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British Women’s Short
Supernatural Fiction,
1860–1930
Our Own Ghostliness

Victoria Margree
British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction,
1860–1930
 Victoria Margree

British Women’s Short

Supernatural Fiction,
1860–1930
Our Own Ghostliness
Victoria Margree
University of Brighton
Brighton, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-27141-1    ISBN 978-3-030-27142-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27142-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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To my parents, and Moritz
 Acknowledgements

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of

Brighton in providing me with the research sabbatical during which much
of this book was written. In particular I want to thank my then Head of
School, Paddy Maguire, for his consistent support and encouragement.
Part of that sabbatical involved teaching a course on ‘Victorian Women’s
Short Fiction’ as an International Visiting Scholar at the University of
Passau in Germany, and I am grateful both to the students on that course
for their lively engagement with this material, and the staff of the univer-
sity for making such an experience possible. I would also like to thank the
staff of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, where most of this
book was researched and written; as well as friends in Germany such as
Dorothea Schick, Frauke Ralf and Michael Günther, who helped to make
it such a productive and enjoyable year.
Particular thanks must go to the people who have read drafts of my
chapters and offered invaluable suggestions for improving them: Michael
Neu, Minna Vuohelainen, Bryony Randall, Daniel Orrells, Emma Liggins,
Anne-Marie Beller and Carolyn Lambert. I cannot overstate how much I
appreciate your generosity with your time, energy and ideas. I am also
grateful to numerous colleagues and students on the Humanities
Programme at the University of Brighton, who have expressed interest in
this project and who make our Programme such a supportive and collab-
orative environment. Especial thanks go to Anthony Leaker who has often
made it possible for me to focus on the book at a crucial stage; I promise
to return the favour.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Appreciation is due to all staff at Palgrave Macmillan who have been

involved in this book, but particularly to Ben Doyle and Camille Davies,
whose efficiency and flexibility has made such a difference. My thanks go
as well to the anonymous reviewer of the proposal and manuscript for
their very helpful feedback. Two chapters of this book (Chaps. 2 and 3)
have been developed in part from arguments that first appeared in articles
in the journals Gothic Studies and Women’s Writing, so I would also like to
thank the editors and reviewers of those publications for their role in
this process.
Lastly, this book would not have been possible without the ongoing
support and encouragement of friends including Nina Hilton, Joanne
Tutt and Gurminder Bhambra, of my partner, Moritz Schick, and my par-
ents, Phil and Jackie Margree.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Our Own Ghostliness  1

2 (Other)Worldly Goods: Ghost Fiction as Financial Writing

in Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Riddell 27

3 Neither Punishment nor Poetry: Mary Elizabeth Braddon,

Edith Nesbit and Female Death 69

4 The Good Memsahib? Marriage, Infidelity and Empire in

Alice Perrin’s Anglo-Indian Tales111

5 Haunted Modernity in the Uncanny Stories of May

Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt147

6 Conclusion193

Index199

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Our Own Ghostliness

Published in 1916, Henrietta (H. D.) Everett’s ‘The Whispering Wall’

testifies to the potent afterlife of the Victorian ghost story in the first
decades of the twentieth century. Deploying familiar tropes such as a
haunted ancestral pile and a cursed aristocratic line, Everett’s story begins
as an Edwardian invocation of the traditional nineteenth-century form
before seguing into an elegy for the lost youth of the First World War. The
‘light-hearted undergraduates’ we meet in the opening sentences, ‘laugh-
ing uproariously’ at tales of the supernatural, seem just the kind of scepti-
cal, boisterous young men whom the Victorian women’s ghost story in
particular had always delighted in humbling (2006, 203). Yet the spectre
that really overshadows these men’s lives is nothing supernatural. The nar-
rator encounters the family ghost of his friend, Jack Lovell, as a whispering
sound that travels along a wall at the latter’s English family estate,
Marchmont, but the two men can make no sense of the apparent words it
utters: ‘Ah-mont-year’ (206). It is only later, once war has broken out and
Jack lies in a military hospital in France, that the whispering sounds can be
interpreted. ‘The child at Marchmont wants me’ he tells the narrator, ‘he
was always whispering for me to come and play’ (207). Jack now under-
stands that the ghostly child was saying not ‘Ah-mont-year’ but
‘Armentieres’—the name of the place where he would be mortally
wounded in combat.
Everett’s story demonstrates how the conventions of the nineteenth-­
century ghost story could be adapted in order to allow writers to explore

© The Author(s) 2019 1

V. Margree, British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27142-8_1
2 V. MARGREE

the transformed conditions of the new century.1 On the one hand, it

deploys these conventions in order to posit the Great War as a definitive
rupture with the past. After the story’s denouement, the carefree laughter
of its opening lines seem to have belonged to an entirely different age, to
the long Edwardian summer in which Cambridge undergraduates could
confidently look forward to peace and prosperity, unaware of how many of
them were soon to be added to the ranks of the ghostly. Yet on the other
hand, the story achieves its chilling effect in large part through its very
disruption of familiar ways of organising time. The ghostly child had
always been calling for Jack; had already known the place of his death.
Retrospectively, the supposed pre-war idyll is revealed to have been already
corrupted by traces of the devastation to come. Everett’s story suggests
that ghosts, as beings whose very nature is to violate chronological time,
may breach the present with fragments not only from the past but also
from the future.
One of the aims of this book is to show how women’s ghost fiction
more generally disrupts conventional stories told about the transition
from the nineteenth century to modernity. British Women’s Short
Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own Ghostliness explores how
female authors continually shaped and reshaped ghost story conventions
across the period of its study. In so doing it complicates the idea that inno-
vative twentieth-century writers commonly rejected Victorian narrative
forms as being unsuited to addressing the circumstances of the new cen-
tury. The notion of a “rupture” that brings to an end the long nineteenth
century and inaugurates a brash modernity around the time of the First
World War, has long been influential in the ways in which literary histori-
ans have periodised time. The very notion of the “golden age” of the
ghost story, for example, typically describes it as coming to an end just
after the war. But this book will contend that this periodisation is no lon-
ger sustainable if we shift our focus from a male tradition of ghost story
writing to a female one. It will, therefore, argue very much in agreement
with Melissa Edmundson’s recent claim that ‘When we look at the work
of women writers, the “golden age” of ghost stories that supposedly ended
at the outbreak of the First World War should be extended to the interwar
period of the 1920s and 1930s’ (2018).
Another literary history that stands to be productively problematised
by turning to women’s ghost stories is that of the emergence of literary
modernism, which has often been characterised as signalling a rebellion
against, or definitive break with, Victorian aesthetic values and narrative
 1 INTRODUCTION: OUR OWN GHOSTLINESS 3

