Weird Sisters: Victorian women’s ghost stories and a new look at the weird tale

Alder, Emily

Abstract

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, weird fiction looks like a masculine tradition. While there are numerous women among recent ‘New Weird’ writers, female authorship of early weird tales barely shows up next to the success of H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries. This is not just because of the historical bias towards literary men in Western canons and not because women did not choose to write supernatural horror stories, but because, as I’ll argue, what we have come to understand as the form of the weird tale is an implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) masculine mode. Male experience of the fin-de-siecle period is written into what are called its weird tales. This paper explores the weird tradition in Victorian women’s writing. In 1882, several of the late Charlotte Riddell’s short stories were collected under the title Weird Stories. On the surface, these narratives bear little resemblance to Lovecraft’s ’The Call of Cthulhu’, Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan, or Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Horla’. Yet, I argue, their commonalities and continuities reward investigation, indicating the shared roots of men’s and women’s weird tales in the nineteenth century as well as their mutual interdependence. Centred on women and speaking to women’s social, sexual, and intellectual lives, stories by Riddell, E. Nesbit and others develop a distinctive epistemological and ontological stance which is essential to the weird, which contests the rules of masculine positivist science and which, I argue, is inextricable from these narratives’ sense of women’s lived experiences. This paper offers a renewed engagement with some Victorian women’s writing often recruited to a ‘female gothic’ tradition to argue for their integral place in the development of the popular mode of the weird.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Victorian Renewals: British Association of Victorian Studies Conference 2019
• Start Date: Aug 28, 2019
• End Date: Aug 30, 2019
• Deposit Date: Apr 17, 2023