British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930: Our Own Ghostliness, by Victoria Margree

Abstract

Reviewed by: British Women's Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness by Victoria Margree Clare A. Simmons (bio) British Women's Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness, by Victoria Margree; pp. ix + 203. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $89.99, $59.99 paper, $44.99 ebook. British Women's Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness makes a strong case for the woman-authored short supernatural tale as a genre that crosses historical periods, paying serious attention to a form through which women of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could participate in the literary marketplace. Many of the supernatural stories discussed in Victoria Margree's study were the work of long-lived writers who could recall a time when British women's legal identities were in many respects erased at their marriage. For example, when Henrietta Dorothy Everett was born in 1851, only the wealthiest women who found themselves in unhappy marriages had a chance of divorce, while husbands would take control of all but a fraction of the money women brought into the relationship; women could not vote, either, even in local elections. Everett lived long enough to write about the traumas of the First World War in her ghost stories and to see the first female Member elected to Parliament, but she [End Page 576] died in 1923, five years before women's voting was placed on equal footing with men's. In subtitling her study "Our Own Ghostliness," Margree draws attention to the ghosts of memories of women's experiences living in the shadow of a male-dominated society. Even more significantly, she argues that supernatural stories by women disrupt common notions of literary periodization, so that "literary histories premised on a radical break between modernism and Victorianism need to be significantly complicated" (3). Even Victorian ghost stories, she suggests, show literary devices associated with modernism, such as "narrative irresolution, ambiguity, and polysemy that proceeds from the character of ghosts as beings that can only be perceived indistinctly and intermittently" (4). The chapters that follow are arranged roughly chronologically but also thematically. Included are discussions of both true ghost stories that depict the return of the dead and other forms of supernatural experience, such as charms, spirit possession, and primal memories of paganism. Discussions of short works by Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Edith Nesbit show that in the ghost story, death does not terminate preoccupations with money and family. Like much fiction of the time, colonialism and empire also cast a shadow over many of the works analyzed; the figure of the unsuspecting family member returning from the colonies, for example, occurs in a number of tales, while the Anglo-Indian Alice Perrin's stories form the subject of the fourth chapter. Perrin's stories, Margree suggests, "employ a specifically Anglo-Indian form of supernaturalism" in their representation of the Anglo wife in India (113). In "The Tiger Charm" (1901), for example, readers can believe (if they wish) that an Indian amulet presented to a sympathetic man by an oppressed wife causes the tiger to kill the abusive husband instead of the man with the charm. "An Eastern Echo" (1901) features what has been termed a crisis apparition, where a wife now in Britain connects with what a former acquaintance was experiencing in India at the time of his death. Particularly relevant to this book's arguments about periodization are stories influenced by the First World War, sometimes from the point of view of women, and sometimes reflecting the experiences of combatants. This does raise the question of the extent to which women's writing differs from that of men. If women can write effectively frightening tales about the war as traumatizing both women and men, that complicates the notion that women's writing is somehow distinct from that of their male counterparts. Margree partially acknowledges the similarity when she explores stories that show the influence of the master of the supernatural tale, Montague Rhodes James, such as Eleanor Scott's, which use James's trope of the unfortunate antiquarian scholar. Even the excellent and insightful analysis of Nesbit's "fascination with female death...