British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930

Our Own Ghostliness

Victoria Margree

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030271411
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030271428
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book explores women's short supernatural fiction between the emergence of first wave feminism and the post-suffrage period, arguing that while literary ghosts enabled an interrogation of women's changing circumstances, ghosts could have both subversive and conservative implications. Haunted house narratives by Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant become troubled by uncanny reminders of the origins of middle-class wealth in domestic and foreign exploitation. Corpse-like revenants are deployed in Female Gothic tales by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Edith Nesbit to interrogate masculine aestheticisation of female death. In the culturally-hybrid supernaturalism of Alice Perrin, the 'Marriage Question' migrates to colonial India, and psychoanalytically-informed stories by May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt explore just how far gender relations have really progressed in the post-First World War period. Study of the woman's short story productively problematises literary histories about the "golden age" of the ghost story, and about the transition from Victorianism to modernism.

© The Author(s) 2019

V. MargreeBritish Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27142-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Our Own Ghostliness

Victoria Margree¹

(1)

University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

Victoria Margree

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

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, ‘laughing uproariously’ at tales of the supernatural, seem just the kind of sceptical, 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 narrator 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 understands 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 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 innovative twentieth-century writers commonly rejected Victorian narrative forms as being unsuited to addressing the circumstances of the new century. 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 historians 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 longer 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 forms understood as being unsuited to exploring post-war society. This characterisation was promoted by self-identified modernist writers and artists at the time and has since been promulgated by much academic work.² The present study will argue, however, that if Eleanor Scott is able in the 1920s to merge the Victorian haunted house subgenre with modernist experimentation in narrative perspective, in order to produce a psychoanalytic study of a post-suffrage feminist (see Chap. 5), then literary histories premised upon a radical break between modernism and Victorianism need to be significantly complicated.³ This book is also, therefore, intended to contribute to current scholarship that is increasingly revising this history by pointing to previously unrecognised continuities between twentieth-century modernism and aspects of Victorian literary and mass culture, including nineteenth-century aestheticism, decadence, Gothic fiction and supernaturalism.⁴ The woman’s ghost story, this book argues, presents a case study of how twentieth-century writers could innovate within existing narrative forms, taking the conventions of a popular Victorian genre and adapting and revitalising them to interrogate the modern present. In linking the “serious” mode of literary modernism with the popular form of the ghost story, this study will also thereby call into question the evaluative categories operated by canon-building literary historians in the twentieth century.

If the ghost story was indeed still an important form for women writers in the first decades of the twentieth century, perhaps one reason for this lies in its power to testify that the past is not done with. This had always been an important function of the women’s ghost story, one developed from the role of ghosts in oral storytelling as deliverers of justice from beyond the grave, and taken up in numerous Victorian tales that feature ghostly women returning to avenge themselves upon men who have abused and exploited them with the relative impunity bestowed by patriarchal legal, social and economic dominance. In the 1920s, and despite the huge gains achieved by the early feminist movement in relation to women’s rights to own property in marriage, to divorce and have custody of their children, to enter into the professions and higher education, and finally to have the vote (at least, for women over 30 years of age who met the property qualification), we encounter women’s ghost stories that question just how much the Victorian past has really been left behind. Historians have described the post-suffrage years as ones in which the idea prevailed that since equality had now been achieved, there remained no structural inequalities that required a continued women’s campaign. Adrian Bingham, for example, writes that ‘[i]f the recent war marked a fundamental rupture with Victorianism, the future seemed to offer the prospect of an inexorable movement towards greater equality’ (2013, 95). But many women’s ghost stories from this period precisely call into question this ‘narrative of progress’ (96), by featuring female protagonists who negotiate expanded fields of possibility in their personal and professional lives while remaining significantly constrained by patriarchal forces that have reconfigured themselves, rather than disappeared, in face of women’s new freedoms. In these stories, it is not that nothing has changed, but that change proceeds at an uneven pace and is shadowed by a past that threatens to return and overwhelm the modern subject. To see the persistence in the present of what is supposedly past has been a feature of the ghost story since its inception, and one that helps account for why even self-consciously modern women writers in the first decades of the twentieth century might see the Victorian ghost story as a form worth returning to.

But I would also like to suggest along with Everett in ‘The Whispering Wall’ that ghosts can sometimes offer a prevision of the future, even if this can be interpreted only in retrospect. If the Victorian ghost story could be taken up and adapted by modernist writers such as May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, this is perhaps because it was always operating at a distance from the literary realism that was the dominant narrative form of the nineteenth century. As the following chapters will show, even in older stories from my period of study, there are elements of narrative irresolution, ambiguity and polysemy that proceed from the character of ghosts as beings that can be perceived only indistinctly and intermittently. If the realist novel sought to map a rapidly changing world in order to make it knowable, the nineteenth-century ghost story frequently testified to the implausibility of this project, insisting that there is always something just on the periphery of vision, eluding one’s full comprehension. It is often ghostliness in this sense that authors influenced by nascent modernism in the 1910s and 1920s are particularly responding to. My study argues that Victorian ghosts can be foreshadowing not just aspects of the formal experimentation of later narrative forms, but also their thematic concerns. Sometimes, as I shall argue later in this Introduction, ghosts seem to materialise in the lacunae created when a mismatch exists between a culture’s existing conceptual resources and emergent forms of social consciousness. For example, many women’s ghost stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focus on the often unwittingly injurious effects upon women of the ways in which men think about and relate to them. “Toxic masculinity” may be a recent concept, informed by decades of gender theory, but supernatural tales by women from a hundred and more years ago reveal an acute sensitivity to the destructiveness of particular kinds of gendered interactions that are sanctioned by social and cultural norms (see Chap. 3 in particular).⁵

British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness, therefore, argues for the value of returning to the women’s ghost story tradition and discovering authors and texts that have not yet been substantially considered. This value has to do with how the form functioned as a vehicle through which women negotiated their changing conditions in a period of social and political transformation; with how it complicates received ideas about literary history (as already noted); and also with the intrinsic merit of these stories, which are frequently brilliantly executed pieces of fiction. The relatively marginal status of both the ghost story and short fiction more generally mean that work in these forms by even well-known female writers has for too long been neglected. Thankfully, this is increasingly being addressed today by a body of scholarship that has turned to short fiction and to the ghost story to reveal their complexities, as I will shortly explore. This book is intended as a contribution to that scholarship.

It begins with writers whose supernatural work has already attracted attention from several scholars: Charlotte Riddell, Margaret ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Our Own Ghostliness
• 2. (Other)Worldly Goods: Ghost Fiction as Financial Writing in Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Riddell
• 3. Neither Punishment nor Poetry: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edith Nesbit and Female Death
• 4. The Good Memsahib? Marriage, Infidelity and Empire in Alice Perrin’s Anglo-Indian Tales
• 5. Haunted Modernity in the Uncanny Stories of May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter