Abstract
All ghost stories require a death. The haunting must be initiated by a death that either has taken place prior to the main narrative action, or that occurs as part of that action. But there are some supernatural tales by women authors that give particular attention to deaths, and in particular to the deaths of women. These stories are fundamentally stories of female death, both in the sense that they make the death of a woman the focal point of the narrative, and in the sense that they insist upon gender as a key term for understanding the reasons for, or the meaning of, that death.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Braddon famously lived with the publisher John Maxwell, a married father of five whose wife was hospitalised for mental illness in Ireland. Nesbit’s marital arrangements were less publically unconventional, although arguably more convoluted: she and her husband, Hubert Bland, lived with Nesbit’s friend Alice Hoatson, whose two children by Bland Nesbit brought up as her own.
- 2.
The legislation governing divorce at the time Braddon was writing was the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which allowed divorce to be obtained through the courts but on an unequal footing: a husband could sue his wife for divorce on grounds of adultery, but a wife could do so only for adultery exacerbated by bigamy, incest, cruelty or desertion. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878 made divorce ‘less [financially] costly to obtain’, while allowing ‘women victims of a violent marriage to obtain a separation order’—something not yet available to Braddon’s abused wife. See Lambert (2018, 6 and 1–17).
- 3.
This chapter’s discussion of Nesbit’s Gothic tales develops work previously published in my article in Women’s Writing (Margree 2014): my grateful acknowledgement goes to the editor and reviewer for their helpful feedback, as well as to Bryony Randall, who first helped shape my approach to Nesbit through work produced together for our co-authored chapter on ‘Fin de Siècle Gothic’ (Margree and Randall 2012). I would also like to thank Sarah Bissell, whose doctoral thesis chapter on Nesbit’s use of the corpse as feminist critique I discovered subsequently to my Women’s Writing article, and with whom I’ve enjoyed illuminating email conversations. Sarah’s dissertation chapter focuses upon four of Nesbit’s Gothic tales: ‘John Charrington’s Wedding’, ‘Man-Size in Marble’, ‘Hurst of Hurstcote’ and ‘From the Dead’, arguing that these ‘continually rework the motif of a beautiful bride being destroyed by male callousness, in a nightmarish cycle in which marital union immediately precedes the death of the woman’ (Bissell 2014, 192). I will refer to her excellent readings at several places in my own discussion.
- 4.
See for example, Dijkstra (1988).
- 5.
See also Bissell, who notes how ‘Almost fifty years later, Nesbit was to explore the unsettling gender politics underpinning this image’ (2014, 156).
- 6.
The ‘washes women in death’ formulation occurs in immediate relation to Thomas Hardy, whom Bassein praises for the ‘sympathy for women’ (105) that she finds in his Tess of the d’Urbervilles, while criticising him for suggesting that Tess’ death is fated by the gods (and thus, she thinks, absolving the mortals of responsibility).
- 7.
Bronfen takes issue with Bassein for taking what she holds to be an overly-simplistic view of the relationship between ‘cultural images and experienced reality’ (59)—for assuming that negative artistic representations do real damage to real women—though she admits that the possibility of harm does exist. She also offers a partial defence of Poe that reads his (in)famous statement in relation to his theory of poetics and considers it ‘significantly logical’ given Western cultural presuppositions (72).
- 8.
See for example the BBC radio programme by actor Doon Mackichan, Body Count Rising (Mackichan and Newby 2016); or the debate on the BBC’s serial killer TV series The Fall, whose writer Allan Cubitt has discussed his intention to ‘explore some aspects of this phenomenon of violence against the female body’ without ‘glamorising violence against women’, but has been accused by some critics of doing exactly that (Cubitt 2013).
- 9.
The rediscovery of Braddon since the 1970s has often been motivated by feminist scholars’ claims as to her subversiveness on matters on gender; see, for example, Showalter (1977) and Pykett (1992). However, two essays in a collection on Victorian anti-feminism call into question any straightforward identification of Braddon as a feminist, stressing the more conservative elements of her work: Mattacks (2009) and Braun (2009). Further scholarship that considers this debate appear in the Jessica Cox edited collection on Braddon: Knowles and Hall (2012), and Beller (2012b).
- 10.
‘The Shadow in the Corner’ (1879) was first published in All The Year Round , and later included in Braddon’s Flower and Weed and Other Tales collection (1884).
- 11.
