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Finding Her Place: Claustrophobia, Mourning and Female Revenants in the ghost stories of May Sinclair

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The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories

Part of the book series: Palgrave Gothic ((PAGO))

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Abstract

This chapter reconsiders May Sinclair’s interrogations of patriarchal space in ghost stories of the 1910s and 1920s set in modern villas, tawdry hotels and remote Yorkshire farmhouses. It examines Sinclair’s obsession with the Brontë Parsonage as a haunted memory-site, an uncanny space of mourning and fatality. Drawing on philosophical imaginings of women’s reoccupation of space by Luce Irigaray and Elizabeth Grosz, it considers bedrooms and drawing-rooms as maternal spaces in “The Intercessor” and “If the Dead Knew.” Questioning Victoria Rosner’s account of modernist domestic interiors, the chapter examines women’s claiming of space in the patriarchal library in “The Token” and “The Nature of the Evidence.” Claustrophobia and the horrors of sexual intimacy in the sepulchral haunted bedroom are shown to be key features of “Where their Fire is not Quenched,” and “The Villa Desirée.”

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  1. Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

    Emma Liggins

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  1. Emma Liggins
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Correspondence to Emma Liggins .

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Liggins, E. (2020). Finding Her Place: Claustrophobia, Mourning and Female Revenants in the ghost stories of May Sinclair. In: The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_6

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