Gothic Fiction & The Female Writer

What do Gothic novels and the supernatural have to do with feminism? A surprising amount.

Back in the 18th century, Gothic novels and ghost stories – many written by and for women – began to gain serious popularity. Behind the eerie castles and haunted houses, many of these stories explored big questions about women’s roles in society: their work, education, independence, and sexuality.

This talk looks at how women writers used horror and the supernatural to push back against the expectations of their time. By turning everyday anxieties into eerie, unsettling fiction, they revealed the darker sides of patriarchy and colonialism. From Ann Radcliffe’sThe Mysteries of Udolphoto Charlotte Brontë’sJane Eyre, and the ghost stories of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and E. Nesbit, women have long used Gothic fiction to explore what it really costs to be independent. And as the popularity of horror films and series likeThe Haunting of Hill Houseshow, the ghosts of lost female histories don’t stay buried for long.

Doors open at 7pm, talk starts at 7.30pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Dr Emma Liggins is a Reader in English Literature in the Department of English atManchester Metropolitan University and Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for GothicStudies. She has published widely on the short story, Victorian women’s writing and thesupernatural. Publications include (with Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins), The BritishShort Story (Palgrave, 2010), The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1850-1945:Gender, Space and Modernity (Palgrave, 2020) and a chapter on ‘The EdwardianSupernatural’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Gothic (EdinburghUniversity Press, 2022). She is currently researching memorial cards, cemetery headstonesand dark tourism for a new book on Victorian and Edwardian Death Spaces: Gender andMemorialisation for Manchester University Press.

This talk is 18+

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