Mrs Vachott's Haunting Memories: Walter Scott and the Female Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Hungary

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on a ghost story originally published in 1861 and then incorporated into a memoir published in 1887–9 by the Hungarian woman writer and editor Mária Csapó (1828–96), better known as Mrs Vachott. With the examination of the ghost story's changing publications, the paper clarifies the process during which this apparently independent ghost story became a powerful metaphor for Mrs Vachott's strenuous life with haunting memories, as recorded in her published memoir. It appears that this same ghost story had been influenced by a Hungarian translation of Walter Scott's “The Tapestried Chamber” (1829) that Mrs Vachott read in a collection of short stories issued in 1836. Thus, the successful combination of the two narratives, the ghost story and the memoir, not only makes Mrs Vachott's experiment truly remarkable, but also gives valuable insights into Scott's influence on nineteenth-century Hungarian women's writing, and into the changing possibilities of the ever hybrid form of the Gothic.