Through innovative and controversial readings of Victorian Gothic and 'sensation' fiction, this book interrogates current feminist assumptions about the relation of women to the private sphere, and reveals the unexpectedly radical potential of this association. It is argued that this potential is an intrinsic aspect of the 'female' Gothic tradition traceable back to Ann Radcliffe. A new typology of 'male' and 'female' Gothic is shown to be relevant to contemporary French feminist debates about sexual difference.