Irish Women Writers and the Supernatural

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Irish women writers and their contributions to supernatural fiction from c.1850-1950. The chapter examines how women incorporated social themes in their short fiction, an emphasis that often differentiates these narratives from ones written by men through the utilization of distinct Irish settings, Irish historical moments, and the foregrounding of the lives of Irish women. These writers responded to rapid social and political changes by creating literary ghosts that reflected contemporary concerns about marriage, domestic abuse, women and children, haunted houses, money and property, colonialism, poverty, and war. The chapter discusses how these themes evolved from the Victorian period into the twentieth century and how Irish women writers described the changing role of women through the lens of the supernatural. The authors surveyed cover a broad range of Gothic writing, including folk horror, the macabre, comic Gothic, and more traditional ghost stories. Authors discussed include Elizabeth Bowen, Bithia Mary Croker, Clotilde Graves, Dorothy Macardle, L. T. Meade, Rosa Mulholland, Charlotte Riddell, Dora Sigerson Shorter, and Katharine Tynan.