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Book Review: Emma Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories. Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1945 (London, Palgrave 2020)

Elke D’hoker
p. 303-306
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Emma Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories. Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1945 (London, Palgrave 2020)

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1In this interesting study, Emma Liggins investigates haunted house narratives by female writers through the prism of women’s gendered engagement with domestic space. In compelling readings of some twenty-five stories, ranging from 1850 to 1945, she shows how the house is turned into a source of terror or threat to women; how the home becomes unhomely. The haunted drawing rooms, bedrooms, gardens and libraries that dominate these stories are shown to be examples of an architectural uncanny which addresses generalised fears about modernity as well as a particularly female anxiety of being confined within or excluded from the patriarchal, ancestral home. Because of the importance of gendered roles and perspectives in these stories and because women writers have often been marginalised in critical studies of ghost fiction or the gothic, Liggins focuses only on women writers, devoting individual chapters to six important authors: Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, May Sinclair and Elizabeth Bowen.

2Following a detailed introduction that offers a survey of existing work on gothic fiction as well as an introduction to theories of (gendered) space, the second chapter reads Gaskell’s 1850s ghost stories in the context of Victorian fascination with Gothic architecture and spiritualism. It traces connections between Gaskell’s ghost stories and the author’s writings about actual haunted country houses, including Haworth’s parsonage. Gaskell’s ghosts, Liggins argues, “are activated by servants, mistresses and daughters violating spatial boundaries or trespassing into forbidden zones” (71). In this way, the stories question the gendered spatial divisions that seek to confine Victorian women within the ancestral home. Women’s lack of freedom in their own home recurs in chapter three which discusses Margaret Oliphant’s 1889 collection, Stories of the Seen and Unseen. Juxtaposing these stories to Oliphant’s comments on the gendered nature of domestic space in her autobiographical writing, Liggins argues that the dispossessed women in these stories reflect cultural anxieties about the older woman and female inheritance. Vernon Lee’s idiosyncratic gothic writings rather aptly form the turning-point from the Victorian to the modern in chapter four. Unlike the haunted drawing-rooms, forbidden libraries, and secret gardens depicted in the stories of Gaskell and Oliphant, the architectural gothic of Lee’s stories draws on decaying Italian palaces and half-ruined Gothic churches. Liggins analyses these haunted spaces against the background of the development of Victorian tourism and the fin-de-siècle aesthetics of decay. Drawing on Lee’s admiration of the past in her travel writing, essays and gallery notes, Liggins shows how her ghost stories express a deep unease with the “vulgar” newness of modernity.

3The clash between old and new, between tradition and modernity is also shown to be at the heart of Edith Wharton’s early twentieth-century ghost stories as technology invades the middle-class home and gender- and class-based hierarchies are transformed. Liggins interestingly traces echoes between the architectural uncanny of Wharton’s haunted house narratives and contemporary debates about privacy, communication and surveillance in the modernised American home. “For the modernist woman writer,” she claims, “the ghost story became a forum for meditating on the implications of mechanization for domestic space, and the strangeness of the new technologies which both replaced and reiterated the labour of servants” (185). The new domestic arrangements prompted by the small and mostly servantless suburban houses that emerged in the interwar period form the backdrop of May Sinclair’s ghost stories, as discussed in chapter six. Again, Liggins links the confined atmosphere of Sinclair’s haunted houses to the rise of modern architecture at the time, but she also emphasizes the psychological processes of mourning, maternal anxiety and claustrophobia which these revenants testify to. Uncanny suburban homes are also a staple of Bowen’s ghost stories, which Liggins turns to in her last chapter. She reads Bowen’s stories from the 1920s in tandem with the author’s non-fiction discussions of place and architecture, both in Bowen’s Court (1942) and in some magazine pieces. The ghost stories included in The Demon Lover (1945), on the other hand, are analysed as examples of War Gothic, as the empty wartime home has become the uncanny space par excellence.

