, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, in The Handbook to Gothic Literature, p. 181.

203

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Conclusion  1  2  3  4  5  6

 7

Crowe, Night Side of Nature, vol. 1, pp. 383–4. Anstey [Guthrie], ‘The Decay of the British Ghost’, 252. Anstey [Guthrie], ‘The Decay of the British Ghost’, 257. Anstey [Guthrie], ‘The Decay of the British Ghost’, 258. Briggs, Night Visitors, p. 111. These include The Cold Embrace (1967), Gentlewomen of Evil (1969), A Circle of Witches (1971), Ladies of Horror (1971), Ladies of Fantasy (1975), Ladies of the Gothics (1975), Sisters of Sorcery (1976), Ghostly Gentlewomen (1977), Witch’s Brew (1984), Haunted Women (1985), The Virago Book of Ghost Stories (1987), Haunting Women (1988), Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers (1988), and What Did Miss Darrington See?: An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (1989). Bleiler, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiii.

204

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Bibliography Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’, in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), pp. 219–52. Fuss, Diana, ‘Corpse Poem’, Critical Inquiry 30/1 (Autumn 2003), 1–30. Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (eds) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966). —— ‘The Poor Clare’, The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, in A. W. Ward (ed.), vol. 5 (New York: AMS Press, 1972), pp. 329–90. —— ‘Two Fragments of Ghost Stories’, The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, in A. W. Ward (ed.), vol. 7 (New York: AMS Press, 1972), pp. 721–7. Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs, ‘The Postcolonial Ghost Story’, in Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 179–200. Gelder, Ken, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1998), p. 180–1. Gray, Margaret K., ‘Introduction’, Margaret Oliphant: Selected Short Stories of the Supernatural (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), pp. vii–xii. Green, Roger Lancelyn, Mrs. Molesworth (New York: Henry Z. Walck, 1964). [Gregg, Hilda], ‘The Indian Mutiny in Fiction’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 161 (February 1897), 218–31. Gregory, Horace, ‘Introduction’, The Snake Lady and Other Stories (New York: Grove Press, 1954), pp. 6–24. Grimes, Hilary, ‘The Haunted Self: Visions of the Ghost and the Woman at the Fin-de-Siecle’, Victorian Newsletter 107 (March 2005), 1–4. Grudin, Peter D., The Demon-Lover: The Theme of Demonality in English and Continental Fiction of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987). Henry, Matthew, The Miscellaneous Works of the Rev. Matthew Henry (London: Joseph Ogle, 1833). Homans, Margaret, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986). Hughes, William, and Andrew Smith, ‘Introduction: Defining the Relationships between Gothic and the Postcolonial’, Gothic Studies 5/2 (November 2003), 1–6. Ingram, John H., The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (London, Allen and Co, 1884). 209

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Bibliography Lyall, Edna, ‘Mrs. Gaskell’, Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1897), pp. 119–45. MacMillan, Margaret, Women of the Raj (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988). Marcus, Sharon, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Marryat, Florence, There Is No Death: My Eyewitness Experiences with the Great Mediums (1891, New York: Causeway Books, 1973). Marsh, Jan, Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life (New York: Viking, 1995). Martin, Carol A., ‘Gaskell’s Ghosts: Truths in Disguise’, Studies in the Novel 21/1 (Spring 1989), 27–40. Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Miles, Robert. ‘“Mother Radcliff”: Ann Radcliffe and the Female Gothic’, in Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (eds) The Female Gothic: New Directions (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 42–59. Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976). Molesworth, Mary Louisa, ‘The Best Books for Children’, Pall Mall Gazette (29 October 1887), 5. —— ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’, Four Ghost Stories (London: Macmillan, 1888), pp. 1–42. Moody, Nickianne, ‘Visible Margins: Women Writers and the English Ghost Story’, in Sarah Sceats and Gail Cunningham (eds), Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Longman, 1996), pp. 77–90. Oliphant, Margaret, ‘Old Lady Mary: A Story of the Seen and the Unseen’, in Margaret K. Gray (ed), Margaret Oliphant: Selected Short Stories of the Supernatural (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), pp. 63–124. —— ‘The Open Door’, in Richard Dalby (ed.), Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988), pp. 150–84. —— The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant, Mrs. Harry Coghill (ed.) (Edinburgh and London, 1899). Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 229–57. Percy, Thomas and Robert Anderson, The Percy Letters: The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Robert Anderson, W. E. K. Anderson (ed.) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). 211

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain Procida, Mary A., Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002). Pulham, Patricia, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). Punter, David, ‘Arundhati Roy and the House of History’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds), Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 192–207. Raza, Rosemary Cargill, ‘Bithia Mary Croker’, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 14 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 271–2. Reddy, Maureen T., ‘Female Sexuality in “The Poor Clare”: The Demon in the House’, Studies in Short Fiction 21 (Summer 1984), 259–65. Reed, Toni, Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988). Rev. of A Struggle for Fame, The Spectator (6 October 1883), 1285–86. Rev. of Confessions of the Nun of St Omer, British Critic (December 1805), 671. Rev. of Four Ghost Stories, Literary World (1888), 170. Rev. of Four Ghost Stories, London Quarterly Review (1888), 186. Rev. of Pope Jacynth and More Supernatural Tales, The Canadian Forum (1956), 118. Rev. of Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales, Athenaeum (31 December 1904), 903. Rev. of Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, British Critic ( January 1803), 78. Rev. of Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, Poetical Register ( January 1803), 431–2. Rev. of Terence, Canadian Bookseller and Library Journal (December 1899), 66. Rev. of To Let, Athenaeum (9 September 1893), 352–3. Rev. of To Let, The Book Buyer (1893), 367. Rev. of Weird Stories, The Spectator (24 February 1883), 267. Rev. of Zofloya, General Review of British and Foreign Literature ( June 1806), 590–3. Rev. of Zofloya, Literary Journal ( June 1806), 631–5. Riddell, Charlotte. Autograph letter signed. 26 April 1858. Charlotte Riddell Letters, 1858–1901. 1997-0070R VF Lit. Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections Library, University Libraries, Penn­ sylvania State University. —— ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’, in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), The Col­ lected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), pp. 85–101. 212

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Bibliography —— ‘Walnut-Tree House’, in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), pp. 148–72. Robbins, Ruth, ‘Apparitions Can Be Deceptive: Vernon Lee’s Androgyn­ ous Spectres’, in Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (eds), Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 182–200. Rolls, Elizabeth Harcourt, ‘The Ballad of Sir Rupert: A Ghost Story’ (Monmouth: T. Farror, 1854). Rossetti, Christina, ‘The Hour and the Ghost’, in R. W. Crump (ed.), The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 2 vols (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), pp. 40–2. —— The Letters of Christina Rossetti, Antony H. Harrison (ed.), 4 vols (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997–2004). —— ‘The Poor Ghost’, in R. W. Crump (ed.), The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 2 vols (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), pp. 120–1. Sainsbury, Alison, ‘Married to the Empire: The Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel’, in Writing India 1757–1990: The Literature of British India, Bart Moore-Gilbert (ed.) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 163–87. Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, ‘Preface’, What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989), pp. ix–xiv. Schor, Esther H., ‘The Haunted Interpreter in Oliphant’s Supernatural Fiction’, in D. J. Trela (ed.), Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1995), pp. 90–110. Scott, Walter, ‘Essay on Imitations of the Scottish Ballad’, in T. F. Henderson (ed.), Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 4 vols (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1902), pp. 1–52. Sharpe, Jenny, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Shelley, Mary, ‘On Ghosts’, London Magazine 9 (March 1824), 253–56. Singh, Bhupal, A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934; reprinted by Curzon Press, London, 1975). Sladen, Douglas, Twenty Years of My Life (London: Constable, 1915). Smajic, Srdjan, ‘The Trouble with Ghost-seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story’, ELH 70/4 (Winter 2003), 1107–35. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialsm’, Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 1–12. 213