forms understood as being unsuited to exploring post-war society. This

characterisation was promoted by self-identified modernist writers and
artists at the time and has since been promulgated by much academic
work.2 The present study will argue, however, that if Eleanor Scott is able
in the 1920s to merge the Victorian haunted house subgenre with mod-
ernist experimentation in narrative perspective, in order to produce a psy-
choanalytic study of a post-suffrage feminist (see Chap. 5), then literary
histories premised upon a radical break between modernism and
Victorianism need to be significantly complicated.3 This book is also,
therefore, intended to contribute to current scholarship that is increas-
ingly revising this history by pointing to previously unrecognised continu-
ities between twentieth-century modernism and aspects of Victorian
literary and mass culture, including nineteenth-century aestheticism, dec-
adence, Gothic fiction and supernaturalism.4 The woman’s ghost story,
this book argues, presents a case study of how twentieth-century writers
could innovate within existing narrative forms, taking the conventions of
a popular Victorian genre and adapting and revitalising them to interro-
gate the modern present. In linking the “serious” mode of literary mod-
ernism with the popular form of the ghost story, this study will also thereby
call into question the evaluative categories operated by canon-building
literary historians in the twentieth century.
If the ghost story was indeed still an important form for women writers
in the first decades of the twentieth century, perhaps one reason for this
lies in its power to testify that the past is not done with. This had always
been an important function of the women’s ghost story, one developed
from the role of ghosts in oral storytelling as deliverers of justice from
beyond the grave, and taken up in numerous Victorian tales that feature
ghostly women returning to avenge themselves upon men who have
abused and exploited them with the relative impunity bestowed by patri-
archal legal, social and economic dominance. In the 1920s, and despite
the huge gains achieved by the early feminist movement in relation to
women’s rights to own property in marriage, to divorce and have custody
of their children, to enter into the professions and higher education, and
finally to have the vote (at least, for women over 30 years of age who met
the property qualification), we encounter women’s ghost stories that
question just how much the Victorian past has really been left behind.
Historians have described the post-suffrage years as ones in which the idea
prevailed that since equality had now been achieved, there remained no
structural inequalities that required a continued women’s campaign.
4 V. MARGREE

Adrian Bingham, for example, writes that ‘[i]f the recent war marked a
fundamental rupture with Victorianism, the future seemed to offer the
prospect of an inexorable movement towards greater equality’ (2013, 95).
But many women’s ghost stories from this period precisely call into ques-
tion this ‘narrative of progress’ (96), by featuring female protagonists who
negotiate expanded fields of possibility in their personal and professional
lives while remaining significantly constrained by patriarchal forces that
have reconfigured themselves, rather than disappeared, in face of women’s
new freedoms. In these stories, it is not that nothing has changed, but that
change proceeds at an uneven pace and is shadowed by a past that threat-
ens to return and overwhelm the modern subject. To see the persistence
in the present of what is supposedly past has been a feature of the ghost
story since its inception, and one that helps account for why even self-­
consciously modern women writers in the first decades of the twentieth
century might see the Victorian ghost story as a form worth returning to.
But I would also like to suggest along with Everett in ‘The Whispering
Wall’ that ghosts can sometimes offer a prevision of the future, even if this
can be interpreted only in retrospect. If the Victorian ghost story could be
taken up and adapted by modernist writers such as May Sinclair and
Virginia Woolf, this is perhaps because it was always operating at a distance
from the literary realism that was the dominant narrative form of the nine-
teenth century. As the following chapters will show, even in older stories
from my period of study, there are elements of narrative irresolution,
ambiguity and polysemy that proceed from the character of ghosts as
beings that can be perceived only indistinctly and intermittently. If the
realist novel sought to map a rapidly changing world in order to make it
knowable, the nineteenth-century ghost story frequently testified to the
implausibility of this project, insisting that there is always something just
on the periphery of vision, eluding one’s full comprehension. It is often
ghostliness in this sense that authors influenced by nascent modernism in
the 1910s and 1920s are particularly responding to. My study argues that
Victorian ghosts can be foreshadowing not just aspects of the formal
experimentation of later narrative forms, but also their thematic concerns.
Sometimes, as I shall argue later in this Introduction, ghosts seem to
materialise in the lacunae created when a mismatch exists between a cul-
ture’s existing conceptual resources and emergent forms of social con-
sciousness. For example, many women’s ghost stories from the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries focus on the often unwittingly injurious
effects upon women of the ways in which men think about and relate to
 1 INTRODUCTION: OUR OWN GHOSTLINESS 5

them. “Toxic masculinity” may be a recent concept, informed by decades

of gender theory, but supernatural tales by women from a hundred and
more years ago reveal an acute sensitivity to the destructiveness of particu-
lar kinds of gendered interactions that are sanctioned by social and cultural
norms (see Chap. 3 in particular).5
British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860–1930: Our Own
Ghostliness, therefore, argues for the value of returning to the women’s
ghost story tradition and discovering authors and texts that have not yet
been substantially considered. This value has to do with how the form
functioned as a vehicle through which women negotiated their changing
conditions in a period of social and political transformation; with how it
complicates received ideas about literary history (as already noted); and
also with the intrinsic merit of these stories, which are frequently brilliantly
executed pieces of fiction. The relatively marginal status of both the ghost
story and short fiction more generally mean that work in these forms by
even well-known female writers has for too long been neglected.
Thankfully, this is increasingly being addressed today by a body of scholar-
ship that has turned to short fiction and to the ghost story to reveal their
complexities, as I will shortly explore. This book is intended as a contribu-
tion to that scholarship.
It begins with writers whose supernatural work has already attracted
attention from several scholars: Charlotte Riddell, Margaret Oliphant,
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edith Nesbit and Alice Perrin. These authors
were writing in the latter part of the long nineteenth century and thus in
the period most associated with the ghost story genre (although Perrin,
the least known of the authors listed above, also wrote beyond this period).
But my study also extends into the 1920s to explore the work of the afore-
mentioned May Sinclair and two writers virtually forgotten today, Eleanor
Scott and Violet Hunt. Although a couple of these authors have origins or
identifications that lie beyond the British isles—Riddell emigrated to
London from Ireland; Perrin identified as Anglo-Indian—they are consid-
ered “British” from the point of view of this study since they found success
within the British publishing industry.
A more thorny issue in terms of the study’s scope is raised by the ques-
tion of what counts as “supernatural” fiction. The chapters that follow are
at times concerned not only or not simply with ghosts but also with stories
that address a range of uncanny phenomena, including spirit possession,
telepathic communication, clairvoyance and revenants of fleshly rather
than ghostly kinds. Especially from the fin de siècle onwards, it becomes
6 V. MARGREE

increasingly difficult to draw firm boundaries between the ghost story and
tales that might also be considered in the light of Gothic fiction, science
fiction, horror and the weird tale. I see this as evidence of the richness and
variety of women’s fantastic literature and take a fairly catholic approach to
this range.6 But an important theme of the book is the long-standing asso-
ciation between women and the specifically ghostly that has been made
within both ghost fiction and ghost fiction scholarship—and it is to the
latter that I will now turn.

Women, Ghosts and Short Stories

The subtitle of this study, ‘Our Own Ghostliness’, is taken from Virginia
Woolf’s review of Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern
English Fiction (1917), in which Woolf wrote that the ‘great increase of
the psychical ghost story in late years’ reflected ‘the fact that our sense of
our own ghostliness has much quickened’ (1918, 55). Writing apprecia-
tively of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898), she proposed that

[t]he horror of the story comes from the force with which it makes us realize
the power that our minds possess for such excursions into the darkness;
when certain lights sink or certain barriers are lowered, the ghosts of the
mind, untracked desires, indistinct intimations, are seen to be a large com-
pany’ (55).

