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This chapter draws on the previous discussion explore how terror and horror are used in Misty, focusing on its covers, visuals and story content. These theoretical ideas are then developed further with reference to the Female Gothic: a contested term with variable meaning. The chapter summarizes the evolution of Female Gothic scholarship and arrives at a working definition. This notes the Female Gothic’s focus on the problems of female experience and use of feminine or domestic symbols, and its simultaneous mobilization of paradoxes such as rebellion/transgression and morality/conservatism.

Emphasising the diversity of the Gothic genre in the eighteenth century, this chapter argues that, in The Recess, Lee hijacks certain themes from Walpole and Reeve to write a prototypical Female Gothic novel. Continuing to read the Gothic as a reaction to eighteenth-century historical writing, this chapter contends that Lee focuses on female protagonists and employs Gothic plotlines to critique the male codes of historical representation that govern David Hume’s Enlightenment historiography. Developing arguments from the previous chapter, this section shows how, in the hands of female writers, Gothic pasts often express contemporary fears and anxieties, and comment on gender politics in the eighteenth century. Drawing on Gary Kelly’s notion that the Gothic enabled women to access the male-dominated realms of history and politics, it is argued that Lee’s historically based novel utilises Gothic tropes such as concealed writings and a focus on the law to present a nightmare vision of women’s historical and social plight in the eighteenth century. Examining the complex structure of The Recess, this chapter concludes by assessing the extent to which Lee ‘Gothicises’ the eighteenth-century epistolary form, and what the novel says about the nature of the past.

This chapter uses the previous analyses to construct the conventions of the ‘Gothic for Girls’ subgenre and reflect on its development and position within children’s literature. It surveys existing work on childhood and Gothic, with a particular focus on the fairy tale and the cautionary tale as subgenres of children’s literature. It argues that Misty combines Female Gothic tropes with fairy tale markers to create stories that bring together adult and child concerns. The chapter concludes by relating Misty to some contemporary dark fairy tales and offering a working definition of Gothic for Girls. Elements include an isolated or trapped female protagonist in an abstracted world that juxtaposes the mundane and supernatural, a narrative awakening to magical potential that is often driven by fear and particularly terror, the use of feminine symbols and fairy tale sins as catalysts, and the weight placed on personal responsibility and self-control or self-acceptance.

This chapter examines how, in Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin brings the Gothic to bear on the eighteenth century. It considers the novel as a manifestation of his radical views outlined in Political Justice (1793) and explores the novel as a response to English anxieties about the French Revolution at home and abroad. This chapter examines representations of the past in the novel, particularly in relation to Godwin’s ‘Of History and Romance’ (1797), which criticises works of Enlightenment history. The psychological introspection of Caleb Williams is discussed, as well as the presence of history in the human psyche and the (unwanted) ideological legacy of the past. This chapter goes on to explore how, in a similar vein to Godwin, Wollstonecraft refuses to use a fictional past as a subterfuge to comment on the present in Maria (1798) and uses the Gothic to examine women’s plight in eighteenth-century England. Discussing Maria in relation to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, it is argued that the novel brings the Female Gothic and its political agenda into sharper focus. This chapter discusses Wollstonecraft’s exploration of the female psyche, and how Maria’s thoughts and actions are governed by anachronistic and patriarchal social customs.

Re-evaluating the implications of the French Revolution for Gothic fiction, this chapter examines representations of the past in a novel that is often neglected in Gothic studies: Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. Written in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, but set in seventeenth-century Roman Catholic France, it discusses the ways in which the novel bears traces of the present and examines the significance of the decaying abbey and fragmented manuscript that feature in the novel. Citing the enormity of the events taking place in France and the challenge they presented to established Enlightenment historical theories and methods, it is argued that The Romance of the Forest responds to such shifting notions of history by revealing a heightened sense of historical consciousness that is engendered by the French Revolution. Influenced by The Recess and utilising the Female Gothic’s focus on the heroine, this chapter shows how Radcliffe’s novel engages with the politics of the past and, more specifically, with the contested ‘Gothic’ views of history presented in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