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Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain Smith, Andrew, The Ghost Story, 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Man­ chester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010). Srebrnik, Patricia Thomas, ‘Mrs. Riddell and the Reviewers: A Case Study in Victorian popular fiction’, Women’s Studies 23/1 (1994), 69–84. Steel, Flora Annie, Turriff, to William Morris Colles. 1895. Autograph letter signed. British Library, India Office Select Materials, MSS Eur C865. Stein, Karen F., ‘Monsters and Madwomen: Changing Female Gothic’, in Juliann E. Fleenor (ed.), The Female Gothic (Montreal and London: Eden Press, 1983), pp. 123–37. Stewart, Clare, ‘“Weird Fascination”: The Response to Victorian Women’s Ghost Stories’, in Emma Liggins and Daniel Duffy (eds), Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts: Divergent Femininities (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 108–25. Stewart, J. I. M., ‘Fits of the Horrors’, Times Literary Supplement (23 December 1977), 1493. Stoddart, Helen, ‘The Demonic’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1998), p. 43–5. Stoneman, Patsy, Elizabeth Gaskell (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987). Stubbs, Patricia, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel, 1880–1920 (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1979). Suleri, Sara, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago and London: The Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, 1993). Swann, Thomas Burnett, Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti (Francestown, NH: Marshall Jones Company, 1960). Telle, Franklin D., ‘Elizabeth Harcourt Mitchell’, in The Magazine of Poetry and Literary Review 7/7 (July 1895), 312–13. Thompson, Edward, The Other Side of the Medal (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926; reprinted by Greenwood Press, 1974). Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973). Tromp, Marlene, Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). Uglow, Jenny, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993). Waldman, Suzanne, The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). 214

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Bibliography Wallace, Diana, and Andrew Smith, ‘Introduction: Defining the Female Gothic’, in Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (eds), The Female Gothic: New Directions (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–12. Wallace, Diana, ‘“The Haunting Idea”: Female Gothic Metaphors and Feminist Theory’, in Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (eds), The Female Gothic: New Directions (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 26–41. —— ‘Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic’, Gothic Studies 6/1 (May 2004), 57–68. Ward, A. W., ‘Introduction’, The Works of Mrs. Gaskell, Knutsford Edition, 8 vols (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1906), pp. xiii–xliii. Warwick, Alexandra, ‘Colonial Gothic’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 261–2. Williams, Anne, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). Wilson, Neil, ‘Mrs Oliphant’, Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction, 1820–1950 (Boston Spa and London: The British Library, 2000), pp. 394–96. Wolff, Robert Lee, ‘Two Irish Novels by Mrs. J. H. Riddell’, in Robert Lee Wolff (ed.), Maxwell Drewitt, vol. 1, Ireland: From the Act of Union to the Death of Parnell, 1800–1891 (New York: Garland, 1979), pp. v–ix. Wood, Ellen, ‘A Mysterious Visitor’, Adam Grainger and Other Stories (London: Macmillan, 1900), pp. 361–93. Wood, Charles W., Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood (London: Bentley, 1894).

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Index



‘Abdul’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’), 147, 149 Abraham, Nicholas: theories of, mentioned, 60 Adam Grainger (collection of short stories by Ellen Wood), 136 ‘After Death’ (poem by Christina Rossetti): mentioned, 71, 72 ‘Aggie’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164 ‘Aireal Chorus, The; or, The Warning’ (Gothic ballad by Charlotte Dacre), 25 ‘Aldwyn, Henry’ (fictional character in Florence Marryat’s novel The Dead Man’s Message), 178n. 22 ‘Alice’ (fictional character in Elizabeth Harcourt’s ‘Ballad of Sir Rupert’), 44

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Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (study by Jenny Sharpe): quoted, 142, 153 ‘Altamira’s Ghost; Or Justice Triumphant’ (ballad by Elizabeth Boyd), 1 Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism (study by Marlene Tromp): cited, 73; quoted, 74, 178n. 23, 182n. 50 ‘Amour Dure’ (story by Vernon Lee), 77; quoted, 77, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 Anderson, Robert: letters from, quoted, 26 Anglo-Indian woman: role of, characterized, 163 Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (study by Sharon Marcus): quoted, 98, 103, 112, 195n. 59, 201n. 34

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Index apparitions: associated with good, evil, 41 ‘Apparitions Can Be Deceptive: Vernon Lee’s Androgynous Spectres’ (essay by Ruth Robbins): quoted, 79, 88 Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (study by Ronald C. Finucane): quoted, 138 Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (study by Patricia Pulham): quoted, 86, 87 Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic (study by Anne Williams): cited, 17, 46; quoted, 94, 97, 107–8, 108, 201n. 34 ‘Arundhati Roy and the House of History’ (essay by David Punter): quoted, 164 Ashley, Michael: mentioned, 170; quoted, 54, 55 Auerbach, Nina: quoted, 31, 40, 42, 43, 45–6 ‘Authentic Ghosts and Real Bodies: Negotiating Power in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Ghost Stories’ (study by Thomas Fick): quoted, 31 ‘Ballad of Sir Rupert, A Ghost Story, The’ (poem by Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls), 39–47; characterized, 25 Bannerman, Anne, 13, 73; female literary figures of, characterized, 22, 25, 46, 47; Gothic ballads of, 13, 17, 25,

26­–33; letter from, quoted, 32; mentioned, 19, 95, 117– 18; quoted, 2; works of, characterized by scandalous elements, 26, praised by Sir Walter Scott, 27 ‘Barnes, Betsy’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’), 128 Barr, Pat: study by, quoted, 202–3 ‘Battle of Trafalgar, The’ (poem by Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls), 180n. 37 Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experiences in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (study by Margaret Homans): cited, 61, 183n. 20 Becker, Suzanne: mentioned, 17 ‘Beecher, Mr’ (fictional character in Ellen Wood’s story ‘A Mysterious Visitor’), 141 ‘Beecher, Mrs’ (fictional character in Ellen Wood’s story ‘A Mysterious Visitor’), 139–40, 142, 143 ‘Beecher, James’ (fictional char­ acter in Ellen Wood’s story ‘A Mysterious Visitor’), 141 Bell, Mrs G. H.: mentioned, 144 Bersani, Leo: quoted, 56 Berthin, Christine: study by, cited, 8; quoted, 60 ‘Bithia Mary Croker’ (biographical entry by Rosemary Cargill Raza in biographical dictionary): quoted, 164 Black, Helen C.: interview with Charlotte Riddell, quoted, 99, 190n. 30 218

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Index Blackwood, Algernon: story by, mentioned, 98 Blackwood, William, 119 Bleiler, E. F.: mentioned, 101; quoted, 100, 170 Blue Room and Other Ghost Stories, The (collection by Lettice Galbraith), 170 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen: historical study by, quoted, 153 Boardman, Kay: study by (with Shirley Jones), quoted, 21 Bonaparte, Felicia: mentioned, 183n. 19; quoted, 61, 64 Botting, Fred: quoted, 89, 92 Bowen, Elizabeth: mentioned, 17 Bown, Nicola: quoted, 93 ‘Bowyer, Mrs’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’), 125 ‘Bowyer, Vicar’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’) see ‘vicar, the’ Boyd, Elizabeth: ballad by, 1 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: mentioned, 176n. 47, 188n. 6, 195n. 59 Bradley, Shelland: mentioned, 144 Brantlinger, Patrick: quoted, 145 ‘Briarwood’ (fictional bungalow in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 161, 162, 164 Briggs, Julia: study by, quoted, 54, 169 British Critic: describes novel by Charlotte Dacre, 179n. 36; reviews Anne Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, 177n. 19