Frye also discusses this story in terms of its critique of Bascom’s form of intellectualism, arguing that it shows ‘how men use the social power of rationality to destroy women—and then to justify their cruelty’ (1998, 181). Frye’s analysis and mine agree on many points, although Frye sees Bascom as more villainous than I do, suggesting that Wildheath Grange’s master is actually unconsciously motivated to punish Maria for the disturbance she effects by unwittingly arousing emotion and erotic feeling within him (‘he […] is the villain who avenges himself on the girl’, 183). I think this makes Bascom too much the Gothic villain, and in so doing risks obscuring how Braddon’s critique is addressed to structural features of ideology and of gender and class relationships. Frye’s emphasis on Bascom also ironically pulls focus away from Maria and her own attempts to make sense of the mystery.
- 12.
Susan’s report of seeing a ghostly vision of her friend John Granger, who is supposedly living in America, is disbelieved by her husband. But she proposes a series of steps to investigate the mystery, and is eventually proved right in her conjectures that Granger had been waylaid for his money by a murderer who then impersonated him in letters (2012c).
- 13.
Although, see Frye (1998) and my endnote 11.
- 14.
This in fact is one of Braddon’s first short stories. It was published initially in the magazine The Welcome Guest (1860), and then included in her collection Ralph the Bailiff and Other Stories (1862).
- 15.
A character in ‘The Scene-Painter’s Wife’ (1869) suggests that a wife’s vision of her husband’s reproachful ghost has been ‘conjured up … out of her own brain’ (2012e).
- 16.
‘Eveline’s Visitant’ (1867) and ‘My Wife’s Promise’ (1868) (Braddon 2012d) are both further instances of stories that contrast male mobility with women’s restriction to within narrowly circumscribed geographical bounds.
- 17.
Hood quoted in Gates.
- 18.
- 19.
Liggins takes the term ‘mock gothic’ from Luke Thurston and uses it to characterize Nesbit’s stories’ ironic, self-reflexive references to the traditional conventions of the Victorian ghost story. See my Chap. 5 for a further discussion of May Sinclair, and of modernist ghost fiction.
- 20.
Key examples of her use of unreliable narrators are ‘Man-Size in Marble’, where the husband-narrator does not seem to grasp the extent of his own culpability in the tragedy he relates, and ‘The Shadow’ (2006g), where a housekeeper tells of a haunting from her past to a group of young girls, seemingly unaware that the story points to her own sexual jealousy as a probable source for the malevolent presence. See Liggins (40–2), and also Alderman (2017). Both these tales also foreground their own inconclusiveness, indeed suggesting that this lack of explanation may be the mark of the “real” as opposed to the fictional ghost story.
- 21.
Nick Freeman notes that ‘Gothic fiction of the 1890s was becoming explicit where acts of violence were concerned’ (2008, 463).
- 22.
Liggins also highlights Nesbit’s treatment of the dead female body in a discussion of spectrality, unspeakability and female eroticism in the ghost stories of Vernon Lee. Both Lee and Nesbit, she observes, offer up the ‘troubling spectacle of the ravished, mutilated or bloody female corpse’, although she deems Nesbit’s depictions ‘the more graphic’ (2013, 37).
- 23.
The image is repeated from earlier in this very short tale, when a young man has a vision of his sweetheart as the butchered corpse, and subsequently persuades her family to move from the house, but there is no explanation of the murder and no detection or punishment of the culprit.
- 24.
The formulation appears both in ‘John Charrington’s Wedding’ (83) and ‘From the Dead (2006b, 44).
- 25.
See ‘ghastly (adj.)’ and ‘ghost (n)’, Online Etymology Dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/.
- 26.
Nesbit refused to support the call for women’s suffrage and sometimes satirised suffragettes in her children’s fiction. She once lectured to the Fabian Society on ‘The Natural Disabilities of Women’. See Briggs (2007, especially 16–17, 84–6, 138–9 and 356–7).
- 27.
In addition to Freeman (2008), and Margree (2014), see also Margree and Randall (2012, especially 225–7). For a directly contrasting argument, however, see a recent essay by Andrew Hock Soon Ng which reads Nesbit’s tales as examples of Male Gothic narratives which incline towards an anti-feminist politics (2018). Ng sees Nesbit as in fact precisely punishing her female New Woman characters such as Ida (‘From the Dead’) and Laura (‘Man-Size in Marble). For me, while Ng is correct that these characters are not necessarily ‘blameless’ (137) (particularly Ida), this testifies to the subtlety of Nesbit’s treatment of her characters without contradicting her overall message about male destructiveness. It is also notable that Nesbit has the male narrators of both these tales condemn themselves for their own actions, and that ‘Man-Size in Marble’s Dr Kelly is patently wrong in his dismissal of Jack’s fears of supernatural evil, therefore making it problematic to call him, as Ng does, a figure of ‘compensatory masculinity’ with his ‘superior rational mind’ (147).