Ghost stories, perhaps more than any other class of story, are preoccupied with these anxious spaces. Hauntings in literature are almost always associated with particular geographic spaces — frequently houses — and, as Dale Bailey observes, the motif of the haunted house stretches back to Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” and occupies an important place in the American literary tradition. This revelatory function of the Female Gothic has generally been discussed in terms of Freud's concept of the uncanny. Avery Gordon asserts in her meditation on haunting in Ghostly Matters that haunting is “a constitutive feature of social life.” In the ghost stories, the force that produces ghosts — and sometimes renders the living ghostly — is the development of American capitalism and the willingness to make one's fortune through the exploitation of others.

Queering the Female Gothic’ examines work by women writers from the 1890s onwards who use the Gothic to create covert and/or overt queer situations and characters. These are often used to explore cultural and social concerns, such as restrictive patriarchal and hetero-normative family structures, the medical pathologisation of female and genderqueer bodies, institutions of racism and sexism within colonial and slave narratives, and contemporary issues surrounding the intersections of sexuality, race, class and gender identity. The chapter examines the work of a number of American and British women authors who have employed the Gothic as a proverbial safe space in which to explore these concerns; they include Vernon Lee, Florence Marryat, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Jane Chambers, Jewelle Gomez, Sarah Waters, Yvonne Heidt and Cate Culpepper. Not only do their fictions encompass queer characters and scenarios in terms of gender identities outside of the male/female binary and the full spectrum of queer sexual orientation, but the authors themselves, taken as a group, embody the full spectrum as far as gender identity and sexual orientation are concerned.

The ghostly works of Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, and Edith Wharton are discussed in this chapter. Capitalism itself is shown to underlie and structure relationships of exploitation and abuse between members of the same and of opposite sexes. These are stories that yoke together the insights of the Female Gothic, in which the supernatural is less scary than the everyday forms of abuse suffered by women, and capitalist horror stories of the type discussed by Annalee Newitz, in which economic system structured on greed and getting ahead literally at the expense of others fosters all manner of violence and deviance. The ghosts in all these stories are situated within social contexts that foreground the disparity between rich and poor that structures the American dream of achieving financial independence, and the space they haunt is precisely that of the ethical void at the heart of American capitalism.

This chapter reconsiders Edith Sitwell’s only novel, I Live under a Black Sun, as Gothic fiction opening up a political reading of British colonialism and women’s labor. When read as citing and rewriting Gothic tropes, the earnest moralizing in the text becomes more nuanced. The ostensibly tidy allegorizing of the salvific power of Christian brotherly love is complicated by the eruption of disavowed sites of material and emotional labor that underwrites such a narrative. The chapter argues for the need to look at Sitwell as a thinker in her own right who dramatized her own strangeness as a way of critiquing the “normalcy” and mass politics around her. Gothic fiction tropes permitted her to offer a secret history of her historical moment, connecting her strangeness to a history of writers with whom she might feel professional kinship while emphasizing her own unique qualities. While she was not interested in feminist political action, Sitwell was concerned with problems of women’s labor in ways we might trace in other mid-century women’s writing that has been dismissed as apolitical or reactionary.

This chapter focuses on The Company of Wolves, as a dark fantasy film about the horrors of the adult world and of adult sexuality glimpsed through the dreams of an adolescent girl. It analyses how The Company of Wolves amalgamates aspects of horror, the Female Gothic, fairy tales, werewolf films and coming-of-age parables. It also illustrates how The Company of Wolves is drenched in atmosphere and an eerily sensual malaise that boasts striking imagery immersed in fairy-tale motifs and startling Freudian symbolism. The chapter mentions Neil Jordan as the director of The Company of Wolves, his second film and his first foray into the realms of Gothic horror. It cites several short stories from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber from 1979 as the basis for The Company of Wolves.