Broughton, Rhoda: new edition of collected ghost stories by, issued, 171 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 10 bungalows: significance of, within British Empire, 162 ‘Burden of History in Vernon Lee’s Ghost Story “Amour Dure”, The’ (essay by Peter G. Christensen): quoted, 88, 187n. 80 Burdett, Carolyn: quoted, 93 ‘Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-house: Revolution and Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic’ (essay by Carol Margaret Davison): quoted, 152 Byron, Glennis: collection by, quoted, 46 Candid Reflections . . . On What is Commonly Called the Negro Cause (study by Edward Long): quoted, 200n. 34 Carpenter, Lynette: quoted, 16 Carter, Margaret L.: quoted, 150­–1 ‘Chalmers, Mr’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 162 ‘Chalmers, Captain Charlie’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 162 ‘Chalmers, Edith’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 159, 161 Chanda (Indian town in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘The

219

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Index Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’), 147 Channings, The (novel by Ellen Wood), 136 ‘Charlotte Dacre’ (article by Ann H. Jones): quoted, 38 ‘Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence’ (article by James A. Dunn) : quoted, 34–5 Child, Francis James, 50 ‘Chilly Night, A’ (poem by Christina Rossetti): mentioned, 185n. 42 Christensen, Peter G.: quoted, 88, 187n. 80 Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life (biography by Jan Marsh): quoted, 66, 73, 74 Christmas Carol, A (novel by Charles Dickens): mentioned, 102 Cixous, Hélène: quoted, 16 Clery, E. J.: mentioned, 17; quoted, 22, 23, 75 ‘Coast Nightmare, A’ (poem by Christina Rossetti): mentioned, 185n. 42 Cock Lane and Common-Sense (study by Andrew Lang): mentioned, 168 Colby, Vineta: cited, 77, 186n. 70; quoted, 75 Colinton House, 119 Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell, The: Introduction to, by E. F. Bleiler, quoted, 100, 170 Collins, Wilkie: mentioned, 188n. 6 Collinson, James, 65

‘Colonial Gothic’ (essay by Alexandra Warwick): quoted, 165 ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean’ (study by Lizabeth ParavisiniGebert): mentioned, 200n. 34, quoted, 152 Confessions of the Nun of St Omer (novel by Charlotte Dacre): described by reviewer, 179n. 36 Conley, Susan: quoted, 73 ‘Connie’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’) see ‘Turner, Connie’ Contested Castle, The: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (study by Kate Ferguson Ellis): quoted, 94 Cook, Edward: briefly quoted, 97 Cook, Florence: mentioned, 181n. 50 Cook, Kate: mentioned, 181n. 50 Cooper, Jane (biographer of Mary Louisa Molesworth): cited, 193n. 46; quoted, 192n. 43 Cooper, Major and Mrs Mark (couple mentioned in memoir by Florence Marryat), 138–9 Copeland, Edward: quoted, 93, 93–4 ‘Corinthian Bride, The’ (female revenant poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe): mentioned, 24 ‘Corpse Poem’ (by Diana Fuss): quoted, 23

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Index ‘Coulton, Graham’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’), 102, 103, 104, 105, 112; mentioned, 129 Countess of Blessington: keepsake story by, 1 Cowper-Temple, William Francis: quoted, 73 Cox, Michael: introduction to anthology edited by, quoted, 1 Craciun, Adriana: mentioned, 177n. 13, 179n. 34; quoted, 23, 24, 32, 45 Crimean War, 46 Croker, Bithia Mary, 2, 133–4, 134; biographical entry on, quoted, 164; collection of ghost stories by, republished, 170; interview of, quoted, 145; mentioned, 19, 20, 135; quoted, 145, 147, 148, 148– 9, 159, 161; writings of, described, 144–5, 152, 155– 6, 156–7, 160–1, 164, praised, 145, 199n. 31 ‘Crooked Branch, The’ (supernatural tale by Elizabeth Gaskell): mentioned, 183n. 16 see also ‘Ghost in the Garden Room, The’. Crowe, Catherine, 4, 167; collection of ghost stories by, republished, 171; quoted, 91, 195n. 61 Cruse, Amy: study by, cited, 21 “Culture-Ghost, A; or, Winthrop’s Adventure’ see ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’

‘da Carpi, Medea’ (fictional character in Vernon Lee’s story ‘Amour Dure’), 49, 53, 77–8, 78, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 Dacre, Charlotte, 179n. 34; contemporary critics of, 179n. 36; female literary figures of, characterized, 46, 47, 194n. 51; Gothic ballads of, 13, 17, 25 33–39; mentioned, 19, 20, 95 ‘Dâk Bungalow at Dakor, The’ (story by Bithia Mary Croker), 146–57, 164, 200n. 32; mentioned, 158, 159; quoted, 147, 148, 148–9, 155, 156 ‘Dakor’ (fictional village in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’), 147 Dalby, Richard: mentioned, 170; Preface to collection by, quoted, 14 Danesbury House (novel by Ellen Wood), 197n. 12 Darcy, Jane: quoted, 192n. 39, 193n. 46 Darling, Malcolm: quoted, 144 Davison, Carol Margaret: essay by, quoted, 152 Dawson, J. E.: article by, quoted, 153, 154, 158 Dead Man’s Message, The (novel by Florence Marryat): quoted, 178n. 22 ‘Dead Woman Talks Back, The: Christina Rossetti’s Ironic Intonation of the Dead Fair Maiden’: (essay by George P. Landow): quoted, 71

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Index ‘Decay of the British Ghost, The’ (essay by Anstey Guthrie): quoted, 4–5, 168, 169 ‘Defining the Relationships between Gothic and the Postcolonial’ (study by William Hughes and Andrew Smith): Introduction to, quoted, 132; quoted, 133 Defoe, Daniel: quoted, 41 DeLamotte, Eugenia C.: quoted, 51–2 Demon and the Damozel, The: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (study by Suzanne Waldman): quoted, 64, 72–3 ‘Demon Lover, The’ (English and Scottish ballad), 49–50 Demon-Lover, The: The Theme of Demoniality in English and Continental Fiction of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (study by Peter D. Grudin): cited, 50 ‘demon lover’ motif, 48­–9 Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction (study by Toni Reed): quoted, 49 ‘Demonic, The’ (article by Helen Stoddart): quoted, 50 Derrida, Jacques: quoted, 6, 6­–7, 7, 87 ‘Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel’ (study by Margaret Anne Doody): quoted, 8 Dickens, Charles, 4, 10; quoted, 4

Dickerson, Vanessa, 176n. 43; quoted, 10, 10–11, 45, 95, 103, 104, 129 Diver, Maud: mentioned, 144 ‘Domestic Novel Goes Native, The: Bithia Mary Croker’s Anglo-India’ (study by Shuchi Kapila): quoted, 149, 155, 157 Doody, Margaret Anne: study by, quoted, 8 ‘double’ (notion addressed by Sigmund Freud), 59, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (novel by Robert Louis Stevenson): mentioned, 183n. 19 ‘Duff, Mrs’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’), 147, 151, 156 ‘Duke Robert’ (fictional character in Vernon Lee’s story ‘Amore Dure’), 78, 86, 88 ‘Duke of Urbania’ (fictional character in Vernon Lee’s story ‘Amore Dure’), 77, 85 Dunn, James A.: quoted, 34–5 East Lynne (novel by Ellen Wood: mentioned, 134, 136 East of Suez (collection of stories by Alice Perrin): new edition of, issued, 171 Edward the Black Prince, 39­–40 Edwards, Amelia B.: mentioned, 14 Elfenbein, Andrew: quoted, 29 Elizabeth Gaskell (biography by Patsy Stoneman): quoted, 61

