Abstract
In this final chapter I wish to explore developments in the women’s ghost story in the first decades of the twentieth century, and in particular, its relationship with both its Victorian forebears and with emerging literary modernism. Julia Briggs claimed in Night Visitors that the English ghost story had entered into decline in the period after 1918, with writers developing ‘inhibitions’ about addressing themselves to the ‘serious’ subjects that the nineteenth-century ghost story had dealt with and substituting for this a decadent preoccupation with demonstrating mere technical skill and innovation (1977, 23). More recently, however, Paul March-Russell, responding to Briggs’ claim in his work on May Sinclair, has argued that on the contrary the ghost story was ‘in transition, becoming a seedbed for that other rich and strange phenomenon known as Modernism’ (2006, 21). March-Russell’s contention accords with a growing body of work that sees the origins of literary modernism as existing partly in aspects of Victorian supernaturalism: in the spiritualist movement (Kontou 2009), in the period’s Gothic revival (Smith and Wallace 2001) and in its ghost fiction. Recent studies by David Seed (2001), Andrew Smith (2010), Claire Drewery (2011), Luke Thurston (2012) and others have explored short supernatural fictions by Sinclair, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen in this light, testifying to the ways in which renewed attention to women’s short fiction can reveal surprising connections between forms of writing considered disparate according to established forms of literary classification and historiography.
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Notes
- 1.
Among these ‘serious’ subjects Briggs includes questions around the survival of the self after death, and the nature of evil.
- 2.
See also Simon Hay, for the slightly different argument that ‘modernist writers found ways of doing new things with the ghost, mostly outside the confines of the ghost story proper’ (2011, 229). I would argue that we see more writers than Hay perhaps allows finding the ghost story enabling, rather than confining, when we turn our attention to female writers, as his own brief references to Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen would suggest (Hay’s argument focuses instead upon Henry James and two male modernist writers).
- 3.
- 4.
See also Drewery, for whom Woolf and Sinclair both intentionally blur the boundaries of the psychological and the supernatural to introduce into their short fiction ‘high’ modernist themes of timelessness, transcendence and intensity of meaning (2011, 69).
- 5.
March-Russell says this of Woolf specifically, but my chapter will argue it is equally applicable to Sinclair, Scott and Hunt.
- 6.
Although Thurston presents this withdrawal of authorial presence as a key characteristic of modernist fiction, he also describes Dickens’ 1866 ghost story, ‘The Signal-Man’, as offering a ‘foretaste’ of it.
- 7.
My account of Leys’ career is drawn from Dalby’s piece.
- 8.
This discovery adds weight to Dalby’s speculation that Leys may have published additional horror stories in anthologies under other noms de plume (2010, 172).
- 9.
Jack Sullivan mentions Scott just once, in his listing of ‘[w]riters who owe a large debt to [M. R.] James’, lamenting that the work of these authors is ‘often hardest of all to track down’ (1978, 92).
- 10.
Quoted from the Amazon website text on the book.
- 11.
‘Celui-la’ is included in collections by Hugh Lamb, 1973, and John Pelan, 2012; ‘The Twelve Apostles’ was anthologised by Lamb in 1972; ‘Randall’s Round’ by Lamb in 1975.
- 12.
Famously both Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde were attributed by their authors to such nocturnal occurrences.
- 13.
For example, Briggs claims that ‘Psychology is totally and defiantly excluded from his writings’ (1977, 135). Subsequent critics have qualified this judgement, however.
- 14.
“Folk horror” is the category retrospectively applied to narratives that locate horror in rural settings where pagan practices believed to be obsolete have in fact survived. The term was used by actor and writer Mark Gatiss in 2010 in his A History of Horror documentary for BBC 4. Folk horror is a much more dominant component in Scott’s oeuvre than in James’. Like ‘Randall’s Round’, several of her tales exploit the geographical proximity of Oxford to rural locations such as the Cotswolds, to suggest that it may be the supposedly backwards hinterlands that are more in touch with metaphysical reality than is the city of gleaming spires. Author Peter Bell is considered a “folk horror” writer, and has recently credited ‘Randall’s Round’ as being the inspiration for one of the tales in his Strange Epiphanies collection (Bell 2012).
- 15.
See for example, Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ (1897), in which a young scholar apparently becomes haunted by the spirit of a Renaissance princess and happily does her bidding although he foresees that it will bring about his destruction (Lee 2006).
- 16.