Woolf’s ‘ghostliness’ therefore refers to the idea that there is something

shadowy or even phantasmal about personal identity; that the seeming
solidity of the self evaporates upon close scrutiny to reveal previously
unperceived mental fragments. Her ‘our’ initially identifies the modern
subject of the new century, who has been shaken into recognition of the
precarity of identity through the experience of total war, the transforma-
tion of living conditions through technology, and the insights of psycho-
analytic theory. But the word ‘quickened’ also suggests that while
awareness of the ghostliness of the self may have intensified through such
developments, it is not perhaps a purely modern phenomenon. It is ghost-
liness as Woolf understands it that I read the authors in Chap. 5—Sinclair,
Scott and Hunt—to be exploring. But ghostliness as a trope for identity,
and particularly women’s identity, has still wider connotations than this.
Scholars of women’s ghost stories have argued that the capacity of ghosts
to express something about female experience in male-dominated societies
 1 INTRODUCTION: OUR OWN GHOSTLINESS 7

is precisely what has made the ghost story historically such an appealing
form for women writers and readers.
As Diana Wallace has observed, although women are estimated to have
produced at least half of all ghost stories published during the Victorian
period, critics and anthologisers for a long time concentrated almost
exclusively on what Nickianne Moody characterised as the male ‘“masters
of the uncanny” approach’ (Wallace 2018, 428; Moody 1996, 77). For
example, Julia Briggs’ important early study Night Visitors: The Rise and
Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977) addresses Charles Dickens, Sheridan
Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard
Kipling, Henry James, M. R. James and Walter De La Mare; while the
only female author to be given more than glancing attention is Vernon
Lee (Violet Paget). Jack Sullivan’s Elegant Nightmares (1978) focuses on
the work of Le Fanu, M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood, making only
occasional reference to women writers such as Rhoda Broughton, Riddell
and Sinclair. Glen Cavaliero’s 1995 study of The Supernatural and English
Fiction discusses few works by female authors (and of these, predomi-
nantly novels), referring only fleetingly to Victorian women ghost story
writers and in terms which characterise them as precursors in a tradition
that becomes fully formed only with M. R. James.7 And yet, despite their
neglect within early scholarship on the form, female authors had in fact
been drawn in great numbers to the ghost story, often publishing—albeit
anonymously or with androgynous pseudonyms—in the literary periodi-
cals whose proliferation from the mid-century onwards fuelled the popu-
larity of ghost stories and short fiction more generally. Women ghost story
writers have been an active though marginalised presence within an already
marginalised literary form.
This critical neglect would start to be addressed from the 1970s with
the development of a specifically feminist literary criticism that took fan-
tastic literature seriously. Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976) introduced
the idea of a Female Gothic tradition through which writers such as Mary
Shelley circumvented prohibitions on women writing explicitly about
female experiences such as motherhood and childbirth; while Sandra
M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) pointed
to how images of female monstrosity in women’s texts could represent
unconscious rebellions against patriarchal subordination. These landmark
studies were crucial in identifying the fantastical language of the super-
natural as enabling the encoding of subversive messages, but their focus
upon Gothic fiction, as Wallace again notes, risked ‘obscur[ing] the ghost
8 V. MARGREE

story as a separate genre and elid[ing] important differences between the

two modes of writing’ (2018, 428).8
From the 1990s, however, scholarship emerged that considered the
specificity of women’s ghost literature. Diana Basham’s The Trial of
Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and
Society (1992) included a chapter on the ghost story which argued that it
‘provided for many writers in the second half of the century its own pecu-
liar route into feminism’ (157). Basham discussed how writers such as
Amelia B. Edwards, Braddon,9 Oliphant and Nesbit employed the super-
natural in order to challenge masculinity itself, often utilising a masculine
narrative perspective to draw attention to ‘the exclusion of women and
their inadequate representation’ (171). Basham also, however, identified a
shift that took place in the 1890s towards ‘the counter-narrative of female
psychic super-abundance’, with Vernon Lee as her chief example (173).
Nickianne Moody’s own chapter on the English women’s ghost story in
1996 would also help draw attention to the woman’s ghost story as ‘a
form which has been used consistently to pursue particular public and
private debates concerning women’s experience’, although the large part
of her analysis focuses upon twentieth century tales (78). A less well-­
known discussion is Lowell T. Frye’s essay from 1998, which argues that
the women’s ghost story tradition deserves critical attention for the ways
in which writers such as Edwards, Braddon and Nesbit ‘make us confront
[…] the victimization of women in a society whose institutions and modes
of thinking clearly favour and empower men’ (1998, 171).
It was in 1996, however, that the first monograph dedicated to wom-
en’s ghost fiction appeared, with Vanessa Dickerson’s Victorian Ghosts in
the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural. Dickerson’s thesis,
that ghosts provided female authors with a particularly suitable trope for
exploring the status of Victorian women, would shape the scholarship to
come. According to Dickerson, the Victorian woman fulfilled her ideo-
logically sanctioned role as Angel of the House by ‘becoming a ghost’
(1996, 4), and the paradoxes of ghostly existence therefore mapped onto
the contradictions of women’s lives in suggestive ways. The ghost is both
there and not there, visible and invisible, powerful and powerless; and so
too were Victorian women, charged as they were with occupying ‘the
higher realm of moral influence’ within the home while being increasingly
‘removed from the power-wielding occupations of the world’ (5). The
ghost story, Dickerson argued, therefore provided a form of ‘public dis-
course for voicing feminine concerns’, and it is for this reason that even
 1 INTRODUCTION: OUR OWN GHOSTLINESS 9

successful women writers such as George Eliot would risk their profes-
sional status by writing in the supposedly inferior and trivial genre of the
supernatural (this was a lesser risk for male writers who received a degree
of protection through their cultural status as ‘the great thinkers and ratio-
nalists of the day’ (8)).10 Through literary ghosts, women were able to
explore ‘their ambiguous status as the “other” living in a state of in-­
betweenness: between the walls of the house, between animal and man,
between angel and demon’—a condition of being poised between one
state and another that they shared with ghosts (8).
Dickerson’s emphasis on the capacity of the ghost story to explore
women’s location at the peripheries of a male-dominated world also pro-
vides a way of reflecting upon the ghost story specifically as short fiction.
Ever since the “second-wave” of short story criticism that took place
between the 1960s and 1980s,11 there has been a critical tendency to view
short fiction as a form that appeals particularly to writers positioned at the
margins of society. Frank O’Connor considered the short story to be a
form focused upon ‘outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of soci-
ety’: for him, the short story’s difference from the novel was ‘not so much
formal […] as ideological’ (quoted by Hanson 1989, 3). This thesis has
been helpfully developed by Clare Hanson who, calling the short story ‘a
form of the margins’ (2), claims that it ‘is a vehicle for different kinds of
knowledge, knowledge which may be in some way at odds with the “story”
of dominant culture’ (6). As Emma Liggins et al note in their invaluable
recent introduction to the British short story, the form has been ‘an effec-
tive outlet for the exploration and negotiation of gender, race, class and
sexual identity, making it particularly popular with women writers and
with others who feel in some ways marginalised or not fully secure within
their communities’ (2011, 16).
In scholarship upon both the ghost story and the short story then, we
find a nexus of claims about marginality, social critique and subversion that
require attention. Firstly, the claim is frequently made that it is the very
marginal status of these forms that makes them available for the expression
of heterodox views and values. While the ghost story suffered for its iden-
tification as popular fiction, the short story more generally has, of course,
long been considered an inferior form to the novel; one which authors
might dabble in for speedy remuneration or as a testing ground for ideas
to be developed within novels. But as we know from other marginalised
kinds of fiction such as children’s literature, “inferior” status has often
afforded writers particular kinds of freedom. Typically published in
10 V. MARGREE