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Index ‘Ellinor’ (fictional character in Anne Bannerman’s Gothic ballad ‘The Penitent’s Confession’), 29, 30, 31, 32 Ellis, Kate Ferguson: quoted, 94 Ellis, S. M.: essay by, cited, 14 Elwin, Malcolm: cited, 197n. 12; quoted, 197n. 8 ‘Empathy and Identity in Vernon Lee’s Hauntings’ (article by Nicole Fluhr): quoted, 88 Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (study by Andrew Smith and William Hughes): Introduction to, quoted, 133, 160 ‘Empty House, The’ (story by Algernon Blackwood): mentioned, 98 English and Scottish Popular Ballads, The (collection by Francis James Child), 50 Englishwomen in India, 153–4 ‘Ensign Tom Pepper’ (pseudonym employed by Ellen Wood), 137 ‘Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad’ (by Sir Walter Scott): praises Anne Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, 27 ‘Evil Other Women’ motif, 51–2, 53 Fantastic, The: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (study by Tzvetan Todorov): quoted, 6 Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (study by Rosemary Jackson): cited, 183n. 23 ‘fatal sexuality’, 50

‘fatal’ women: literary incarnations of, 24 Fatal Women of Romanticism (study by Adriana Craciun): mentioned, 177n. 13; quoted, 23, 24, 32, 45 ‘Female Gothic’ (gender distinction within supernatural literature tradition), 15, 16–17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 48, 51, 52, 97, 130, 165, 171–2 ‘Female Gothic’: distinguished from ‘Male Gothic’, 97 Female Gothic, The (study by Juliann Fleenor): quoted, 15 ‘Female Gothic and the Institutionalisation of Gothic Studies’ (essay by Lauren Fitzgerald: quoted, 15 Female Gothic, The: New Directions (study by Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith): cited, 18; Introduction to, cited, 15 female revenants (as literary devices), 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33­–4, 40, 46, 47 ‘Female Sexuality in “The Poor Clare”: The Demon in the House’ (article by Maureen T. Reddy): quoted, 184n. 36 female stereotypes, 23 Fick, Thomas: quoted, 31 Finucane, Ronald C.: quoted, 138 First Fruits (collection of poems by Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls), 180n. 37 Fisher, Benjamin F.: cited, 103 ‘Fitzgerald, Miss’ (fictional ghost in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s

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Index story ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’), 115, 116, 117; mentioned, 129 ‘Fitzgerald, Bridget’ (fictional character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s story ‘The Poor Clare’), 55, 60, 61, 63 Fitzgerald, Lauren: quoted, concerning importance of Ellen Moers, 15 ‘Fitzgerald, Lucy’ (fictional character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s story ‘The Poor Clare’), 49, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62; mentioned, 64 ‘Fitzgerald, Mary’ (fictional character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s story ‘The Poor Clare’), 56, 57, 60 Fleenor, Juliann: quoted, 15 Fluhr, Nicole: quoted, 88 For Maurice (supernatural work by Vernon Lee): mentioned, 75 ‘Forbes, Gordon’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’), 155 Foster, Shirley: cited, quoted, 184n. 27 Four Ghost Stories (collection by Mary Louisa Molesworth): mentioned, 98, 112; reviews of, quoted, 117, 118 ‘Frank’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’), 155 Freud, Sigmund: quoted, 59 Fuss, Diana: quoted, 23

Future for Astyanax, A: Character and Desire in Literature (study by Leo Bersani): quoted, 56 Galbraith, Lettice: collection of ghost stories by, republished, 170 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 4; begins two fragmentary ghost stories, 185n. 37; describes visit to Shottery, 53; employs supernatural female characters to prey on weak men, 49; letter of, quoted, 53; mentioned, 14, 17, 19, 20, 192n. 45; writings of, characterized, 52, 89, 90 ‘Gaskell’s Ghosts: Truths in Disguise’ (article by Carol A. Martin): quoted, 63 Gelder, Ken: essay by, quoted, 165; study by, cited, 150, 156 gender inequality, 20, 22, 25 General Review of British and Foreign Literature: describes novel by Charlotte Dacre, 179n. 36 Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, A: Mapping History’s Nightmares (study by Robert Mighall): cited, 92, 201n. 34; quoted, 132 George Geith (novel by Charlotte Riddell): mentioned, 100 ‘Geraldine’ (fictional character in Anne Bannerman’s Gothic ballad ‘The Perjured Nun’), 27, 28, 29 ‘Ghost in the Garden Room, The’ (story by Elizabeth Gaskell): mentioned, 188n. 3; Preface to, quoted, 54 224

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Index see also ‘Crooked Branch, The’ ghost stories: characteristics of, stated, 14 ghost stories by women: recently published anthologies of, enumerated, 204n. 6 ‘Ghost Story, A’ (keepsake story by the Countess of Blessington), 1 Ghost Story, 1840–1920, The: A Cultural History (study by Andrew Smith), 7, 11, 12; quoted, 96, 105 ‘Ghost Story and Its Exponents, The’ (essay by S. M. Ellis): cited, 14 ghosts: associated with good, evil, 41 Ghosts and Family Legends: A Volume for Christmas (collection of short stories by Catherine Crowe), 4; mentioned, 195n. 61; republished, 171 ‘Ghost’s Name, The’ (story by Mary Elizabeth Braddon): mentioned, 195n. 59 ‘Ghost’s Petition, The’ (poem by Christina Rossetti), 64 ‘Ghosts and Right Reason’ (essay by Andrew Lang), 202n. 43 Gift, Theo: collection of ghost stories by, republished, 170 Gilbert, R. A.: introduction to anthology edited by, quoted, 1 ‘Gil-Martin’ (fictional character in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner): mentioned, 183n. 19

‘Gisborne, Squire’ (fictional character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s story ‘The Poor Clare’), 55, 56, 58, 60 Gladstone, William: book by, influences Margaret Oliphant, 196n. 69 Goblin Market and Other Poems: mentioned, 64 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: female revenant poem by, mentioned, 24 ‘Goodchild, Julia’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’), 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 156 ‘Gordon, Mrs’ (fictional character in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s story ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’), 116, 117 ‘Gordon, Lillie’ (fictional character), 181n. 50 ‘Gostock, Miss’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘Nut Bush Farm’), 191n. 34 Gothic (study by Fred Botting): quoted, 89, 92 Gothic ballads by women writers: characteristics of, 25 Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts: study by Christine Birthin, 2010): cited, 8; quoted, 60 Gothic literary genre, 8, 9, 92, 94, 132, 133, 160, 164 ‘Gothic Mirror, The’ (article by Claire Kahane): quoted, 57, 80 225

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Index Gray, Margaret K.: cited, 122; quoted, 121, 123 Green, Roger Lancelyn: quoted, 112 Gregg, Hilda: essay assumed to be by, quoted, 134, 134–5, 135, 136 Gregory, Horace: Introduction to book by, quoted, 76 ‘Grim White Woman, The’ (female revenant poem by M. G. Lewis): mentioned, 24 Grimes, Hilary: cited, 115; quoted, 114 Grudin, Peter D.: quoted, 50 Guthrie, [Thomas] Anstey, 173n. 10; criticizes methods of Society for Psychical Research, 168, 169; essay by, cited, 4–5; praises work of Catherine Crowe, 5 Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester, The: The Life of Mrs. Gaskell’s Demon (study by Felicia Bonaparte): quoted, 61, 64 Haunted Houses and Family Traditions of Great Britain, The (book by John H. Ingram): Preface to, quoted, 91 ‘Haunted Interpreter in Oliphant’s Supernatural Fiction, The’ (essay by Esther H. Schor): quoted, 122 ‘Haunted Self, The: Visions of the Ghost and the Woman at the Fin-de-Siecle’ (essay by Hilary Grimes): quoted, 114 Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost

Stories by American Women (study by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar): quoted, 16 ‘“Haunting Idea,” The: Female Gothic Metaphors and Feminist Theory’ (essay by Diana Wallace): quoted, 15– 16, 16 Hauntings (collection of short stories by Vernon Lee), 75; mentioned, 77; Preface to, cited, 75–6; quoted, 3, 3–4 ‘hauntology’ (term employed by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx), 6 ‘Hennings, Mr’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The WalnutTree House’), 109 Henry, Matthew: quoted, 189n. 17 Henry of Trastamare, 40 ‘Her Last Wishes’ (story by Bithia Mary Croker): quoted, 201n. 34 Herdt, Gilbert: cited, 45 ‘Hindu Ascetic, The’ (poem by Sir Alfred Lyall): quoted, 151 Hoeveler, Diane Long: mentioned, 17 Hofland, Mrs: keepsake story by, 1 Hogg, James: mentioned, 183n. 19 Homans, Margaret: cited, 61, 183n. 20 Hood, Thomas, 2 ‘Hour and the Ghost, The’ (poem by Christina Rossetti), 49, 64, 65–68; quoted, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70