- 28.
- 29.
See Briggs (2007).
- 30.
- 31.
John Charrington’s bride May Foster is ‘laid beside her husband in the churchyard where they had kept their love-trysts’ (83). In ‘Hurst of Hurstcote’, a necromancer husband who has unwittingly condemned his wife to the horror of a ‘living’ burial is discovered at the story’s end ‘on the floor of the vault with his wife’s body in his arms’ (2006d, 110).
- 32.
At the story’s end a doctor suggests that Ida had not in fact died the first time, but only been in a cataleptic state, though the text neither endorses nor refutes this.
- 33.
Bissell emphasises that contrary to Victorian ideas about motherhood, according to which Ida ‘might be expected to impart some caring words or gestures to her new-born offspring’, she instead focuses on making sexual advances to her husband (2014, 189). Noting Nesbit’s depiction of Arthur’s ‘confused desire’ for his dead wife, Liggins suggests that the story ‘comments on male anxieties about the female sexual appetite’ (2013, 47).
- 34.
The narratives considered by Moran are by Eliza Lynn Linton, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Riddell and George Egerton. She says that these conform to the then widespread view that ‘witch-persecutions [had been] a legalized form of brutality to women’ (129), despite their conservative resolutions. Liggins also briefly discusses ‘The Ebony Frame’, commenting that ‘Nesbit paints the ghostly encounter here as the truer form of fulfilment, with middle-class marriage as the locus of horror’ (2013, 46).
- 35.
In a recent discussion of this story, Anne DeLong also reads the witch figure as a New Woman and makes the interesting observation that rather than witchcraft, her real transgression seems to consist in ‘provoking, or embodying, the narrator’s dissatisfaction with conventionality’ (2018, 20).
- 36.
Particular thanks to Bryony Randall for this observation (and, indeed, for several other insights into ‘The House of Silence’). This setting perhaps suggests what Liggins calls the ‘decadent Italy’ of Gothic tales by Vernon Lee (2013, 48). But it also recalls the French Riviera setting of Ella D’Arcy’s ‘The Villa Lucienne’ (1896). D’Arcy’s tale also operates impressionistically, contrasting vivid descriptions of beauty with images of decay, and refusing to specify what is the nature of the villa’s dark secret concerning a woman. As such, it is a possible influence upon Nesbit’s story. Where D’Arcy gives us a female ghost however, Nesbit, typically, gives us a corpse.
- 37.
Wharton later returns to this plot in the better known ‘Kerfol’ (1916) (Wharton 2009b), in which a wealthy French merchant marries a much younger woman and buys her many luxuries, though he keeps her a prisoner on his estate and denies her contact with anyone but servants. In both stories the husbands are bountiful with their gifts to their wives, but by having them surround these beautiful women with decorative objects while denying them agency and disregarding their desires, Wharton suggests that the women themselves are only chief among the husbands’ beautiful possessions.
- 38.
On aestheticism as a material culture, see also Schaffer (2000).
- 39.
See for example, Denis Denisoff, who considers Walter Pater’s novel Marius, the Epicurean (1885) to be decadent in that it is ‘is so loaded with detailed, beautiful descriptions that it loses any strong sense of momentum’; or Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884) as decadent ‘with the prose sometimes going on for pages in its lists of collections of things such as esoteric books and freakish plants’ (2007, 37–8).
- 40.
See for example Arthur Symons, who in 1893 argued for French poet Paul Verlaine as a major light in decadent literature; for Symons, Verlaine’s poetry ‘paints as well as sings’ (Symons 2000, 107).
- 41.
Talia Schaffer sees aestheticism as continuing until at least 1910 in the works of female writers, but she argues against a conflation of the aesthetic movement with decadence, which she characterises as ‘a brief defensive reaction of embattled elite male writers who perceived themselves to be losing status to popular women writers and consequently fetishized their own decay’, adding that ‘Decadents often contrasted themselves with women whom they viewed as crude, unthinking beings’ (2000, 6). Not distinguishing decadence from aestheticism as Schaffer does, Denisoff argues that decadent aestheticism ‘was attractive to many women’ because of its interest in challenging orthodoxies of gender and sexuality, but notes that female writers in The Yellow Book often challenged the ‘misogyny’ of male aesthetes who would ‘depict women as little more than objects of desire or symbols of sexual aberrancy and decay’ (2007, 48).