­ eriodicals, nineteenth-century short fiction seems not to have been sub-

p
jected to the same levels of editorial scrutiny as novels, which had to con-
form to the strict moral standards of the circulating libraries. In relation to
ghost stories specifically, Clare Stewart has argued that male critics and
publishers were thrown ‘off guard’ by their apparent character as mere
entertainment vehicles whose origins lay in oral tradition (2001, 110).
Under the ‘guise of a “harmless” ghost story’, Stewart contends, Victorian
women could produce ‘multi-layered’ narratives (112) whose ‘popular
form […] allowed them into print initially, whilst the supernatural element
and the social comment were, cleverly, so indistinguishable as to make
vague misgivings difficult to identify and vocalize’ (111).
Secondly, the possible subversiveness of both short fiction and ghost
fiction has been considered to relate to the formal qualities of each.
Happily, the notion of the short story as the novel’s inferior cousin has
been successfully challenged by a growing body of scholarship that insists
upon the distinctive narrative and aesthetic possibilities of the form. It is
now recognised that the very brevity of short fiction frees it from certain
requirements placed upon novels (particularly nineteenth-century realist
ones), such as to explain events by establishing cause and effect, or to end
with narrative closure. Consequently, the short story is able to foreground
moments of epiphany or intense feeling, to explore fleeting impressions or
“irrational” chains of mental association, to end in shocking or ambiguous
ways, and to present discordant perspectives without deciding between
them. These formal qualities help the short story to resist the pull to affirm
ideological normalcy, explaining the appeal of the form to what Hanson
described as ‘losers and loners, exiles, women, blacks—writers who for one
reason or another have not been part of the ruling “narrative” or episte-
mological/experiential framework of their society’ (1989, 2). It is also
these qualities that have arguably made short fiction particularly hospita-
ble to ghosts. Ghosts are not always so well accommodated in narratives
that require suspension of readerly disbelief over a sustained duration, but
they flourish in the intensely charged, unfamiliar and uncertain moments
in which short fiction specialises.12
The last decade or so has witnessed a resurgence of scholarship that
takes seriously both the short story and the ghost story and that also aims
to question the prioritisation of male writing within these traditions, and
my own study is indebted to this work in numerous ways. In much of this
scholarship, arguments about marginality and subversion have been key.
Claire Drewery’s Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in
Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf
 1 INTRODUCTION: OUR OWN GHOSTLINESS 11

(2011) argues that these authors’ short stories interrogate liminal states of
madness, death, incoherence and alienation. Drewery is clear that liminal-
ity overlaps with marginality and inferiority without being identical to
them, since liminality has specifically to do with occupying a threshold
condition within a social structure (as opposed to being outside or beneath
it): with being at the limins of one state and another and encountering the
possibility of transgressing a boundary. I would suggest that liminality
nonetheless speaks to the ‘in-betweenness’ that Dickerson had identified
as the condition both of women under patriarchy and of ghosts, and
indeed uncanny stories by Sinclair and Woolf are the focus of one of
Drewery’s chapters. She writes, for example, that ‘Modernist short fiction
is frequently set in such in-between spaces as gardens or the seashore, or
transitional areas like hotels, waiting rooms and railway carriages: spaces
that are occupied only on a transitory basis’ (3; emphasis added). In the
following chapters, I draw on Drewery’s account of death as a modernist
pre-­occupation in my analysis of Edith Nesbit, and on her understanding
of journeys as transformative, threshold experiences in my discussion of
Alice Perrin.
Kate Krueger’s 2014 monograph British Women Writers and the Short
Story, 1850–1930: Reclaiming Social Space presents another study that
explores women’s experience in relation to limits and potential boundary
crossings. Krueger explores how the compressed narrative space of short
fiction makes it ideally suited to exploring gendered social space, and her
study focuses upon stories in which ‘heroines […] surmount the limita-
tions of their prescribed roles by redefining their boundaries’ (2). In a
chapter on the ghost stories of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Rhoda
Broughton, Krueger acknowledges her indebtedness to Dickerson, but
also signals her distance from the limitations of Dickerson’s narrow
emphasis on ghosts as veiled versions of Victorian women themselves (a
point I will return to). Krueger’s insistence on the gendered symbolism of
spaces is helpful in my reading of Perrin’s stories, but her emphasis upon
‘representations of transgressive women in short fiction’ (4; emphasis
added) is one that I will have cause to depart from.
Scholarship focused on the female ghost story has also been reinvigo-
rated. Wallace’s important article in 2004, ‘Uncanny Stories: The Ghost
Story as Female Gothic’, called for the recognition of links between the
women’s ghost story and the Female Gothic tradition. Wallace analyses
how tales by Elizabeth Gaskell, May Sinclair and Elizabeth Bowen which
rework the Bluebeard story in order to articulate desire for and fear of ‘the
12 V. MARGREE

male Other’, show how the ghost story of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries updated the conventions of the earlier form in order to articulate
not dissimilar female anxieties (66).13 Andrew Smith’s The Ghost Story,
1840–1920: A Cultural History (2010) explores how a ‘discourse of spec-
trality’ was spawned by the political and economic contexts of the long
nineteenth century, and while his study is largely concerned with male
writers, his chapter on ‘the female ghost story’ offers an important discus-
sion of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee and May Sinclair. I draw upon
Smith’s insights in my analyses of Riddell and Oliphant in Chap. 2.
Luke Thurston’s Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The
Haunting Interval (2012) performs the kind of troubling of literary his-
tory that I am also calling for, arguing as it does that ‘the ghost story can
be given its full aesthetic significance only when seen as a gap of “haunting
interval” between Victorian literature and the modernist moment’ (6).
For Thurston, ghosts rupture established orders of meaning so severely
that they cannot be interpreted at the time of their appearance, but only
subsequently, through ‘Nachträglichkeit’ or ‘future anteriority’ (6;
Thurston’s example is the ghost in Edith Wharton’s ‘Afterwards’, but the
whispering ghost of Everett’s tale would also be a case in point). For
Thurston, this is so not only for particular literary ghosts but also for the
Victorian ghost story form itself, which can be seen only in retrospect to
have foreshadowed the modernist experimentation that followed. Ghosts,
for Thurston, are disruptive forces, ‘intrusive, illegible “guest” element[s]’
that are ‘at odds with’ the meanings of the narratives that host them (6).
I pursue this thinking of ghosts, hosts and guests in my reading of stories
by Oliphant and Riddell in Chap. 2.
Melissa Edmundson has perhaps done more than any other scholar to
make the case for the importance of returning to a female ghost story
tradition, through her monograph Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-­
Century Britain (2013) as well as in several important essays. She argues
along with Dickerson, Basham and Wallace that women have tended to
write ghost stories in a different vein from the masculine tradition of
malign spectres and destructive supernaturalism, pointing to the far greater
prevalence in women’s stories (and poems) of benevolent ghosts moti-
vated by revealing past injustice or protecting the living. Edmundson has
frequently emphasised the potential subversiveness of women’s supernatu-
ral fiction, arguing that the form enables the resurfacing of meanings or
memories that a patriarchal and imperialist society has repressed. She
therefore lays stress on the ‘use of the ghost as a figure of social critique’
(18), arguing that women’s ghost literature
 1 INTRODUCTION: OUR OWN GHOSTLINESS 13

stirred British social consciousness by exposing the social tensions and

inequalities that existed for those who were on the margins of society (namely
women, the poorer working classes and minorities). Recognizing that direct
political or social critique would potentially alienate their reading audiences,
these authors sought more subversive means to discuss current issues. (5;
emphases added)

If, in this study, I am sometimes in disagreement with Edmundson, it is

because some of my chapters deliberately explore stories that productively
complicate a critical framework that emphasises marginality and subver-
sion in relation to women’s ghost fiction. I nonetheless remain indebted
to Edmundson’s work and in accord with very many of her arguments.
Indeed, we have seen that a current runs throughout scholarship on the
ghost story and the short story that valorises these forms for their capacity
to speak from the margins or from in-between spaces, and therefore to
speak critically to aspects of dominant culture. I agree that this is so, and
it is one of the things that draws me to these literary forms. But ghosts, as
we have also seen, are disruptive, and perhaps they are capable of some-
times disturbing even fondly held critical paradigms such as this. By dis-
cussing authors and texts that have not been significantly addressed within
scholarship so far, the present study is intended to demonstrate that the
wealth of supernatural fictions by women is far from having been exhausted.
If women have been marginalised by the construction of male traditions in
relation to both the ghost story and the short story (themselves already
marginalised genres) then it is likely that there are many other texts by
both neglected and canonical female writers that warrant consideration.
But if one reason for recovering these texts is because the ghost story con-
stituted a ‘public discourse’ (Dickerson 1996, 6) or ‘public forum’
(Krueger 2014, 10) for the negotiation of women’s situations, we should
not expect these texts always to contain meanings that correspond with a
twenty-first century feminist’s notions of what is progressive.