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Index Hours of Solitude (collection of Gothic ballads by Charlotte Dacre): mentioned, 25, 33 Howitt, Mary, 138 Hughes, William: quoted, 132, 133, 160 Ideas about India (historical study by Wilfred Scawen Blunt): quoted, 153 In the Dark and Other Ghost Stories (collection by Mary E. Penn), 170 In the Kingdom of Kerry (collection of short stories by Bithia Mary Croker), 198n. 28 India: Englishwomen, 153–4 Indian caretaker (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’), 148–9, 151, 153, 155 ‘Indian Mutiny in Fiction, The’ (essay assumed to be by Hilda Gregg): quoted, 134, 134–5, 135, 136 Indian Uprising (1857), 5, 134, 135, 139, 142, 157, 202n. 40 indigestion: blamed for supernatural sightings, 202n. 43 Ingram, John H.: quoted, 91 ‘Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism’ (study by Andrew Smith and William Hughes): quoted, 133 ‘invisibility’ of woman writer, 10–11 ‘Irene’ (fictional character in Charlotte Dacre’s Gothic

ballad ‘The Skeleton Priest’), 35, 36, 37, 38­–9 Jackson, Rosemary, 176n. 43; quoted, 16, 55–6 Jacobs, Jane M.: study by, cited, 150, 156 Jameson raid, 2 Jane Eyre (novel by Charlotte Brontë): mentioned, 183n. 19 ‘Janet’ (fictional character in M. G. Lewis’s poem ‘The Grim White Woman’): described, 24–5 ‘Jarvis, Mr’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘The Open Door’), 120, 122 ‘Jarvis, Mrs’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘The Open Door’), 120, 121 Jason and Other Stories (collection of short stories by Bithia Mary Croker), 198n. 28 Jay, Elisabeth: cited, 195n. 60, 196n. 69; quoted, 119, 129 Johnny Ludlow series (collections of short stories by Ellen Wood), 136 ‘Johnson, Hannah’ (fictional character in unfinished ghost story by Elizabeth Gaskell), 185n. 37 Jones, Ann H.: mentioned, 179n. 34; quoted, 38 Jones, Shirley: study by (with Kay Boardman), quoted, 21 Kahane, Claire: quoted, 57, 80 Kane, Mary Patricia: quoted, 79, 84, 85

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Index Kapila, Shuchi: study by, quoted, 149; quoted, 155, 157 ‘Karwassa’ (fictional Indian town in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’), 146 King William’s Ghost (pamphlet by Sarah Malthus), 1 Kipling, Rudyard, 135, 144, 199n. 29 ‘Knowledge, Belief and the Supernatural at the Imperial Margin’ (essay by Roger Luckhurst): cited, 139; quoted, 142 Kolmar, Wendy K.: quoted, 16 Kurth-Voigt, Lieselotte E.: essay by, quoted, 24 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci: The Revenant as Femme Fatale in Romantic Poetry’ (essay by Lieselotte E. Kurth-Voigt): quoted, 24 ‘Lady Farquhar’ see ‘Margaret, “Lady Farquhar”’ ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’ (story by Mary Louisa Molesworth): discussed, 98, 192n. 45; quoted, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117 ‘Lady Mary’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’) see ‘Old Lady Mary’ Landow, George P.: quoted, 71, 72 Lang, Andrew: essay by, 202n.43; mentioned, 168 Late Victorian Gothic Tales: Introduction to, by Roger

Luckhurst, quoted, 150; mentioned, 170 ‘Latest Thing in Ghosts, The’ (article): quoted, 91, 92 ‘Laugh of the Medusa, The’ (study by Hélène Cixous): quoted, 16 Laun, Ellen M.: study by, cited, 184n. 36 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 10 Lee, Vernon: characterized as employing blurred gender boundaries, 87; employs supernatural female characters to prey on weak men, 49; mentioned, 19; quoted, 3; writings of, characterized, 52, 89, 90, 169 Lewis, M. G.: female revenant poem by, mentioned, 24 Life’s Secret, A (novel by Ellen Wood), 136, 197n. 12 Lifted Veil, The: The Book of Fantastic Literature by Women (collection by A. Susan Williams): mentioned, 170 Liggins, Emma: edits new editions of collected ghost stories, 171 ‘Ling, Mrs’ (fictional character in Ellen Wood’s story ‘A Mysterious Visitor’), 139 Linton, Eliza Lynn: disparages writings of Ellen Wood, 197n. 8 Literary Journal: describes novel by Charlotte Dacre, 179n. 36 Literary Women (study by Ellen Moers): quoted, 15, 56 ‘Little Brass God, The’ (story by Bithia Mary Croker), 145

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Index ‘Little Mary’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’), 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129 Little Pilgrim in the Unseen, A (collection of stories by Margaret Oliphant), 118 ‘Lois the Witch’ (story by Elizabeth Gaskell): mentioned, 54 Long, Edward: study by, quoted, 200n. 34 ‘Lord Henrie’ (fictional character in Anne Bannerman’s Gothic ballad ‘The Perjured Nun’), 27, 28, 29 ‘Love from the North’ (poem by Christina Rossetti): mentioned, 185n. 42 ‘Loyd, Nellie’ (fictional narrator of Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’), 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156 Luckhurst, Roger: comment by, quoted, 164; essay by, cited, 139, quoted, 142, 150 Lucknow, India: described in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’, 157–8 ‘Lucy’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 162, 163 ‘Lucy’ (fictional character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s story ‘The Poor Clare’) see “Fitzgerald, Lucy’ Lyall, Edna: quoted, 183n. 16 Lyall, Sir Alfred, 152; poem by, quoted, 151

Lynch, Eve M.: essays by, mentioned, 176n. 47 Mackay, Charles: quoted, 178n. 22 ‘Maclean, Jennet’ (fictional character), 181n. 50 MacMillan, Margaret: study by, quoted, 148 Magazine of Poetry and Literary Review, The: publishes brief biography of Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls, 180n. 37 ‘Main, Constance’ (fictional character in Ellen Wood’s story ‘A Mysterious Visitor’), 141 Makala, Melissa Edmundson: edits new edition of Alice Perrin’s East of Suez, 171 ‘Male and Female Gothic’ (gender distinction within supernatural literature tradition), 14, 16 ‘Male Gothic’ (gender distinction within supernatural literature tradition), 16; distinguished from ‘Female Gothic’, 97 Malthus, Sarah: pamphlet by, 1 ‘Marchmont, Captain’ (fictional character in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s story ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady), 117 Marcus, Sharon, 97–8; quoted, 98, 103, 111–12, 195n.59, 201n. 34 ‘Margaret, “Lady Farquhar”’ (fictional character in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s story ‘Lady Farquhar’s Old Lady’), 113, 114, 115, 116, 117; characterized, 98

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Index Margaret Oliphant: Selected Short Stories of the Supernatural (collection by Margaret K. Gray): briefly quoted, 121; Introduction to, cited, 122, quoted, 123 ‘Married to the Empire: The Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel’ (essay by Alison Sainsbury): quoted, 156 Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947 (study by Mary A. Procida): quoted, 162 Marryat, Florence: memoir by, quoted, 138; mentioned, 95, 96; novel by, quoted, 178n. 22 Marsh, Jan, 67; quoted, 66, 73, 74 ‘Martha’ (fictional character in Ellen Wood’s story ‘A Mysterious Visitor’), 140 Martin, Carol A.: quoted, 63 Martineau, Harriet: praises writings of Ellen Wood, 197n. 8 ‘Mary’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’) see ‘Little Mary’ Maxwell Drewitt (novel by Charlotte Riddell): Introduction to, by Robert Lee Wolff, quoted, 100 ‘May, Mrs’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The Walnut-Tree House’), 111 Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood (biography by Charles W.