- 42.
Schaffer considers that Nesbit ‘can be seen as a female aesthete because of her early archaizing language in her 1890s volumes published under John Lane’s imprint’, although she mentions Nesbit only briefly and does not consider her short fiction (2000, 4). Nesbit has also been included in two recent anthologies of decadent or aesthetic work: Blyth (2009) and Spirit and Asbee (2013).
References
Alderman, Naomi. 2017. Not Suitable for Kids: The Deliciously Creepy Ghost Stories of E. Nesbit. The Guardian. Accessed September 24, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/24/the-ghost-stories-of-e-nesbit
Bassein, Beth Ann. 1984. Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.
Beller, Anne-Marie. 2012a. Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.
———. 2012b. Sensational Bildung? Infantilization and Female Maturation in Braddon’s 1860s Novels. In New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, ed. Jessica Cox, 113–131. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Bissell, Sarah. 2014. Haunted Matters: Objects, Bodies, and Epistemology in Victorian Women’s Ghost Stories. PhD diss., University of Glasgow. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/6402/1/2014bissellphd.pdf
Blyth, Caroline, ed. 2009. Decadent Verse: An Anthology of Late-Victorian Poetry, 1872–1900. London and New York: Anthem Press.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 1988. The Cold Embrace. In The Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby, 43–50. London: Virago.
———. 2012a. Eveline’s Visitant. In The Cold Embrace and Other Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press. Kindle edition.
———. 2012b. Her Last Appearance. In The Cold Embrace and Other Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press. Kindle edition.
———. 2012c. John Granger. In The Cold Embrace and Other Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press. Kindle edition.
———. 2012d. My Wife’s Promise. In The Cold Embrace and Other Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press. Kindle edition.
———. 2012e. The Scene-Painter’s Wife. In The Cold Embrace and Other Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press. Kindle edition.
———. 2015. The Shadow in the Corner. White Press.
Braun, Heather. 2009. Idle Vampires and Decadent Maidens: Sensation, the Supernatural, and Mary E. Braddon’s Disappointing Femmes Fatales. In Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel, ed. Tamara S. Wagner, 235–254. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.
Briggs, Julia. 2007. Edith Nesbit: A Woman of Passion. Chalford: Tempus.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Coste, Bénédicte, Catherine Delyfer, and Christine Reynier, eds. 2016. Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations. London: Routledge.
Cubitt, Allan. 2013. The Fall’s Writer Allan Cubitt on Women and Violence in TV Drama. The Guardian. Accessed August 5, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/jun/07/the-fall-allan-cubitt-women-violence
Delong, Anne. 2018. Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative: Ghostly Portraits of the Emerging New Woman. In The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s (Among the Victorians and Modernists), ed. Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares, 5–21. New York and London: Routledge.
Denisoff, Dennis. 2007. Decadence and Aestheticism. In The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall, 31–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dijkstra, Bram. 1988. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siècle Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Downing, Lisa. 2003. Death and the Maidens: A Century of Necrophilia in Female-Authored Textual Production. French Cultural Studies 14 (2): 157–168.
Drewery, Claire. 2011. Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Edwards, Amelia B. 2012. The Phantom Coach. In The Lady Chillers: Classic Ghost and Horror Stories by Women Writers. Fast Editions. Kindle edition.
Freeman, Nick. 2008. E. Nesbit’s New Woman Gothic. Women’s Writing 15 (3): 454–469.
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Frye, Lowell T. 1998. The Ghost Story and the Subjection of Women: the Example of Amelia Edwards, M. E. Braddon, and E. Nesbit. Victorians Institute Journal 26: 167–209.
Gates, Barbara. 1988. Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hager, Kelly. 2010. Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition. Farnham: Ashgate.
Killeen, Jarlath. 2010. Gendering the Ghost Story? Victorian Women and the Challenge of the Phantom. In The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: A Ghostly Genre, ed. Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie Ann Stevens, 81–96. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Knowles, Nancy, and Katherine Hall. 2012. Imperial Attitudes in Lady Audley’s Secret. In New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, ed. Jessica Cox, 37–58. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University.
Krueger, Kate. 2014. British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850–1930: Reclaiming Social Space. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lambert, Carolyn. 2018. Introduction: The Lottery of Marriage. In For Better, For Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women, edited by Carolyn Lambert and Marion Shaw, 1–17. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Liggins, Emma. 2013. Gendering the Spectral Encounter at the Fin de Siècle: Unspeakability in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Stories. Gothic Studies 15 (2): 37–52.
