Conclusion

Abstract

The female-authored ghost story did not go into decline after the First World War but continued to play a vital role in allowing women writers to interrogate their social, political and cultural conditions. The ghostliness that had so fascinated the Victorians persisted in exerting a profound influence on the imaginations of twentieth-century writers, providing a trope that could be adapted for diverse purposes. A shift in the deployment of ghostliness is perhaps perceptible in the way that literary ghosts seem less frequently to be signalling the particular condition of women as marginal beings in a male-dominated world, and more a condition of precarity—of relationships, identity and self-knowledge—that applies to men just as much as to women. As late as 1925, however, in ‘The Night of No Weather’, Violet Hunt was deploying ghostliness as a way to explore the liminal and excluded status of an unmarried woman deprived of her property by a male relation—suggesting that the ghostliness that Vanessa Dickerson (1998) had seen as the condition of Victorian women was far from being a thing of the past in the post-suffrage years.