"Liggins draws together the different strands in her account of the female ghost story, providing an exceptional introduction to this often over-looked and under researched genre. This book will be of interest to scholars of women's writing, ghost stories, and nineteenth-century fiction, as well as the general reader. It is an excellent companion to two recently reprinted short-story collections introduced by Liggins: Twilight Stories (1879) by Rhoda Broughton and Charlotte Riddell's Weird Stories (1882)." (Kathleen Beal, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 22 (2), 2022) "This well-written book is a much needed re-examination of female ghost story writers and their representations ... . Emma Liggins's book sheds light onto an often-overlooked area of work, appealing to both expert and neophyte researchers in the field of the Female Gothic ghost story." (Richard Jorge Fernández, English Studies, September 27, 2021)
Introduction.- Chapter 1: Elizabeth Gaskell: Old Nurses, Illegitimacy and the Ancestral Rural Home.- Chapter 2: Margaret Oliphant: Disinheritance, Scottish properties and the haunted garden.- Chapter 3: Vernon Lee: The Rapture of Old Houses and Decadent Italy.- Chapter 4: The Horrors of Suburbia in the Ghost Stories of E. Nesbit.- Chapter 5: ‘Ghosts went out when Electricity Came In’: Technology and the Domestic Interior in Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.- Chapter 5: May Sinclair: Patriarchal Space and Haunted Libraries.- Chapter 7: Elizabeth Bowen: From the Suburban Villa to Bomb-Damaged London.- Conclusion.
Emma Liggins is Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has previously published Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women’s Fiction, 1850s-1930s (2014), as well as articles and chapters on Vernon Lee, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and modernist ghost stories.