The Ghost Story, Feminist Theory and Epistemic

Injustice
In several of the chapters that follow I shall in fact be arguing with the
grain of existing scholarship by reading stories for the social or cultural
critiques they offer. Moody has observed that ‘[g]host stories are particu-
larly concerned with injustice’ (1996, 78), and it is undoubtedly the case
14 V. MARGREE

that the female ghost story has long provided a vehicle for contesting
unjust aspects of dominant masculine culture. Indeed, Victorian women’s
ghost stories seem to me to be often deeply concerned not only with
forms of legal, political or social injustice, but also with what is today
called, following philosopher Miranda Fricker, ‘epistemic injustice’. One
form of epistemic injustice is ‘testimonial injustice’, in which widespread
prejudice against a speaker on the basis of their social identity results in
reduced credibility being given to what they say (Fricker’s paradigmatic
example is ‘when the police do not believe you because you are black’)
(2007, 1). Time and again in Victorian women’s ghost stories, women’s
warnings about some supernatural danger go unheeded by their male
hearers, not only because of an unwillingness to credit the supernatural
but also because the testimony comes from a woman. In Edith Nesbit’s
‘Man-Size in Marble’ (1893), for example, the narrator, Jack, breezily
ignores the warnings of his housekeeper whom he considers ‘this old peas-
ant woman’ (2006, 21) and responds with condescension to his wife,
Laura, when she tells him she also apprehends danger:

“Do you ever have presentiments of evil?”

“No,” I said, smiling; “and I shouldn’t believe in them if I had.”
“I do,” she went on; “the night my father died I knew it, though he was
right away in the north of Scotland.” I did not answer in words. (23)

Jack’s answer, evidently a kiss or caress, establishes that Laura’s belief is

unworthy of a reasoned response. In Fricker’s terms, Laura is being
harmed here precisely in her capacity as a knower (even prior to the directly
physical harms that will result from her intuition being ignored). Treated
by her husband as one might a small child or a pet—as deserving of affec-
tion but deficient in rational capacity—she is being deprived of ‘a funda-
mental sort of respect’ (132).
But another kind of epistemic injustice is also pertinent to reading the
woman’s ghost story. “Hermeneutical injustice” occurs ‘when a gap in
collective interpretative resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage
when it comes to making sense of their social experiences’ (1). Fricker’s
key example is of a woman who is unable to communicate to an employer
about what we would today call sexual harassment because the concept is
yet to be developed. Hermeneutical injustice is a structural phenomenon
that reflects the over-representation of one social group within the institu-
tions that produce knowledge—medicine, science, journalism and aca-
 1 INTRODUCTION: OUR OWN GHOSTLINESS 15

demia—so that the experiences of other social groups are prevented from
making a contribution to collective understandings. This was, of course,
precisely the situation of women during the nineteenth century and much
of the twentieth: male writers, doctors and scientists were able to discourse
freely on the nature and capabilities of women, while women themselves
were largely excluded from the institutions of meaning-making. Under
such conditions women are rendered what Fricker would call ‘source[s] of
information’ rather than ‘informants’ (132): objects of study from which
knowledge may be gleaned (by men), but not participants in knowledge
production. This is just the dynamic depicted by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
in a story I consider in Chap. 3, ‘The Shadow in the Corner’, where
servant-­girl Maria is considered by her master as an interesting case-study
in the superstitious mind, but absolutely not as a possible co-investigator
of the mystery.
That women’s ghost stories repeatedly stage scenarios of women’s
silencing and exclusion suggests that they are profoundly concerned with
these two intertwined injustices: with the discrediting of what women say
because they are women, and with the difficulty of rendering aspects of
women’s experience intelligible when meaning-making institutions are
dominated by men.14 The much-used convention in these stories whereby
a male protagonist is forced to bear witness to some supernatural occur-
rence, knowing he will not be believed, appears in this light as an attempt
to impress upon men this routine dimension of women’s experience
(‘Although every word of this tale is true, I do not expect people to believe
it’ (17) is how Nesbit’s Jack begins his tale, speaking from the feminised
position of one who expects to be dismissed as irrational). But they are
also advancing the proposition that their culture’s very epistemological
frameworks are inadequate.15 The stories’ supernatural occurrences (how-
ever ambiguous) testify that something is amiss with the rationalistic,
materialistic worldview espoused by its male, middle-class characters: that
there are phenomena or experiences that cannot be comprehended from
within its purview. As scholars such as Dickerson, Wallace and Edmundson
have noted, the ghost in women’s ghost stories seems frequently to be
functioning as a cypher for something that cannot be expressed directly,
something that emerges from the lacunae of masculine epistemological
frameworks.
Interestingly, Fricker’s own language becomes somewhat gothicised
when she discusses those ‘occluded experiences’ (148) that struggle to be
heard when structural inequality means that a culture lacks the requisite
16 V. MARGREE

conceptual resources. The ‘powerless’, she writes, ‘are more likely to find
themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly, with at
best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligi-
ble’ (148, emphasis added). Perhaps narrative fictions which centre upon
the ghostly, as that which emerges from the shadows to haunt us with the
sense that something has eluded our understanding, are particularly well
placed to signify these gaps. This is to say more than that the supernatural
can encode meanings which female authors could in principle express
directly, but choose not to for fear of censorship or censure (although this
is undoubtedly often the case). It is to suggest that women’s supernatural
fiction may often be grasping at the articulation of meanings that are only
just beginning to materialise and take shape. It is on this account that I
suggest we can read Nesbit as being concerned with what will become
known as ‘toxic masculinity’, or Braddon with ‘epistemic injustice’. Their
tales are engaged in an activity of summoning occluded aspects of female
experience for which today’s writers have found their own frameworks of
intelligibility. It is not only that feminist theory has illuminated the wom-
en’s ghost story tradition; it is also the case that women’s ghost texts
sometimes anticipate or prefigure aspects of later feminist theory.
But while pointing to the capacity of women’s ghost fiction to critique
dominant values, I also want to sound a note of caution. Victorian and
early twentieth-century women authors may have been marginal to domi-
nant culture in respect of being women, but in relation to other axes of
social power many of them possessed relative privilege. Ever since Kimberlé
Crenshaw introduced the term ‘intersectionality’ in 1989, to capture how
identity is produced in relation to multiple, interlocking structural inequal-
ities, feminist theory has been involved in a process of reckoning with the
complexities of women’s identities.16 If we are claiming the relevance of an
author’s gender identity to the fictional texts she produces, then other
aspects of that identity and its possible implications for the ideological
values at work in her texts must also be taken into account. It is possible
that such a reckoning may complicate, without rendering altogether
redundant, the claim about “marginality” and the critical perspective that
marginality may engender.
This idea is taken forward particularly in two chapters of this study.
Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant, whose work is explored in
Chap. 2, were members of a commercial middle class that was becoming
increasingly economically powerful and socially confident. To a significant
extent, middle-class women such as these were benefitting from transfor-
 1 INTRODUCTION: OUR OWN GHOSTLINESS 17