Wood): cited, 138; quoted, 137 ‘memsahib’ (Hindi for ‘lady master’): term described, 153 Memsahibs, The: The Women of Victorian India (study by Pat Barr): quoted, 202n. 48 Mighall, Robert: cited, 92, 201n. 34; quoted, 132 Milbank, Alison: mentioned, 17 Mildred Arkell (novel by Ellen Wood), 197n. 12 Miles, Robert: briefly quoted, 94 Minerva Press: female authors of, characterized, 92–3 Miscellaneous Works of the Rev. Matthew Henry, The: quoted, 189n. 17 ‘Miseries of Christmas, The’ (article by Charlotte Riddell): quoted, 100 ‘Missing Gaskell Tale Found, A’ (article by Ellen M. Laun): cited, 184n. 36 ‘Mistresses of the Macabre’ (series of collections of ghost stories written by women): mentioned, 170 Mitchell, Frank Johnstone, 181n. 37 Mitre Court (novel by Charlotte Riddell): mentioned, 101 Moers, Ellen: mentioned, 17, 94; quoted, 15, 56 Molesworth, Gwen: mentioned, 113 Molesworth, Mary Louisa: fictional ghosts created by, criticized, 118; mentioned, 14, 19, 94, 95, 96, 189n. 17;

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Index quoted, 113, 113, 114, 115, 116, 192n. 45; stories by, characterized, 97, 98, 130 ‘Moncrieff, Dr’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘The Open Door’), 121, 124 ‘Monsters and Madwomen: Changing Female Gothic’ (article by Karen F. Stein): quoted, 50–1 Moody, Nickianne: quoted, 13, 14, 182n. 50, 190n. 23 Moreton, Andrew see Defoe, Daniel ‘Mortimer, Colonel’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘The Open Door’), 120, 121, 122, 123 ‘Morven’ (fictional character in Charlotte Dacre’s Gothic ballad ‘The Aireal Chorus’), 33–4 ‘“Mother Radcliff”: Ann Radcliffe and the Female Gothic’ (article by Robert Miles: briefly quoted, 94 Mount Temple, Lord see Cowper-Temple, William Francis Mrs. Gaskell’s Tales of Mystery and Horror (collection by Michael Ashley): mentioned, 54 Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles (novel by Ellen Wood), 136, 197n. 12 ‘Mrs J. H. Riddell and Late Victorian Literary Gothicism’ (article by Benjamin F. Fisher): cited, 103

Mrs Molesworth (biography by Jane Cooper): cited, 193n. 46; quoted, 192n. 42, n. 43 Mrs. Molesworth (biography by Roger Lancelyn Green): quoted, 112 Mrs Oliphant: ‘A Fiction to Herself’ (biography by Elisabeth Jay): cited, 195n. 60, 196n. 69; quoted, 119, 129 Mulholland, Rosa: mentioned, 14 ‘Mysterious Visitor, A’ (story by Ellen Wood), 139; quoted, 140, 140–1, 141, 142–3, 143 Neubauer, Hans-Joachim: study by, cited, 142 Night Side of Nature, The; or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers (prose work by Catherine Crowe), 4; Preface to, quoted, 4; quoted, 91, 167, 195n. 61 Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (study by Julia Briggs): quoted, 54, 169 Nightingale, Florence, 46 Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women (collection by Glennis Byron): quoted, 46 Not for the Night-Time (collection of ghost stories by Theo Gift), 170 Notable Women Authors of the Day, Biographical Sketches (book by Helen C. Black): quoted, 99 Number Ninety and Other Ghost Stories (collection by Bithia Mary Croker), 170

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Index Old Cantonment, The (collection of short stories by Bithia Mary Croker), 198n. 28 ‘Old House in Vauxhall Walk, The’ (story by Charlotte Riddell): cited, 98; described, 102, 103–4; quoted, 102, 103, 104 ‘Old Lady Mary’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary: A Story of the Seen and Unseen’), 123; ghost of, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129 ‘Old Lady Mary: A Story of the Seen and Unseen’ (story by Margaret Oliphant), 119, 123, 124; quoted, 124, 125, 126 ‘Old Mrs Jones’ (story by Charlotte Riddell): mentioned, 101 ‘Old Nurse’s Story, The’: mentioned, 53, 54, 55 ‘Old Woman of Berkeley, The’ (female revenant poem by Robert Southey): mentioned, 24 Oliphant, Margaret: influenced by book by William Gladstone, 196n. 69; letters written by, quoted, 119; mentioned, 19, 94, 95, 96, 189n. 17; stories by, characterized, 97, 99, 129, 130 Oliphant, Tids, 119 On the Face of the Waters (novel by Flora Annie Steel), 5; criticized by reviewer, 135–6 ‘On Ghosts’ (essay by Mary Shelley), 2; quoted, 3 ‘Open Door, The’ (story by Margaret Oliphant):

described, 99; fictional female ghost in, mentioned, 119, 191n. 34; quoted, 119– 20, 120, 121, 122, 123 ‘Ordie, Captain’ (fictional character in Ellen Wood’s story ‘A Mysterious Visitor’), 139, 140, 143, 144 ‘Ordie, Louisa’ (fictional character in Ellen Wood’s story ‘A Mysterious Visitor’), 139, 140, 141, 143 ‘Orlando’ (fictional character in Charlotte Dacre’s Gothic ballad ‘The Skeleton Priest’), 35, 36, 37, 38 ‘Orsini, Duke of Stimigliano’ (fictional character in Vernon Lee’s story ‘Amour Dure’), 77 Other side of the Medal, The (account of 1857 Indian Up­­ rising by Edward Thompson): quoted, 202n. 40 ‘Other Woman’ (motif of good v. evil in women), 51–2 ‘Otherness’ (of British, in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 159, 160 Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (anthology edited by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert): introduction to, quoted, 1; mentioned, 170 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth: article by, mentioned, 200n. 34, quoted, 152 Paton, Margaret, 193n. 46 ‘Penitent, the’ (fictional character in Anne Bannerman’s Gothic

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Index ballad ‘The Penitent’s Confession’), 30, 31, 32, 33 ‘Penitent’s Confession, The’ (Gothic ballad by Anne Bannerman), 25, 29–30; quoted, 30, 30–1, 32, 33 Penn, Mary E.: collection of ghost stories by, republished, 170 Percy, Thomas: letter from, quoted, 26 Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (study by Eugenia C. DeLamotte): quoted, 51–2 ‘Perjured Nun’ (fictional character in Anne Bannerman’s Gothic ballad ‘The Perjured Nun), 28, 29 ‘Perjured Nun, The’ (Gothic ballad by Anne Bannerman), 25; quoted, 27, 28, 28–9, 29 Perrin, Alice: collections of ghost stories by, re-issued, 171; mentioned, 144; writings of, praised, 199n. 29 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart: mentioned, 196n. 68 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (novel by Oscar Wilde): mentioned, 84 Poems (first collection of poems by Anne Bannerman): mentioned, 26 Poems (subsequent collection of poems by Anne Bannerman): mentioned, 27 Poetical Register: reviews Anne Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, 177n. 19

