Gothic fiction & The Female Writer

What do Gothic novels and the supernatural have to do with feminism? A surprising amount.

Back in the 18th century, Gothic novels and ghost stories – many written by and for women – began to gain serious popularity. Behind the eerie castles and haunted houses, many of these stories explored big questions about women’s roles in society: their work, education, independence, and sexuality.

This talk looks at how women writers used horror and the supernatural to push back against the expectations of their time. By turning everyday anxieties into eerie, unsettling fiction, they revealed the darker sides of patriarchy and colonialism. From Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the ghost stories of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and E. Nesbit, women have long used Gothic fiction to explore what it really costs to be independent. And as the popularity of horror films and series like The Haunting of Hill House show, the ghosts of lost female histories don’t stay buried for long.

Doors open at 6:30pm, talk starts at 7pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Dr Emma Liggins is a Reader in English Literature in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University and Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. She has published widely on the short story, Victorian women’s writing and the supernatural. Publications include (with Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins), The British Short Story (Palgrave, 2010), The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1850-1945: Gender, Space and Modernity (Palgrave, 2020) and a chapter on ‘The Edwardian Supernatural’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Gothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). She is currently researching memorial cards, cemetery headstones and dark tourism for a new book on Victorian and Edwardian Death Spaces: Gender and Memorialisation for Manchester University Press.

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