University of Wales Press Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic (Gothic Literary Studies)

'Female Gothic Histories' traces the development of women's Gothic historical fiction from Sophia Lee's The Recess in the late eighteenth century through the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt to the bestselling novels of Sarah Waters in the twenty-first century. Often left out of traditional historical narratives, women writers have turned to Gothic historical fiction as a mode of writing which can both reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusion. This study breaks new ground in bringing together thinking about the Gothic and the historical novel, and in combining psychoanalytic theory with historical contextualisation. Review In Female Gothic Histories Diana Wallace provides a powerful account of the centrality of historical fiction to the evolution of the Gothic and, in the process, re-writes the story of the origins of the historical novel. Her finely-argued and nuanced case-studies -- ranging from Sophia Lee in the C18thth to Sarah Waters in the C21st -- will cause readers to reflect anew upon both genres and the intriguing ways in which their genealogies intertwine. Elegantly written, carefully researched and imaginative in its use of literary and feminist theory, this book will quickly establish itself as priority reading for students and scholars alike. --Professor Lynne Pearce, Lancaster University. About the Author Diana Wallace is Professor of English Literature at the University of Glamorgan. She is the author of 'The Woman's Historical Novel' (2005) and 'Sisters and Rivals in British Women s Fiction, 1914-39' (2000). Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Female Gothic Histories Gender, History and the Gothic By Diana Wallace University of Wales Press Copyright © 2013 Diana Wallace All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-7083-2574-2 Contents Preface, Acknowledgements, 1 Introduction, 2 The Murder of the Mother: Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783–5), 3 Be-witched and Ghosted: Elizabeth Gaskell's Gothic Historical Tales, 4 Puzzling over the Past: Vernon Lee's Fantastic Stories, 5 Displacing the Past: Daphne du Maurier and the Modern Gothic, 6 Queer as History: Sarah Waters's Gothic Historical Novels, Afterword, Notes, Bibliography, CHAPTER 1 Introduction * * * The history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female. Virginia Woolf, 'Women and Fiction' (1929) If the rationale of History is ultimately to remind us of everything that has happened and to take it into account, we must make the interpretation of the forgetting of female ancestries part of History and re-establish its economy. Luce Irigaray, Thinking the Difference (1989) From the late eighteenth century, women writers, aware of their exclusion from traditional historical narratives, have used Gothic historical fiction as a mode of historiography which can simultaneously reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusion. If the Gothic with its blatant flouting of realism is always already, as I will suggest here, a kind of metafiction avant la lettre, then Gothic historical fiction, the subject of my study, can be seen as a kind of metahistory, a way of theorising or producing a philosophy of history. In the hands of women writers, Gothic historical fiction has offered a way of 'interpreting', or symbolising, what Luce Irigaray calls 'the forgetting of female ancestries' and of re-establishing them within 'History'. In doing so these novels throw into question what exactly we mean by 'History', or indeed, 'history', or 'the past'. That is, how do we shape accounts of what happened in the past (the events of 'history') into narratives ('History')? How does our understanding of gender influence such processes? What happens to those accounts when women are either left out, or added in? And, if the 'economy' (to borrow Irigaray's term) of 'History' is based on the assumption that public and political e