‘Poor Clare, The’ (story by Elizabeth Gaskell): quoted, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62, 63; female sexuality in, 184n. 36 ‘Poor Ghost, The’ (poem by Christina Rossetti), 49, 64, 68–71; quoted, 68, 69, 70 Pope Jacynth and More Supernatural Tales (by Vernon Lee): mentioned, 76 Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales (by Vernon Lee): mentioned, 75 Popular Victorian Women Writers (study by Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones): Introduction to, quoted, 21 Portal, Iris: quoted, 148 ‘Postcolonial Ghost Story, The’ (study by Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs): cited, 150, 156 ‘Postcolonial Gothic’ (essay by Ken Gelder): quoted, 165 ‘Prentiss Mrs’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’), 125, 127, 128 Pretty Miss Neville (novel by Bithia Mary Croker), 145, 198n. 28 Price, Elizabeth Evans (mother of Ellen Wood), 198n. 14 Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, The: mentioned, 64 Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (novel by James Hogg): mentioned, 183n. 16 Procida, Mary A.: study by, quoted, 162

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Index Proper Pride (novel by Bithia Mary Croker), 145, 198n. 28 ‘Prophecy of Merlin, The’ (Gothic tale by Anne Bannerman): engraving used as illustration for, seen as scandalous, 177n. 13 Pulham, Patricia: quoted, 86, 87 Punter, David: essay by, quoted, 164 ‘Queen of Beauty’ (character in Anne Bannerman’s Gothic tale ‘The Prophecy of Merlin’): engraving of, seen as scandalous, 177n. 13 Radcliffe, Ann: mentioned, 15, 17, 52, 94, 96 ‘Ravenna and Her Ghosts’ (essay by Vernon Lee): review of, quoted, 76 Raza, Rosemary Cargill: biographical entry on Bithia Mary Croker by, quoted, 164 ‘Red Bungalow, The’ (story by Bithia Mary Croker): described, 200n. 32 Reddy, Maureen T.: article by, quoted, 184n. 36 Reed, Toni: quoted, 49 ‘Regretted Ghost, The’ (keepsake story by Mrs Hofland), 1 Relations and What They Related & Other Weird Tales, The (collection by G. M. Robins), 171 Rhetoric of English India, The (study by Sara Suleri): quoted, 163 Rhodes, Cecil, 2

Riddell, Charlotte: disparages writings of Ellen Wood, 197n. 8; interview of, quoted, 99, 190n. 30; letter from, quoted, 100; mentioned, 14, 19, 94, 95, 96, 189n. 17; new edition of collected ghost stories by, issued, 171; quoted, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 190n. 24; stories by, characterized, 97, 102, 130, praised, 101, 189n. 22 Riddell, J. H.: mentioned, 100 ‘Rinaldi, Ferdinando’ (fictional character in Vernon Lee’s supernatural tale ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’), 80, 81, 82 Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762– 1800, The (study by E. J. Clery): quoted, 75 Robbins, Ruth: quoted, 79, 85, 88 Robins, G. M.: collection of ghost stories by, republished, 171 ‘Roland’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘The Open Door’), 120, 122 Rolls, Elizabeth Harcourt, 46, 47, 180n. 37; mentioned, 19–20, 95; poem by, characterized, 25 Romantic Gothic ballads, 17 ‘Romantic Spinstrelsy: Anne Bannerman and the Sexual Politics of the Ballad’ (article by Adriana Craciun): quoted, 32 Romantic women poets, 24

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Index ‘Ronald’ (character in M. G. Lewis’s poem ‘The Grim White Woman’), 25 ‘Rosamond’ (fictional character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s story ‘The Poor Clare’): mentioned, 55 ‘Rose Matilda’ (fictional character in Charlotte Dacre’s novel Zofloya), 180n. 36 Rossetti, Christina: employs supernatural female characters to prey on weak men, 49; mentioned, 19, 20; revenants of, 18; writings of, characterized, 52, 89, 90 ‘Rossetti’s Cold Women’ (article by Susan Conley): quoted, 73 Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (study by Patrick Brantlinger): quoted, 145 Rumour, The (work by HansJoachim Neubauer): cited, 142 Sainsbury, Alison: study by, quoted, 156 Salmonson, Jessica Amanda: Preface to anthology by, quoted, 14 ‘Sandy the Tinker’ (story by Charlotte Riddell): mentioned, 101 Savi, Mrs E. W.: mentioned, 144 Schor, Esther H.: quoted, 122 Schreiner, Olive, 2 Scott, Sir Walter: praises Anne Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, 27

Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos’d, The: Preface of, quoted, 41 ‘See What a Big Wide Bed It Is! Mrs Henry Wood and the Philistine Imagination’ (essay by Deborah Wynne): cited, 197n. 13 Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (biography by Robert Lee Wolff): mentioned, 176n. 47 ‘Sermon on Family Religion’ (by Rev. Matthew Henry): quoted, 189n. 17 ‘Shadow in the Moonlight, The’ (story by Mary Louisa Molesworth): mentioned, 193n. 45 Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction (study by Neil Wilson): quoted, 194n. 54 ‘Shandon, Bob’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 157 ‘Shandon, Susan’ (fictional narrator of Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 157–8, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164 ‘Shandon, Tom’: (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 157, 158 ‘Shandon, Tor’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 157 Sharpe, Jenny: quoted, 142, 153 235

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Index Shelley, Mary: describes appeal of supernatural stories, 2–3 ‘Short Church History, A’: attributed to Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls, 181n. 37 ‘Simson, Dr’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘The Open Door’), 122 ‘Since I Died’ (story by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps): mentioned, 196n. 68 Sinclair, May: mentioned, 17 Singh, Bhupal, 144; quoted, 144–5 ‘Sir Rupert’ (fictional character in Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls’s ‘Ballad of Sir Rupert’), 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 Sistrum and Other Ghost Stories, The (collection by Alice Perrin), 171 ‘Skeleton Priest, The; or, the Marriage of Death’ (Gothic ballad by Charlotte Dacre), 25, 35, 38–9 Sladen, Douglas: interviews Bithia Mary Croker, 145 Smajic, Srdjan: article by, quoted, 9, 9–10 Smith, Andrew: mentioned, 18; quoted, 7, 8, 11, 12, 96, 105, 132, 133, 160 Snake Lady and Other Stories, The (book by Horace Gregory): Introduction to, quoted, 76 Society for Psychical Research: methods of, criticized by Anstey Guthrie, 168; mentioned, 139, 188n. 1 ‘Song’ (poem by Christina Rossetti), 71–2; quoted, 71, 72

Southey, Robert: female revenant poem by, mentioned, 24 ‘Spanish Nun’ see ‘Spectre Nun’ speaking corpses (literary device), 23, 24, 31 Specter or Delusion? The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction (study by Margaret L. Carter): quoted, 150–1 Specters of Marx (study by Jacques Derrida): mentioned, 58; quoted, 6, 6–7, 7, 87 ‘Spectral Politics: M. E. Braddon and the Spirits of Social Reform’ (essay by Eve M. Lynch): mentioned, 176n. 47 ‘Spectral Politics: The Victorian Ghost Story and the Domestic Servant’ (essay by Eve M. Lynch): mentioned, 176n. 47 ‘Spectre Nun’ (fictional character in Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls’s ‘Ballad of Sir Rupert’), 40–1, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47 Spiritualism, 11, 178n. 23, 181n. 50 Spurious Ghosts: The Fantastic Tales of Vernon Lee (study by Mary Patricia Kane): quoted, 79, 84, 85 Srebrnik, Patricia Thomas: quotes favorable comment by Anne Thackeray concerning writing by Charlotte Riddell, 189n. 22 ‘Stainton, Alfred’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The WalnutTree House’), 108, 110, 111; mentioned, 124

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Index ‘Stainton, Edgar’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The WalnutTree House’), 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112; mentioned, 129 ‘Stainton, Felix’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The WalnutTree House’), 108, 110 ‘Stainton, George’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The WalnutTree House’), 109; mentioned, 124, 129 ‘Stainton, Mrs Lancelot’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The Walnut-Tree House’), 110 ‘Starkey, Mrs’ (fictional character in Bithia Mary Croker’s story ‘To Let’), 161, 162, 163 State Secret, A (collection of short stories by Bithia Mary Croker), 198n. 28 Steel, Flora Annie: describes plot of her novel On the Face of the Waters), 5; novel by, criticized by reviewer, 135– 6; writings of, praised, 199n. 29 Stein, Karen F.: quoted, 50–1 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 10 Stewart, Clare: quoted, 12, 12–13, 13 Stoddart, Helen: quoted, 50 Stoneman, Patsy: quoted, 61 Stories of the Seen and Unseen (collection of stories by Margaret Oliphant), 118