4Across these different chapters, Liggins convincingly traces the development of a particularly gendered architectural uncanny from the mid-Victorian ghost stories of Gaskell to the late-modernist ones of Elizabeth Bowen, from gloomy country houses and Italian ruins to modern suburban homes and war-damaged town houses. Each author’s specific rendering of the haunted house narrative is impressively contextualised through references to contemporary debates and developments such as the rise of tourism, the fashion for spiritualism and the Servant Question in the nineteenth century or the modern architecture, technological innovation and new domestic arrangements that transformed domestic space in the early twentieth century. Yet Liggins also shows that what remains constant throughout these different instantiations of the unhomely home is the insistently gendered perspective of these ghost stories as they bear witness to women’s anxieties about their place and position in the home, their relations with mistresses or servants, and their pre-scripted roles of wife, mother and daughter. These anxieties, Liggins argues with the help of theorists like Henry Lefebvre, Doreen Massey and Elizabeth Grosz, are at the heart of the gendered engagement with domestic space that the haunted house narratives bear witness to.

5As the foregoing suggests, particularly impressive in this study is the wealth of material Liggins brings to bear on her analyses of women’s ghost stories: contemporary texts about architecture, tourism, aesthetics and spiritualism as well as the selected authors’ own non-fiction writings; general philosophies of space and psychoanalysis (Lefebvre, Bachelard, Heidegger, and Freud) as well as their feminist critique (Grosz, Massey, Young, and Irigaray); existing criticism on ghost stories and the female gothic, as well as previous readings of the authors and stories she discusses. Liggins deserves high praise for the impressive scope and depth of her research as well as for the meticulousness with which she acknowledges prior research in the field. A potential downside of this thoroughness is that it is not always easy to see what Liggins’s own main argument is or how her perspective sheds new light on the stories she analyses. As the survey of existing research on the female gothic shows, the genre has attracted quite some critical attention in recent years. Palgrave has even published another monograph on women’s ghost stories in 2019, Victoria Margree’s British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930. Our Own Ghostliness, which partly covers the same ground.

6What distinguishes The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories from this and other studies, I would argue, is a corollary of the impressive scope of Liggins’s scholarship. Her selection of authors allows her to link the work of women writers across national borders (British, American and Irish) and different periods (Victorian, fin-de-siècle and modernism). These are made concrete in the different chapters in the form of influences, echoes and correspondences between the six authors as well as between these established writers and other, lesser-known, women writers of the period. In a similar way, Liggins’s method of framing her analyses of the ghost stories by a discussion of the authors’ non-fiction texts, whether travel writing, autobiography or essay, successfully manages to highlight recurring preoccupations within an author’s oeuvre as well as resonances with the wider social and cultural debates at the time.

7Its exclusive focus on the short story also distinguishes Liggins’s study from other approaches to gothic fiction, which tend to read short stories rather indiscriminately alongside longer fiction. As Liggins notes in the introduction, it is no coincidence that the short story form, with its “ellipses, absences and discontinuities,” lends itself particularly well to an exploration of the liminal and the uncanny (10). It is a pity, then, that the formal properties and generic characteristics of the short story do not receive more attention in this study. After all, the movement from the haunted country houses in the stories of Gaskell and Oliphant to the unhomely modern homes of Sinclair and Bowen goes hand in hand with the conspicuous development from the Victorian plotted tale to the modernist short story. It would thus have been interesting to see how the modern short story’s different narrative techniques, stylistic approaches and understanding of brevity had an impact on the staging of the architectural uncanny. This is only a minor quibble, however, which in no way detracts from the importance of The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories as a comprehensive, erudite and insightful study of the highly gendered architectural uncanny in some of the most fascinating and haunting stories of the past two centuries.

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Elke D’hoker, « Book Review: Emma Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories. Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1945 (London, Palgrave 2020) »Journal of the Short Story in English, 75 | 2020, 303-306.

Référence électronique

Elke D’hoker, « Book Review: Emma Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories. Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1945 (London, Palgrave 2020) »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 75 | Autumn 2020, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2022, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3404

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Elke D’hoker

University of Leuven

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