mations in Victorian capitalism that enfranchised them as never before,

enabling them to exercise influence as the shareholders of companies, or
as writers or editors in the burgeoning publishing industry. This chapter’s
discussion of Oliphant and Riddell reads them as evincing a confidence in
the capacity of middle-class women such as themselves to judge and act in
financial matters. This may be subversive in relation to mid-century gen-
der norms, which urged that women restrict themselves to domestic mat-
ters and leave affairs of business to men, but it produces—particularly in
the case of Riddell—an affirmation of capitalist economics and middle-
class norms that is thoroughly consonant with the commercial values
becoming hegemonic in this period. Chapter 4 also calls for a nuanced
understanding of identity in its discussion of Alice Perrin’s Anglo-Indian
stories. Perrin lived in India as a member of the colonial British presence
and belonged, therefore, to an economic and political elite backed up by
military power. Edmundson has argued that Anglo-Indian women writers
such as Perrin or Bithia Mary (B. M.) Croker were marginal to the impe-
rial project in consequence of their gender (women were not directly
employed as the agents of empire), and that this enabled them to take a
more critical perspective on the Raj. However, my reading of Perrin, while
accepting that hers is sometimes an ambivalent gaze, sees her as asserting
not the marginality but the centrality of women to the success of the impe-
rial project, and her fictions as performing fundamentally conservative
ideological work.
In arguing thus I agree with Jarlath Killeen, who has called for recogni-
tion of the diversity of women’s ghost stories. Killeen suggests that
Dickerson’s interpretative framework, ‘while certainly suggestive and
appropriate for some stories’ (96), also risks occluding what may be hap-
pening in other narratives, where the ghost represents not spectral femi-
ninity but the ‘physical and financial threat that men posed to women’
(85). Certainly, Killeen’s proposal fits with the analyses I offer here of
Nesbit and Braddon, and to some extent Oliphant and Riddell. But it is
really his conclusion that resonates most deeply with my work: his caution
against attempting to force ghost stories ‘into an a priori view [that may
be] distorting rather than illuminating’ (2010, 96). As Nina Auerbach
observes in a review of Dickerson’s book that Killeen quotes: ‘“Ghost
stories are fiendishly difficult to generalize about; formulaic though they
are, they tend to be willfully inconclusive”’ (96). Above all then, I am call-
ing for recognition of the complexity and range of women’s ghost stories,
of the way that both subversive and conservative impulses may often be at
18 V. MARGREE

play within one and the same story, articulated along multiple axes of gen-
der, class, sexuality and “race”. Perhaps, as Auerbach among others sug-
gests, ghost stories with their wilful inconclusiveness are particularly
hospitable to such discordance.17

The Structure of This Book

The book’s chapters are organised broadly chronologically in order to
trace developments that take place across the period. Chapter 2 begins
with Oliphant and Riddell as successful practitioners of the “reassuring”
ghost story that aims to impart lessons about the ethical and practical
management of wealth. In this sense, their stories can be considered forms
of financial writing (Poovey 2008)—in which imaginative fiction drew
upon economic theory and financial journalism—although offered from a
specifically female perspective. While the possible subversiveness of their
gender politics is tempered by the conservatism of their class values (as
argued earlier), the chapter focuses upon two stories that introduce ele-
ments that Oliphant and Riddell struggle to integrate into their financial-­
ethical systems. Drawing upon Simon Hay’s argument that the ghost story
makes central to its concerns the ‘structural absences’ of other Victorian
fictions (Hay 2011, 11), I read Oliphant’s ‘The Portrait’ (1884) and
Riddell’s ‘Old Mrs Jones’ (1882) for the disturbances produced when the
spectres of working-class poverty and imperialism are brought to the fore-
ground. The chapter argues that while both authors seek to exonerate the
possession of wealth as a potential force for good, these texts are haunted
by an uncomfortable recognition of the origins of Victorian middle-class
money in domestic and colonial exploitation.
Chapter 3 proposes that women’s supernatural fictions have often
exploited imagery of female death. The chapter reads these in relation to
feminist scholarship (Bassein 1984; Bronfen 1992) that regards the link-
age between women and death as being pervasive in the Western aesthetic
tradition. It argues that Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Edith Nesbit do not,
however, merely complicitously repeat this association, but actually sub-
vert it, transforming Edgar Allen Poe’s beautiful female corpse from a
poetic to a political trope that insists upon the radical equality of death. In
Braddon’s ‘The Shadow in the Corner’ (1879) and ‘The Cold Embrace’
(1860), the bodies of two young female suicides are used to critique the
forced dependence of women and the masculine scientific and aesthetic
gazes. The chapter explores how Nesbit’s stories almost obsessively depict
 1 INTRODUCTION: OUR OWN GHOSTLINESS 19

female corpses and women returned from the grave, amounting to an

iconography of female death that testifies to Nesbit’s profound pessimism
about the place of women in a male-dominated society. It concludes with
a reading of Nesbit’s enigmatic and rarely discussed tale, ‘The House of
Silence’ (1906), which sees this as interrogating both the memento mori
tradition in art and the contemporary decadence movement, and argues
that with its enigmatic and painterly qualities and its preoccupation with
death it anticipates aspects of later modernist women’s short fiction.
Chapter 4 turns its attention to how the woman’s ghost story operated
outside domestic Britain, with a focus upon Alice Perrin’s Anglo-Indian
tales. In particular, it explores how debates about marriage that were rag-
ing in domestic Britain across the nineteenth century travelled to colonial
contexts where they became transmuted. I read Perrin’s fiction as writing
back against the negative stereotype of the memsahib and attempting to
articulate a positive model of colonial femininity for both colonial and
domestic audiences. Her stories argue that the Anglo-Indian wife is crucial
to the effective running of the British Raj, but they also feature unhappy
marriages characterised by emotional or sexual incompatibility or even by
coercion and abuse. The chapter uncovers how Perrin attempts to resolve
this contradiction by urging the suppression of desire in favour of commit-
ting to marital and imperial duty, and it traces the operation of this theme
across both supernatural and non-supernatural stories. But it also argues
that the supernatural elements of tales such as ‘The Tiger Charm’ (1901),
‘An Eastern Echo’ (1901) and ‘The Packet of Letters’ (1906) assume an
equivocal function in this context, and calls for recognition of the conser-
vative as well as the more questioning aspects of Perrin’s use of the super-
natural in relation to ideologies of race and empire. The chapter also
briefly considers Perrin’s work in relation to a story by New Woman writer
Netta Syrett that also has an Indian setting, ‘Thy Heart’s Desire’ (1894),
to show how Perrin was simultaneously proximate to and far away from
the more radical interrogation of marriage that was being undertaken in
domestic short fiction at the fin de siècle.
My final chapter explores how May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet
Hunt revitalised Victorian ghost story conventions for the new century,
introducing elements of the narrative experimentation associated with lit-
erary modernism and an interest in new psychological theories. Each
writer can be considered a practitioner of the “psychological” ghost
story—in which ghosts, whether objectively existing or subjective phan-
toms—materialise the psychological conflicts of the ghost-seer. While
20 V. MARGREE

