Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories

Emma Liggins is Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has previously published Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women’s Fiction, 1850s-1930s (2014), as well as articles and chapters on Vernon Lee, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and modernist ghost stories.

“The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, Liggins successfully translates these messages for a twenty-first-century readership in an absorbing and impassioned analysis that will undoubtedly offer insight and guidance to scholars of Wharton and her fellow ghost seers for generations to come.” (Dara Downey, Edith Wharton Review, Vol. 39 (2), 2023)“Liggins draws together the different strands in her account of the female ghost story, providing an exceptional introduction to this often over-looked and under researched genre. This book will be of interest to scholars of women’s writing, ghost stories, and nineteenth-century fiction, as well as the general reader. It is an excellent companion to two recently reprinted short-story collections introduced by Liggins: Twilight Stories (1879) by Rhoda Broughton and Charlotte Riddell’s Weird Stories (1882).” (Kathleen Beal, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 22 (2), 2022)“This well-written book is a much needed re-examination of female ghost story writers and their representations … . Emma Liggins’s book sheds light onto an often-overlooked area of work, appealing to both expert and neophyte researchers in the field of the Female Gothic ghost story.” (Richard Jorge Fernández, English Studies, September 27, 2021)

• Introduction.- Chapter 1: Elizabeth Gaskell: Old Nurses, Illegitimacy and the Ancestral Rural Home.- Chapter 2: Margaret Oliphant: Disinheritance, Scottish properties and the haunted garden.- Chapter 3: Vernon Lee: The Rapture of Old Houses and Decadent Italy.- Chapter 4: The Horrors of Suburbia in the Ghost Stories of E. Nesbit.- Chapter 5: ‘Ghosts went out when Electricity Came In’: Technology and the Domestic Interior in Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.- Chapter 5: May Sinclair: Patriarchal Space and Haunted Libraries.- Chapter 7: Elizabeth Bowen: From the Suburban Villa to Bomb-Damaged London.- Conclusion.