The Ghost Story and Feminism

Abstract

Women writers themselves tended to be a ghostly presence in early critical writing on the ghost story, pressed into the margins of what was depicted as a male-dominated tradition. The ghost story has offered women writers’ freedom to speak the unspeakable. Using a female narrator allows Elizabeth Gaskell to present the ghost story as a female genre associated with oral storytelling and to condemn a system of male power which represses women and deforms their relationships with each other. A self-declared feminist with a keen interest in the new psychoanalytic theory, Sinclair wrote a pamphlet, Feminism, in 1912 in reply to Sir Almroth Wright who had argued against female suffrage on the grounds that women were at the mercy of “physiological emergencies”. While defining a ‘feminist ghost story’ may be problematic, there is no doubt that feminist publishing and theory have provided a way of recuperating the rich and diverse body of work by women writers.