See Blanshard, who notes that ‘Rome came to regularly stand for lasciviousness and viciousness in a way that Greece rarely did’ (2010, xiii). According to Blanshard this discourse emerged particularly ‘at times of crisis’, a ‘clear example’ being ‘the anxiety felt in Britain about the potential fall of her empire’ (6).
- 17.
My thanks to Daniel Orrells for his invaluable observations in relation to several aspects of this chapter, but particularly for pointing out that Norton seems modelled on a Victorian tradition of intellectual young men who were fascinated by their athletic counterparts.
- 18.
Dalby tells us that Helen Leys’ older brother died in action during the war, while a younger brother was seriously wounded; he also conjectures that Helen herself probably worked as a landgirl. (2010, 170–1).
- 19.
Kolmar and Carpenter’s study is the only scholarly work I have found that addresses Scott’s supernatural fiction, but its character as a bibliographic text means that its engagement with individual stories is limited to just a short paragraph on each.
- 20.
See Blanshard (2010). ‘Uranian circles’ formed around the Oxford tutorial system and were comprised of groups of young male classicists for whom ‘the world of pagan freedom and intense male friendship were the highest goods’ (146). Blanshard also explores how Wilde’s prosecutors constructed Hellenism in his works and letters as evidence of sodomy; an association that remained attached to the study of ancient Greece after that (92–6).
- 21.
A small harpsichord, popular in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
- 22.
‘Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?’ is a real ballad, a poem by Caroline Oliphant sung to a traditional Scottish folk tune. Though written in the mid-nineteenth century, it concerns the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and expresses the longing of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s supporters for his return. See ‘Bonnie Charlie.’ Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_Charlie. Accessed 2 August 2018.
- 23.
See ‘Lad’s Love (Sperm-scented Herb)’. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WVwssDZy6E. Accessed 2 August 2018.
- 24.
These two volumes are collected together in a 2013 electronic edition, The Complete Uneasy Tales, by Ash-Tree. My page-numbered references are, however, to the original texts.
- 25.
Bleiler himself, however, foregrounds Hunt’s relationships to male authors, twice noting that her fiction is ‘somewhat reminiscent of the work of Henry James’ and identifying her as ‘[s]ecretary and mistress to Ford Maddox Ford’ (267). Needless to say, Ford is not similarly identified in terms of his sexual relationship with Hunt.
- 26.
Although Edward believes himself to have died, and returned through some supernatural intervention, the story leaves open the possibility that he had merely been resuscitated at the brink of death (a doctor had pronounced him dead for one hour, before his revivification). Yet this possibility makes his subsequent desolation and eventual suicide (assisted by his wife) disturbing in a different way. The uncanniness of the tale consists in its vacillation between two equally horrible possibilities.
- 27.
Belford also tells us that ‘Violet claimed she too would have gone to prison had she not had the responsibility of caring for an invalid mother and a young niece. “Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel kindly dispensed with my services in extremis,” Violet herself wrote. “So my nose remains in its own shape, not squashed against the flank of a horse—voted by Miss Evelyn Sharp as the safest place of all when the mounted police were turned out to disperse us—or torn in the efforts of the doctors to forcibly feed us.”’ (1990, 134)
- 28.
Hardwick notes that ‘In discussing the work of the modernist writers of the younger generation in relation to her own, she is challenging Ford [Maddox Ford, her then lover] at his own game. He was the acknowledged expert on the style of their young friends’ (1990, 156).
- 29.
Wikipedia entry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Balzac. Accessed 5 August 2018.
- 30.
See, for example, ‘Ghosts at Littlecote House.’ 2014. Love Hungerford. https://www.hungerford.co.uk/index.php/explore/44-history/439-ghosts-at-littlecote-house. Accessed 5 August 2018.
- 31.
For an account of the ghost story specifically in this period, see Matt Foley, for whom ‘it becomes clear that from the 1920s there was a movement away from the mythologizing of conflict towards rendering a series of ghostly testimonies that use spectralization as a means of testing, even sustaining, those interpersonal relationships that were so affected by conflict’ (2018, 319). Hunt certainly uses spectralisation to explore such relationships but they seem to be destroyed rather than sustained.
- 32.
See also Clare Hanson’s characterisation of Bowen’s war-time fiction as ‘opening up currents of feeling and fantasy which usually run underground’ (Hanson 2015, 194). This is similarly applicable to Hunt’s post-war fiction.
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Margree, V. (2019). Haunted Modernity in the Uncanny Stories of May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt. In: British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27142-8_5
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