———. 2015. Beyond the Haunted House? Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories and the Troubling of Modernity. In British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now, ed. Emma Young and James Bailey, 32–49. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lynch, Eve M. 2004. Spectral Politics: the Victorian Ghost Story and the Domestic Servant. In The Victorian Supernatural, ed. Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell, 67–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mackichan, Doon, and Gemma Newby. 2016. Body Count Rising. BBC Radio programme first broadcast on 6 October 2016. Accessed August 5, 2018. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wtggz
Margree, Victoria. 2014. The Feminist Orientation in Edith Nesbit’s Gothic Short Fiction. Women’s Writing 21 (4): 423–443.
———. 2018. Marriage in Women’s Short Fiction. In For Better, For Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women, ed. Carolyn Lambert and Marion Shaw, 175–190. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Margree, Victoria, and Bryony Randall. 2012. Fin-de-Siècle Gothic. In The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 217–233. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Mattacks, Kate. 2009. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Secret: An Antifeminist Amongst the New Women. In Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel, ed. Tamara S. Wagner, 217–233. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.
Miller, Kathleen A. 2012. The Mysteries of the In-Between: Re-Reading Disability in E. Nesbit’s Late Victorian Gothic Fiction. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 6 (2): 143–157.
Moran, Maureen F. 2000. ‘Light No Smithfield Fires’: Some Victorian Attitudes to Witchcraft. Journal of Popular Culture 33 (4): 123–151.
Nesbit, Edith. 2006a. The Ebony Frame. In The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, ed. David Stuart Davies, 143–152. Ware: Wordsworth.
———. 2006b. From the Dead. In The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, ed. David Stuart Davies, 33–44. Ware: Wordsworth.
———. 2006c. The House of Silence. In The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, ed. David Stuart Davies, 223–232. Ware: Wordsworth.
———. 2006d. Hurst of Hurstcote. In The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, ed. David Stuart Davies, 101–111. Ware: Wordsworth.
———. 2006e. Man-Size in Marble. In The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, ed. David Stuart Davies, 17–28. Ware: Wordsworth.
———. 2006f. The Mystery of the Semi-Detached. In The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, ed. David Stuart Davies, 139–141. Ware: Wordsworth.
———. 2006g. The Shadow. In The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, ed. David Stuart Davies, 169–178. Ware: Wordsworth.
———. 2006h. Uncle Abraham’s Romance. In The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, ed. David Stuart Davies, 29–32. Ware: Wordsworth.
———. 2006i. John Charrington’s Wedding. In The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, ed. David Stuart Davies, 73–83. Ware: Wordsworth.
Ng, Andrew Soon Hock. 2018. The Fantastic and the Woman Question in Edith Nesbit’s Male Gothic Stories. In The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s (Among the Victorians and Modernists), ed. Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares, 135–151. New York and London: Routledge.
Orrells, Daniel. 2018. Decadent Aesthetics and Richard Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death. In Richard Marsh, Popular Fiction and Literary Culture, 1890–1915: Rereading the Fin de Siècle, ed. Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna Vuohelainen, 190–207. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Pater, Walter. 2012. The Works of Walter Pater: Volume 1: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poe, Edgar Allan. 1846. The Philosophy of Composition. Graeme’s Magazine 28 (4): 163–167.
Pykett, Lyn. 1992. The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman. London and New York: Routledge.
Schaffer, Talia. 2000. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian Britain. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.
Sherry, Vincent. 2014. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Showalter, Elaine. 1977. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Spirit, Jane, and Sue Asbee, eds. 2013. The Women Aesthetes: British Writers, 1870–1900. Vol. 1. Abingdon: Routledge.
Stoker, Bram. 2000. Dracula. Edited by Glennis Byron. Peterborough, ON: Broadview.
Symons, Arthur. 2000. The Decadent Movement in Literature. In The Fin De Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900, ed. Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, 104–111. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thompson, Terry W. 2011. ‘Presentiments of Evil’: Sourcing Frankenstein in Edith Nesbit’s ‘Man-Size in Marble’. The CEA Critic 73 (2): 91–100.
Uglow, Jenny. 1988. Introduction. In The Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby, ix–xvii. London: Virago.
Wharton, Edith. 2009a. The Duchess at Prayer. In The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton: Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural, ed. David Stuart Davies. Ware: Wordsworth.
———. 2009b. Kerfol. In The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton: Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural, ed. David Stuart Davies. Ware: Wordsworth.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Margree, V. (2019). Neither Punishment nor Poetry: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edith Nesbit and Female Death. In: British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27142-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27142-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27141-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-27142-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)