The Female Gothic
New Directions
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“Everything Is Out of Place”: Virginia Woolf, Women, and (Meta-)Historical Biofiction
Starting from Virginia Woolf’s assertion in Orlando: A Biography (1928) that “when we write of a woman everything is out of place,” this chapter argues that Woolf’s spatial metaphor foregrounds the gendered natur...
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Historical Fictions
In 1961 the historian Helen Cam noted the contemporaneous vogue for historical fiction, quoting approvingly John Raymond’s comment that, ‘We must all agree … that there is no time like the present for the hist...
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The Gothic Reader: History, Fear and Trembling
A typical Gothic scene: a young girl sits alone in a darkened room lit only by a guttering candle, her fearful gaze directed not at the text she has been reading, but over her shoulder. It is as if the very ac...
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The Woman’s Historical Novel
Drawing attention to the absence of women in mainstream histories, Virginia Woolf suggested to the students of ‘Fernham’ in A Room Of One’s Own (1929) that they might ‘add a supplement to history’, adding with pa...
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Difficulties, discontinuities and differences: Reading women’s historical fiction
Women’s historical fiction seems to provoke very intense reactions — either positive or negative. General readers are often passionate about it, as numerous websites and the existence of the Historical Novel S...
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Introduction: Defining the Female Gothic
The term ‘Female Gothic’ has become much contested. When Ellen Moers coined the term in 1976 she thought that it could be ‘easily defined’ as ‘the work that women have done in the literary mode that, since the...
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‘The Haunting Idea’: Female Gothic Metaphors and Feminist Theory
In Woman as Force in History (1946) Mary R. Beard identifies ‘one obtruding idea that haunts thousands of printed pages’ dealing with women: ‘It is the image of woman throughout long ages of the past as a being a...
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Article
Open AccessDifferences between naive and memory T cell phenotype in Malawian and UK adolescents: a role for Cytomegalovirus?
Differences in degree of environmental exposure to antigens in early life have been hypothesized to lead to differences in immune status in individuals from different populations, which may have implications f...
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The Convent Novel and the Uses of History
The first Englishwoman of letters is commonly accepted to be the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, an anchoress living in a cell attached to the church of St Julian in Norwich.1 Born around 1342 or 1343, she was...
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Postscript
Women’s historical novels have been critically dismissed or, perhaps worse, ignored because they have been perceived as nostalgic, escapist, irrelevant or simply as ‘trash’. In fact, as I have shown, the genre...
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Introduction
Women’s relationship with ‘real solemn history’ — that catalogue of kings and popes and battles lost and won — has often been ambivalent, but they have been reading and enjoying historical novels for well over...
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Histories of the Defeated: Writers Taking Sides in the 1930s
Looking back at the inter-war period, Storm Jameson saw it divided into two parts with the energetic twenties, ‘lively with ideas, dreams, hopes, experiments’ (Jameson, 1984, 292), superseded by the grim polit...
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Hollow Men and Homosexual Heroes: Exploring Masculinity in the 1950s
In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Flint Anchor (1954), the despotic patriarch John Barnard goes down into the wine cellar of the family home to check the port wine laid down by his father. He finds there the stacks...
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Selling Women’s History: Popular Historical Fiction in the 1970s
In the 1970s the woman’s historical novel was widely visible but in a range of sub-genres regarded as popular fiction and therefore disregarded by literary critics: the historical romance associated with Mills an...
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Dialogues with the Dead: History and the ‘Sense of an Ending’, 1990–2000
The 1990s were, as Patricia Waugh put it, an ‘era of belatedness, of a generalised “post”-condition’ (1995, 33). Theorists talked about ‘postmodernism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postcolonialism’, ‘post-industrial...
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Entering into History: The Woman Citizen and the Historical Novel, 1900–1929
A few women were writing historical novels in the early years of the twentieth century, including Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel adventures, the extravagant romances of Marjorie Bowen, and the rural novels...
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Writing the War and After: Wicked Ladies and Wayward Women in the 1940s
During the war, reading was an important form of escape from tension, fear and boredom. In 1944, a Mass Observation survey of 10,000 readers found that their strongest desire was for ‘relaxation’ and that most...
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The Return of the Repressed: Maternal Histories in the 1960s
Penguin’s victory in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 seems, in retrospect, to mark the opening victory of liberated modernity over the old guard (those stuffy elders who, famously, would not want their wife or ...
