When we think of women authors in horror, Mary Shelley immediately comes to mind. If we want to look ahead to our destiny readers in this category, it can be enlightening to look back. During this month dedicated to Women in Horror, I’d like to honor the forgotten classic authors who remain in their graves but live on in our reading life. The past may be ashes but ghosts remain. I am haunted every day by dead authors. And I love it.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman is famous for her best-selling short story The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892. Such a benign title for a story about a woman’s struggle with sanity versus madness that becomes a terrifying blur into the supernatural. It’s a story streaming with imagination, symbolism, and psychological tension to say nothing of feminism and repression. What a delicate adventure and a courageous one for a 19th-century woman writer.
As writers we all seek courage to become imaginative craftsmen employing the tools of language. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, she wrote more than a frightening story with compelling characters. Shelley, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, illustrated a philosophy of horror about being human. And so have many of their literary sisters and daughters written novels and short stories with these same goals.
If the past is present in our future, as some say, then we might visit the Dead Authors Society of Women in Horror. Let the ghosts of these writers prevail on a dark and lonely evening by candlelight. Be haunted!
Dead Authors Society of Women in Horror:
Amelia B. Edwards, The Phantom Coach and Other Short Stories
Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories
Ann Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford World Classics)
Charlotte & Emily Bronte Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (Gothic)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Short Stories
Charlotte Riddell Weird Stories (Irish Horror)
Clara Reeve The Old English Barron (1777) (Gothic)
Daphne du Maurier Don’t Look Now and Selected Short Stories
Edith Nesbit The Power of Darkness (Supernatural Short Stories)
Edith Wharton The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Eleanor Sleath The Orphan of the Rhine (Gothic)
Eliza Parsons The Castle of Wolfenbach (Gothic)
Elizabeth Bowen The Demon Lover
Elizabeth Gaskell The Short Stories of Elizabeth Gaskell
Evangeline Walton She Walks in Darkness
Gertrude Atherton The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky Nightmare Tales
Jane Austen Northanger Abbey (Gothic)
Joan Aiken The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
Louisa May Alcott The Long Fatal Love Chase (Gothic)
Margaret Oliphant The Beleagured City & Tales of the Seen and Unseen
Margery Lawrence Terraces of the Night
Marjorie Bowen The Bishop of Hell & Other Stories
Mary Elizabeth Braddon At Chrighton Abbey
Mary Shelley The Collected Works of Mary W. Shelley
May Sinclair Uncanny Stories (Mystery & Supernatural)
Mary Stewart Thornyhold
Mary Wilkins Freeman The Wind in the Rose Bush & Other Supernatural Tales
Regina Maria Roche Clermont, A Tale (Gothic)
Shirley Jackson The Lottery & Other Short Stories
V.C. Andrews Flowers In the Attic
Vernon Lee The Vernon Lee Compendium (10 books)
Violet Hunt The Complete Uneasy Tales
Post by: Paula Cappa
Author Bio: Paula Cappa’s novels include Night Sea Journey, A Tale of the Supernatural and from Crispin Books (Crickhollow) The Dazzling Darkness, which won the Gothic Readers Book Club Choice Award for outstanding fiction in 2013. Her short fiction has appeared in Whistling Shade Literary Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly, Every Day Fiction, Fiction365, Twilight Times Ezine, and in anthologies. Cappa’s writing career began as a freelance journalist for newspapers in New York and Connecticut. She writes a weekly blog, Reading Fiction, Tales of Terror, on her Web site https://paulacappa.wordpress.com
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