In 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 Wh...
Book Review: Emma Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories. Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1945 (London, Palgrave 2020)
Emma Liggins, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories. Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1945 (London, Palgrave 2020)
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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.
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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 [En ligne], 75 | Autumn 2020, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2022, consulté le 19 mai 2022. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3404
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