Abstract
ABSTRACT This article examines the ghost stories by Anna Mostowska (c.1762–c.1811) – probably the first professional female writer in Polish – from the point of view of their relation to Female and post/colonial Gothic traditions to test how these categories lend themselves to describing the Gothic produced outside of Britain and the British Empire. Firstly, writing in the politically challenging post-partition period, Mostowska turned to the past to revive the times of Polish-Lithuanian political prominence and idealised the power relations in this once vast commonwealth of nations. Secondly, she used the Gothic to express the traumas of pre-Christian populations during the Northern Crusades and Gothicised the memories of the brutalities which lingered in the cultural memory of their ancestors for centuries. Thirdly, social and political circumstances made her promote in her writing a model of self-reliant and strong femininity, while the short form of a ghost story gave her entry to a literary scene which at her time was dominated by men.
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