Women in White and the New Gothic Cinema: Reinventing the Gothic Heroine

About the lecture

There has been a revival of interest in the Gothic heroine in the twenty-first century, in big budget films such as Crimson Peak, Poor Things, Nosferatu, Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights. This talk traces the history of the Gothic heroine back to the eighteenth-century novels of Ann Radcliffe, the highest paid author of her day. Paying particular attention to costume and the iconic image of the woman in white running from a dark house, Professor Catherine Spooner explores the ways in which contemporary writers and film-makers have positioned the Gothic heroine as embodying feminist resistance and dark romance.

About the speaker

Catherine Spooner is Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University, where she researches Gothic in literature, fashion and popular culture from the late-eighteenth century to the present. She is the author of Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Contemporary Gothic and Post-Millennial Gothic and the co-editor of four books including, most recently, The Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume 3: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. She has been a guest on a variety of TV and radio shows including BBC Breakfast and The Steve Lamacq Show on BBC Radio 6 Music and is interviewed regularly in the press when Gothic is deemed to be back in fashion. She is also a prize-winning writer of poetry and fiction with a Gothic slant.

About the film

Set in Victorian England, Crimson Peak tells the Gothic tale of a young woman who marries a mysterious bachelor and goes to live with him in his house. But as she quickly finds out, nothing is quite what it seems...

Please note that Crimson Peak has a 15 age rating and contains strong violence, horror, and sex.

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Host or Publisher Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now