Abstract
This chapter focuses on the short fiction of Isabella Valancy Crawford, and how Crawford used the Gothic romance genre to craft fictional heroines who gain more autonomy and greater freedom than their late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary forbears. The chapter examines two early stories by Crawford, “The Perfect Number Seven” (1880) and “Sèvres Fulkes” (1885), as well as two of her final stories which are set in distinctly Canadian settings, “Extradited” (1886) and “In the Breast of a Maple” (c. 1887). These stories show that not only did Crawford manage to succeed in the competitive world of popular magazines, becoming one of the first Canadian women writers to make her career as an author, but she also was integral to the creation of a more progressive imagining of the Gothic heroine.
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Edmundson, M. (2018). Gothic Romance and Retribution in the Short Fiction of Isabella Valancy Crawford. In: Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76917-2_3
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