‘Story of the Rippling Train, The’ (story by Mary Louisa Molesworth), 192n. 43 Struggle for Fame, A (novel by Charlotte Riddell): review of, extensively quoted, 101 Stubbs, Patricia: study by, quoted, 130 Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler (book by William Gladstone): influences Margaret Oliphant, 196n. 69 Suleri, Sara: study by, quoted, 163 Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction, A (study by Bhupal Singh), 144 Swann, Thomas Burnett: cited, 65 Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (Gothic ballad collection by Anne Bannerman), 2, 26; mentioned, 25; praised by Sir Walter Scott, 27; reviewed in British periodicals, 177n. 19 Tales of Wonder (collection of Gothic ballads by M. G. Lewis): mentioned, 24 Telle, Franklin D.: publishes brief biography of Elizabeth Harcourt Rolls, 180n. 37 Thackeray, Anne: praises writing of Charlotte Riddell, 189n. 22 There Is No Death: My Eyewitness Experiences with the Great Mediums (memoir by Florence Marryat): quoted, 138–9

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Index Third Sex, Third Gender (study by Gilbert Herde): cited, 45 Thompson, Edward: account of 1857 Indian Uprising by, quoted, 202n. 40 Thurschwell, Pamela: quoted, 93 ‘Timpson, Mr’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The Walnut-Tree House’), 108 ‘To be Read at Dusk’ (short story by Charles Dickens), 4 To Let (collection of short stories by Bithia Mary Croker), 146, 198n. 28; highly praised by contemporary reviewers, 199n. 31 ‘To Let’ (story by Bithia Mary Croker), 146, 160–1, 164, 200n. 32; quoted, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163 ‘To Robert Anderson, M.D., With a Copy of the First Edition of the Author’s Poems’ (ode by Anne Bannerman): mentioned, 177n. 17 Todorov, Tzvetan: quoted, 6 ‘Toplis, Mrs’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The Walnut-Tree House’), 109, 110, 111 Torok, Maria: theories of, mentioned, 60 ‘Travers, John” (pseudonym of Mrs G. H. Bell), 144 ‘Trepka, Spirideon’ (fictional character in Vernon Lee’s story ‘Amour Dure’), 50, 77, 78–80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88

Tromp, Marlene: book by, cited, 73, quoted, 74, 178n. 23, 182n. 50 Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (novel by Olive Schreiner), 2 ‘Trouble with Ghost-seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story, The’ (article by Srdjan Smajic): quoted, 9, 9–10 ‘Turner, Mrs’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’), 126, 127, 128 ‘Turner, Connie’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’), 127, 128 Twenty Years of My Life (memoir by Douglas Sladen): praises writings of Bithia Mary Croker, Alice Perrin, and Flora Annie Steel, 199n. 29 Twilight Stories (collection of ghost stories by Rhoda Broughton): new edition of, issued, 171 Two Stories of the Seen and Unseen (book by Margaret Oliphant), 119 ‘Tynan, Miss’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’), 103, 104; mentioned, 129 ‘uncanny’ (notion advanced by Sigmund Freud), 59, 60, 61 ‘Uncanny, The’ (study by Sigmund Freud): quoted, 59, 60

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Index ‘Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic’ (essay by Diana Wallace): quoted, 9, 17 Uncanny Tales (collection by Mary Louisa Molesworth): mentioned, 112 ‘uncomfortable houses’, 97, 188n. 17 Unforgettable Ghost Stories by Women Writers (collection edited by Michael Ashley): mentioned, 170 ‘Unquiet Grave, The’ (English folk song), 50 verandahs: significance of, within British Empire, 162 Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (by Vineta Colby): cited, 77, 186n. 70; quoted, 75 ‘vicar, the’ (fictional character in Margaret Oliphant’s story ‘Old Lady Mary’), 127 Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (study by Vanessa Dickerson): quoted, 10, 10–11, 45, 95, 103, 129 Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers (collection edited by Richard Dalby): mentioned, 170; Preface to, quoted, 14 Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (study by Julian Wolfreys, 2002): 8 Victorian Secrets (independent publisher of books from and

about the nineteenth century): mentioned, 171 Victorian Spiritualism see Spiritualism Victorian Supernatural, The (study by Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell): Introduction to, quoted, 93 Victorian Wallflowers: A Panoramic Survey of the Popular Literary Periodicals: chapter in, by Malcolm Elwin, quoted, 197n. 8, n. 12 Victorians and Their Books, The (study by Amy Cruse): cited, 21 Village Tales and Jungle Tragedies (collection of short stories by Bithia Mary Croker), 198n. 28 ‘Violence and Disorder in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Short Stories’ (essay by Shirley Foster: cited, quoted, 184n. 27 ‘Visible Margins: Women Writers and the English Ghost Story’ (essay by Nickianne Moody): quoted, 13, 14, 182n. 50, 190n. 23 Virago Book of Ghost Stories, The (collection edited by Richard Dalby): mentioned, 170 Waldman, Suzanne, 67; quoted, 64, 72–3 Wallace, Diana: cited, 46; mentioned, 17, 18; quoted, 9, 15, 17 ‘Walnut-Tree House, The’ (story by Charlotte Riddell): 239

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Index described, 105–7; mentioned 98; quoted, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110 Ward, A. W.: quoted, 54 Warwick, Alexandra: essay by, quoted, 165 ‘“Weird Fascination”: The Response to Victorian Women’s Ghost Stories’ (study by Clare Stewart): quoted, 12, 12–13, 13 Weird Stories (collection by Charlotte Riddell): mentioned, 98; new edition of, issued, 171; review of, quoted, 101 What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (collection by Jessica Amanda Salmonson): Introduction to, quoted, 16; mentioned, 170; Preface to, quoted, 14 ‘William’ (fictional character in Charlotte Riddell’s story ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’), 103 Williams, A. Susan: book by, mentioned, 170 Williams, Anne: cited, 17, 46; quoted, 94, 97, 107–8, 108, 201n. 34 Wilson, Neil: quoted, 194n. 54 ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’ (supernatural tale by Vernon Lee), 80–3; quoted, 80, 81, 81–2, 82 Wolff, Robert Lee: biography of Mary Elizabeth Braddon by, mentioned, 176n. 47; quoted, 100

Wolfreys, Julian: studies by, cited, 7–8 Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (study by Nina Auerbach): quoted, 31, 40, 42, 43, 45–6 ‘Woman in India: Her Influence and Position’ (article by J. E. Dawson): quoted, 153, 154, 158 Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel, 1880–1920 (study by Patricia Stubbs): quoted, 130 Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations (study by Edna Lyall): quoted, 183n. 16 Women of the Raj (study by Margaret MacMillan): quoted, 148 women writers: ‘invisibility’ of, 10–11 Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (study by Edward Copeland): quoted, 93, 93–4 Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (study by E. J. Clery): quoted, 22, 23 Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti (study by Thomas Burnett): cited, 65 Wood, Charles W.: biography of Ellen Wood by, quoted, 137, 138 Wood, Ellen, 2, 133, 134, 136; brief biography of, 136–8; mentioned, 19, 135; writings of, praised, criticized, 197 n.8

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Index Wood, Mrs Henry see Wood, Ellen Works of Mrs. Gaskell, The: Introduction to, quoted, 54 ‘“Worlds Not Realized”: The Work of Louisa Molesworth’ (essay by Jane Darcy): cited, 191n. 39, 193n. 46

Wynne, Deborah: essay by, cited, 197n. 13 Zofloya (Gothic novel by Charlotte Dacre): described by reviewers, 179n. 36; mentioned, 33, 179n. 34

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