Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930

Melissa Edmundson is Lecturer of English at Clemson University and specializes in 19th- and 20th- century British women writers, ghost stories, the Gothic, and Anglo-Indian popular fiction. She is the author of Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013).

“Melissa Edmundson’s study is an impressive volume that will probably prove influential in the field of Gothic Studies. … This volume provides an excellent foundation upon which Edmundson or other scholars might build. ... Edmundson introduces us to several strangers in strange lands on whom future scholarship might focus. This is an important step in the reclamation of marginalized voices, both academically and politically commendable.” (Eleanor Dobson, Modern Language Review, Vol. 114 (3), July, 2019)

• 1. Introduction: Reclaiming Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing.- 2. Susanna Moodie, Colonial Exiles, and the Frontier Canadian Gothic.- 3. Gothic Romance and Retribution in the Short Fiction of Isabella Valancy Crawford.- 4. Generations of the Female Vampire: Colonial Gothic Hybridity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire.- 5. Mary Kingsley and the Ghosts of West Africa.- 6. The African Stories of Margery Lawrence.- 7. Colonial Gothic Framework: Haunted Houses in the Anglo-Indian Ghost Stories of Bithia Mary Croker.- 8. Animal Gothic in Alice Perrin’s East of Suez.- 9. The Past Will Not Stay Buried: Female Bodies and Colonial Crime in the Australian Ghost Stories of Mary Fortune.- 10. Fear and Loathing in the Outback: Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies.- 11. Katherine Mansfield and the Troubled Homes of Colonial New Zealand.- 12. Conclusion: "cicatrice of an old wound".