Unquiet spirits: the lost female ghost-story writers returning to haunt us

As we drift into the season of mists, many of us may cosy up with a ghost story or two. But who are the best known authors behind the classics, who plied their chilling trade in the Victorian and Edwardian eras? There are the usual suspects: MR James, Charles Dickens, William Hope Hodgson, Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, Wilkie Collins. But what of Mary E Wilkins Freeman? Evelyn Henty? Olive Harper? Elinor Mordaunt? Lettice Galbraith? BM Croker?

That most of us won’t recognise these names is no accident: these women ghost-story writers were effectively erased from history over the last century. But thanks to the often painstaking detective work of a handful of dedicated anthologists, the balance is being restored in spooky tales.

“Much of the ‘great forgetting’ of women’s involvement with the supernatural is due to tunnel vision when it comes to editing anthologies and republishing work,” says Dr Melissa Edmundson, a specialist in 19th- and early 20th-century British women writers, with a particular interest in supernatural fiction. “So while these women were well known in their day, their work wasn’t included in many anthologies of supernatural and weird fiction. Then editors relied on the work of other editors, not doing the research themselves. This caused the same, relatively small selection of mostly male-authored works to be republished and republished yet again.”

Edmundson’s first anthology dedicated to overlooked female ghost writers, Women’s Weird, was published last year. It showcased writers who had fallen from the public eye, as well as familiar names whose ghost stories had been neglected, such as Edith Wharton’s Kerfol and Edith Nesbit’s The Shadow. In her introduction, Edmundson quotes from How to Suppress Women’s Writing, the 1983 polemic by Joanna Russ, who used the example of Sheridan Le Fanu to demonstrate how male editors champion male writers at the expense of women.

“Male editors appreciated themes of father-son conflicts and heroic struggles. Women’s supernatural writing tends to be more critical of these traditional, less complicated masculine values,” says Edmundson, who is about to publish Women’s Weird 2, with 13 stories mixing unknowns with household names such as Cold Comfort Farm author Stella Gibbons and LM Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame. “Women focus on women’s experience in these stories, so their writing was conveniently labelled too ‘domestic’ to be included alongside the men. This label has become quite dismissive when it comes to discussing the quality of women’s ghost stories, which I disagree with. It’s as if people don’t think anything domestic could be scary – the home can be the scariest place of all, because it’s supposed to be the place where we feel safest or where we have the most control.”

Johnny Mains began his mission to shine light on the forgotten female ghost-story writers four years ago, when he was putting together an anthology of obscure fiction. While searching in an archive, he found Miss Massereene’s Ghost by one EA Henty, an Australian poet. “What was remarkable was that her story hadn’t been reprinted since it was first written in 1889. So I decided to go down the rabbit hole, to see how many ‘new’ ghost stories I could find.”

He is now publishing Our Lady of Hate, a volume of stories by Catherine Lord, of whom very little was known before Mains started his investigations. Lord wrote for just 10 years between the death of her husband and her own in 1901; though she was prolific, her work was never reprinted.

Recurring topics have emerged in his research. “The short story was an amazing outlet for Victorian women to talk about love, oppression, suffrage, sexuality and many other sociological issues that were dominant factors of the time,” he says. “Our Lady of Hate features four stories that deal directly with losing a young child and give another fascinating look at the Victorians and their beliefs on death and the grieving process.”

What sets these women apart from other writers of their day is the lack of class barriers between them. “Women with connections normally wrote and were published by the magazines of the day,” says Mains. “But I’ve discovered short stories in newspapers that were written by housewives and working women. These were not women with nannies or parlour maids to help run the household. For me, this has been the most exciting aspect of this – writing was an achievable goal.”

For Edmundson, her work is not only about correcting a historical imbalance. “These woman are good at what they do,” she says. “I can honestly say that no two stories are alike. Many times, when I’m reading stories by male authors, I don’t develop any kind of connection with the protagonists. It’s more about describing the supernatural or weird events that occur. Women, on the other hand, pay just as much attention to the people in their stories; they never lose sight of the human element. And that is fundamentally what all good scary stories do: they tell us about ourselves, our fears and anxieties, how we cope with the imperfect, unpredictable world around us.”

• Women’s Weird 2, edited by Dr Melissa Edmundson, is published by Handheld Press on 27 October. Our Lady of Hate by Catherine Lord, edited by Johnny Mains, will be published by Noose & Gibbet in December.