Table Of ContentBritish Women’s Short
Supernatural Fiction,
1860–1930
Our Own Ghostliness
Victoria Margree
British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction,
1860–1930
Victoria Margree
British Women’s Short
Supernatural Fiction,
1860–1930
Our Own Ghostliness
Victoria Margree
University of Brighton
Brighton, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-27141-1 ISBN 978-3-030-27142-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27142-8
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To my parents, and Moritz
A
cknowledgements
I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of
Brighton in providing me with the research sabbatical during which much
of this book was written. In particular I want to thank my then Head of
School, Paddy Maguire, for his consistent support and encouragement.
Part of that sabbatical involved teaching a course on ‘Victorian Women’s
Short Fiction’ as an International Visiting Scholar at the University of
Passau in Germany, and I am grateful both to the students on that course
for their lively engagement with this material, and the staff of the univer-
sity for making such an experience possible. I would also like to thank the
staff of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, where most of this
book was researched and written; as well as friends in Germany such as
Dorothea Schick, Frauke Ralf and Michael Günther, who helped to make
it such a productive and enjoyable year.
Particular thanks must go to the people who have read drafts of my
chapters and offered invaluable suggestions for improving them: Michael
Neu, Minna Vuohelainen, Bryony Randall, Daniel Orrells, Emma Liggins,
Anne-Marie Beller and Carolyn Lambert. I cannot overstate how much I
appreciate your generosity with your time, energy and ideas. I am also
grateful to numerous colleagues and students on the Humanities
Programme at the University of Brighton, who have expressed interest in
this project and who make our Programme such a supportive and collab-
orative environment. Especial thanks go to Anthony Leaker who has often
made it possible for me to focus on the book at a crucial stage; I promise
to return the favour.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Appreciation is due to all staff at Palgrave Macmillan who have been
involved in this book, but particularly to Ben Doyle and Camille Davies,
whose efficiency and flexibility has made such a difference. My thanks go
as well to the anonymous reviewer of the proposal and manuscript for
their very helpful feedback. Two chapters of this book (Chaps. 2 and 3)
have been developed in part from arguments that first appeared in articles
in the journals Gothic Studies and Women’s Writing, so I would also like to
thank the editors and reviewers of those publications for their role in
this process.
Lastly, this book would not have been possible without the ongoing
support and encouragement of friends including Nina Hilton, Joanne
Tutt and Gurminder Bhambra, of my partner, Moritz Schick, and my par-
ents, Phil and Jackie Margree.
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Our Own Ghostliness 1
2 (Other)Worldly Goods: Ghost Fiction as Financial Writing
in Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Riddell 27
3 Neither Punishment nor Poetry: Mary Elizabeth Braddon,
Edith Nesbit and Female Death 69
4 The Good Memsahib? Marriage, Infidelity and Empire in
Alice Perrin’s Anglo-Indian Tales 111
5 Haunted Modernity in the Uncanny Stories of May
Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt 147
6 Conclusion 193
Index 199
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Our Own Ghostliness
Published in 1916, Henrietta (H. D.) Everett’s ‘The Whispering Wall’
testifies to the potent afterlife of the Victorian ghost story in the first
decades of the twentieth century. Deploying familiar tropes such as a
haunted ancestral pile and a cursed aristocratic line, Everett’s story begins
as an Edwardian invocation of the traditional nineteenth-century form
before seguing into an elegy for the lost youth of the First World War. The
‘light-hearted undergraduates’ we meet in the opening sentences, ‘laugh-
ing uproariously’ at tales of the supernatural, seem just the kind of scepti-
cal, boisterous young men whom the Victorian women’s ghost story in
particular had always delighted in humbling (2006, 203). Yet the spectre
that really overshadows these men’s lives is nothing supernatural. The nar-
rator encounters the family ghost of his friend, Jack Lovell, as a whispering
sound that travels along a wall at the latter’s English family estate,
Marchmont, but the two men can make no sense of the apparent words it
utters: ‘Ah-mont-year’ (206). It is only later, once war has broken out and
Jack lies in a military hospital in France, that the whispering sounds can be
interpreted. ‘The child at Marchmont wants me’ he tells the narrator, ‘he
was always whispering for me to come and play’ (207). Jack now under-
stands that the ghostly child was saying not ‘Ah-mont-year’ but
‘Armentieres’—the name of the place where he would be mortally
wounded in combat.
Everett’s story demonstrates how the conventions of the nineteenth-
century ghost story could be adapted in order to allow writers to explore
© The Author(s) 2019 1
V. Margree, British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27142-8_1
2 V. MARGREE
the transformed conditions of the new century.1 On the one hand, it
deploys these conventions in order to posit the Great War as a definitive
rupture with the past. After the story’s denouement, the carefree laughter
of its opening lines seem to have belonged to an entirely different age, to
the long Edwardian summer in which Cambridge undergraduates could
confidently look forward to peace and prosperity, unaware of how many of
them were soon to be added to the ranks of the ghostly. Yet on the other
hand, the story achieves its chilling effect in large part through its very
disruption of familiar ways of organising time. The ghostly child had
always been calling for Jack; had already known the place of his death.
Retrospectively, the supposed pre-war idyll is revealed to have been already
corrupted by traces of the devastation to come. Everett’s story suggests
that ghosts, as beings whose very nature is to violate chronological time,
may breach the present with fragments not only from the past but also
from the future.
One of the aims of this book is to show how women’s ghost fiction
more generally disrupts conventional stories told about the transition
from the nineteenth century to modernity. British Women’s Short
Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness explores how
female authors continually shaped and reshaped ghost story conventions
across the period of its study. In so doing it complicates the idea that inno-
vative twentieth-century writers commonly rejected Victorian narrative
forms as being unsuited to addressing the circumstances of the new cen-
tury. The notion of a “rupture” that brings to an end the long nineteenth
century and inaugurates a brash modernity around the time of the First
World War, has long been influential in the ways in which literary histori-
ans have periodised time. The very notion of the “golden age” of the
ghost story, for example, typically describes it as coming to an end just
after the war. But this book will contend that this periodisation is no lon-
ger sustainable if we shift our focus from a male tradition of ghost story
writing to a female one. It will, therefore, argue very much in agreement
with Melissa Edmundson’s recent claim that ‘When we look at the work
of women writers, the “golden age” of ghost stories that supposedly ended
at the outbreak of the First World War should be extended to the interwar
period of the 1920s and 1930s’ (2018).
Another literary history that stands to be productively problematised
by turning to women’s ghost stories is that of the emergence of literary
modernism, which has often been characterised as signalling a rebellion
against, or definitive break with, Victorian aesthetic values and narrative