Sinclair has deservedly attracted renewed critical attention, Scott and

Hunt remain unfairly overlooked by a writing of literary history that recalls
them (if at all) only in connection with famous literary men. Eleanor Scott
(pseudonym of Helen Leys) emerges in this discussion as a writer who, far
from simply imitating the ghost story conventions of M. R. James,
employed these to interrogate Jamesian politics in relation to the entrance
of women into higher education. The chapter also reads the potentially
subversive implications of this as being complicated in Scott’s more equiv-
ocal story, ‘Will Ye No’ Come Back to Me’ (1929), an adaptation of the
Victorian haunted house subgenre in which a post-suffrage feminist is
haunted by an eighteenth-century ancestress who scorns her for her self-­
deception. Violet Hunt, a writer too long remembered only for her per-
sonal connections with men such as Ford Maddox Ford and Henry James,
published the short story collections Tales of the Uneasy (1911) and More
Tales of the Uneasy (1925), which deploy multiple narrative perspectives
and strategic ambiguities in their depictions of solipsistic protagonists who
fail to understand other people and themselves. Chapter 5 concludes with
a discussion of Hunt’s ‘Love’s Last Leave’ (1925), a tale that both invokes
and rejects the Victorian ghost story in order to lay bare the traumatising
effects of the First World War upon women and children as well as men.
The affinity of female authors for ghosts has taken many forms, both in
the period of this study and in subsequent years. The one thing I will con-
fidently advance about these spectres is their capacity to disturb, to present
a troubling excess that frustrates any desire to write exhaustive literary
histories or to construct definitive critical frameworks. The literary ghost
is always there, just on the periphery of vision, insisting that something is
escaping you.

Notes
1. In this case, in relation to feelings of shock, loss and trauma produced by
war. Melissa Edmundson, in an insightful article on Everett, notes how the
encounter with the ghost at Marchmont ‘foreshadows the men’s eventual
enlistment and war service’, with the ‘long, narrow passageway’ and the
atmosphere of ‘quiet tension’ resembling a war-time trench (2017, 59–60).
2. For example, quoting Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, Anne Besnault-Levita
and Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada begin their recent essay collection with
the observation that ‘Whether it was in 1910 that “human character
changed” or in 1915 that “the old world ended,” the modernists’ turn-of-­
 1 INTRODUCTION: OUR OWN GHOSTLINESS 21

the-century consciousness was clearly grounded in an acute sense of his-

torical, ideological and cultural rupture’ (2018, 1). They note, however,
that Woolf’s qualified language of “change” would later be ‘replaced by a
de-­historicized vision of “rupture” and the “divide,” until this approach to
the “modern” and “modernism” proved reductive and problematic’ (2).
3. The Scott story is ‘Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?’ (1929), discussed sub-
stantially in Chap. 5. Another example of a modernist reworking of the
haunted house narrative is Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Haunted House’ (1921).
4. See especially Gillard-Estrada and Besnault-Levita (2018), Marcus et al.
(2016) and Feldman (2002). For work on decadence and aestheticism
respectively, see Sherry (2014) and Coste et al. (2016). Smith and Wallace’s
Gothic Modernisms collection (2001) explores the influence of the Gothic
literary tradition on modernist writers of the twentieth century. Thurston’s
monograph (2012) focuses on the relationship between the Victorian
ghost story and modernism. Krueger (2014) also points to continuities
between the Victorian and modernist short story. Finally, see also Harris
McCormick et al. (2018).
5. “Toxic masculinity”, with its emphasis upon how male behaviours become
policed in relation to limiting and damaging gender roles, is particularly
relevant to Edith Nesbit’s Gothic fiction, as I explore in Chap. 3. Even at
their most destructive to women, Nesbit’s male protagonists often seem to
be acting against their true desires and in accordance with their under-
standing of social scripts that establish what it means to be a man (see also
Margree 2014).
6. A new essay collection dedicated to the variety of women’s fantastic fiction
is The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s
(Among the Victorians and Modernists), edited by Lizzie Harris McCormick,
Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares. The volume promises to contribute
to the project of challenging conventional literary histories: as the editors
note in their Introduction, ‘putting these two decades in conversation
encourages us to treat fin de siècle literature as a precursor for modernist
literature’ (2018, xxiii). They appreciatively quote Holly Laird, for whom
‘“[p]eriodization works differently when the perspective shifts from a
dominant group to a marginalized one’” (xxiii).
7. Cavaliero describes Riddell, Braddon and Amelia B. Edwards as ‘skilled
practitioners’ whose stories are, however, ‘[e]ssentially diversionary’, being
‘good for no more than an agreeable shudder’, and as only ‘reach[ing]
their apogee as a genre in the ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James’
(1995, 36). May Sinclair, Vernon Lee and Edith Nesbit are also described
as contributing ‘notable examples’ to the ghost story genre, but an
‘authentic tradition’ has arisen only in response to James’ work (52).
8. Two important differences include the respective lengths of Gothic fiction
and ghost stories, and the role of the “explained supernatural”. Ghost sto-
Another random document with
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 By Alfred Tennyson

My good blade carves the casques of men,

My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.
The shattering trumpet shrilleth high,
The hard brands shiver on the steel,
The splinter’d spear-shafts crack and fly,
The horse and rider reel:
They reel, they roll in clanging lists,
And when the tide of combat stands,
Perfume and flowers fall in showers,
That lightly rain from ladies’ hands.

—From “Sir Galahad.”

OPPORTUNITY
By Edward Rowland Sill

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:—

There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.

A craven hung along the battle’s edge,

And thought, “Had I a sword of keener steel—
That blue blade that the king’s son bears—but this
Blunt thing—!” he snapped and flung it from his hand,
And lowering crept away and left the field.

Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,

And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause that heroic day.

THE FIRING LINE

By Joaquin Miller

For glory? For good? For fortune or fame?

Why, he for the front when the battle is on!
Leave the rear to the dolt, the lazy, the lame,
Go forward as ever the valiant have gone;
Whether city or field, whether mountain or mine,
Go forward, right on to the Firing Line.

Whether newsboy or plowboy, cowboy or clerk,

Fight forward, be ready, be steady, be first;
Be fairest, be bravest, be best at your work;
Exalt and be glad; dare to hunger, to thirst,
As David, as Alfred—let dogs skulk and whine—
There is room but for men on the Firing Line.
Aye, the place to fight and the place to fall—
As fall we must, all in God’s good time—
It is where the manliest man is the wall,
Where boys are as men in their pride and prime,
Where glory gleams brightest, where brightest eyes shine,
Far out on the roaring red Firing Line.

HOW OSWALD DINED WITH GOD

By Edwin Markham

Over Northumbria’s lone, gray lands,

Over the frozen marl,
Went flying the fogs from the fens and sands,
And the wind with a wolfish snarl.

Frosty and stiff by the York wall

 Stood the rusty grass and the yarrow:
Gone wings and songs to the southland, all—
Robin and starling and sparrow.

Weary with weaving the battle-woof,

Came the king and his thanes to the Hall:
Feast-fires reddened the beams of the roof,
Torch flames waved from the wall.

Bright was the gold that the table bore,

Where platters and beakers shone:
Whining hounds on the sanded floor
Looked hungrily up for a bone.

Laughing, the king took his seat at the board,

With his gold-haired queen at his right:
War-men sitting around them roared
Like a crash of the shields in fight.

Loud rose laughter and lusty cheer,

And gleemen sang loud in their throats,
Telling of swords and the whistling spear,
Till their red beards shook with the notes.

Varlets were bringing the smoking boar,

Ladies were pouring the ale,
When the watchman called from the great hall door:
“O King, on the wind is a wail.

