Abstract
This chapter analyses Margaret Oliphant’s Stories of the Seen and Unseen in relation to women’s exclusion and patriarchal traditions in ancestral homes and Scottish town houses. It explores women’s ghostly occupation of the haunted garden in “Earthbound” and “The Lady’s Walk” in relation to the difficulties of communicating with female ancestors. The contradictions of green spaces, both domestic and non-domestic, are investigated in relation to essays on gardens by Vernon Lee and Gertrude Jekyll. In “The Portrait” and “The Library Window” the haunted spaces of the male library and the feminised drawing-room are examined in terms of the lost mother and stifling Victorian spatial divisions. The chapter uses Gaston Bachelard’s discussions of the inside/outside dialectic to frame arguments about failed communications between women in “Old Lady Mary.”
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Liggins, E. (2020). Left Out in the Cold: Exclusion and Communications with the Female Ancestor in the ghost stories of Margaret Oliphant. In: The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_3
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