“Feebly the host of the hungry poor

Lift hands at the gate with a cry:
Grizzled and gaunt they come over the moor,
Blasted by earth and sky.”

“Ho!” cried the king to the thanes, “make speed—

Carry this food to the gates—
Off with the boar and the cask of mead—
Leave but a loaf on the plates.”
Still came a cry from the hollow night:
“King, this is one day’s feast;
But days are coming with famine-blight;
Wolf winds howl from the east!”

Hot from the king’s heart leaped a deed,

High as his iron crown:
(Noble souls have a deathless need
To stoop to the lowest down.)

“Thanes, I swear by Godde’s Bride

This is a cursèd thing—
Hunger for the folk outside,
Gold inside for the king!”

Whirling his war-ax over his head,

He cleft each plate into four.
“Gather them up, O thanes,” he said,
“For the workfolk at the door.

“Give them this for the morrow’s meat,

Then shall we feast in accord:
Our half of a loaf will then be sweet—
Sweet as the bread of the Lord!”

—From “The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems.” Copyright by

Doubleday, Page & Co., and used by kind permission of author and
publisher.

HOW THE GREAT GUEST CAME

By Edwin Markham

Before the Cathedral in grandeur rose,

At Ingelburg where the Danube goes;
Before its forest of silver spires
Went airily up to the clouds and fires;
Before the oak had ready a beam,
While yet the arch was stone and dream—
There where the altar was later laid,
Conrad the cobbler plied his trade.

II

Doubled all day on his busy bench,

Hard at his cobbling for master and hench,
He pounded away at a brisk rat-tat,
Shearing and shaping with pull and pat,
Hide well hammered and pegs sent home,
Till the shoe was fit for the Prince of Rome.
And he sang as the threads went to and fro:
“Whether ’tis hidden or whether it show,
Let the work be sound, for the Lord will know.”

III

Tall was the cobbler, and gray and thin,

And a full moon shone where the hair had been.
His eyes peered out, intent and afar,
As looking beyond the things that are.
He walked as one who is done with fear,
Knowing at last that God is near.
Only the half of him cobbled the shoes;
The rest was away for the heavenly news.
Indeed, so thin was the mystic screen
That parted the Unseen from the Seen,
You could not tell, from the cobbler’s theme
If his dream were truth or his truth were dream.

IV

It happened one day at the year’s white end,

Two neighbors called on their old-time friend;
And they found the shop, so meager and mean,
Made gay with a hundred boughs of green.
Conrad was stitching with face ashine,
But suddenly stooped as he twitched a twine:
“Old friends, good news! At dawn to-day,
As the cocks were scaring the night away,
The Lord appeared in a dream to me,
And said, ‘I am coming your Guest to be!’
So I’ve been busy with feet astir,
Strewing the floor with branches of fir.
The wall is washed and the shelf is shined,
And over the rafter the holly twined.
He comes to-day, and the table is spread,
With milk and honey and wheaten bread.”

His friends went home; and his face grew still

As he watched for the shadow across the sill.
He lived all the moments o’er and o’er,
When the Lord should enter the lowly door—
The knock, the call, the latch pulled up,
The lighted face, the offered cup.
He would wash the feet where the spikes had been;
He would kiss the hands where the nails went in;
And then at the last would sit with Him
And break the bread as the day grew dim.

VI

While the cobbler mused, there passed his pane

A beggar drenched by the driving rain.
He called him in from the stony street
And gave him shoes for his bruisèd feet.
The beggar went and there came a crone,
Her face with wrinkles of sorrow sown.
A bundle of fagots bowed her back,
And she was spent with the wrench and rack.
He gave her his loaf and steadied her load
As she took her way on the weary road.
Then to his door came a little child,
Lost and afraid in the world so wild,
In the big, dark world. Catching it up,
He gave it the milk in the waiting cup,
And led it home to its mother’s arms,
Out of the reach of the world’s alarms.

VII

The day went down in the crimson west

And with it the hope of the blessed Guest,
And Conrad sighed as the world turned gray:
“Why is it, Lord, that your feet delay?
Did You forget that this was the day?”
Then soft in the silence a Voice he heard:
“Lift up your heart, for I kept my word.
Three times I came to your friendly door;
Three times my shadow was on your floor.
I was the beggar with bruisèd feet;
I was the woman you gave to eat;
I was the child on the homeless street!”

—From “The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems.” Copyright by

Doubleday, Page & Co., and used by kind permission of author and
publisher.

PICKETT’S CHARGE
By Fred Emerson Brooks

When Pickett charged at Gettysburg,

For three long days, with carnage fraught,
Two hundred thousand men had fought;
And courage could not gain the field,
Where stubborn valor would not yield.
With Meade on Cemetery Hill,
And mighty Lee thundering still
Upon the ridge a mile away;
Four hundred guns in counterplay
Their deadly thunderbolts had hurled—
The cannon duel of the world!
When Pickett charged at Gettysburg.

When Pickett charged at Gettysburg,

Dread war had never known such need
Of some o’ermastering, valiant deed;
And never yet had cause so large
Hung on the fate of one brief charge.
To break the center, but a chance;
With Pickett waiting to advance;
It seemed a crime to bid him go,
And Longstreet said not “Yes” nor “No,”
But silently he bowed his head.
“I shall go forward!” Pickett said.
Then Pickett charged at Gettysburg.

Then Pickett charged at Gettysburg;

Down from the little wooded slope,
A-step with doubt, a-step with hope,
And nothing but the tapping drum
To time their tread, still on they come.
Four hundred cannon hush their thunder,
While cannoneers gaze on in wonder!
Two armies watch, with stifled breath,
Full eighteen thousand march to death,
At elbow-touch, with banners furled,
And courage to defy the world,
In Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.

’Tis Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg:

None but tried veterans can know
How fearful ’tis to charge the foe;
But these are soldiers will not quail,
Though Death and Hell stand in their trail!
Flower of the South and Longstreet’s pride,
There’s valor in their very stride!
Virginian blood runs in their veins,
And each his ardor scarce restrains;
Proud of the part they’re chosen for:
The mighty cyclone of the war,
In Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.

’Tis Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg:

How mortals their opinions prize
When armies march to sacrifice,
And souls by thousands in the fight
On Battle’s smoky wing take flight.
Firm-paced they come, in solid form
The dreadful calm before the storm.
Those silent batteries seem to say:
“We’re waiting for you, men in gray!”
Each anxious gunner knows full well
Why every shot of his must tell
On Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.

’Tis Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg:

What grander tableau can there be
Than rhythmic swing of infantry
At shouldered arms, with flashing steel?
As Pickett swings to left, half-wheel,
Those monsters instantly outpour
Their flame and smoke of death! and roar
Their fury on the silent air—
Starting a scene of wild despair:
Lee’s batteries roaring: “Room! Make room!!”
With Meade’s replying: “Doom! ’Tis doom
To Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg!”

’Tis Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg:

Now Hancock’s riflemen begin
To pour their deadly missiles in.
Can standing grain defy the hail?
Will Pickett stop? Will Pickett fail?
His left is all uncovered through
That fateful halt of Pettigrew!
And Wilcox from the right is cleft
By Pickett’s half-wheel to the left!
Brave Stannard rushes ’tween the walls,
No more disastrous thing befalls
Brave Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.

’Tis Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg:

How terrible it is to see
Great armies making history:
Long lines of muskets belching flame!
No need of gunners taking aim
When from that thunder-cloud of smoke
The lightning kills at every stroke!
If there’s a place resembling hell,
’Tis where, ’mid shot and bursting shell,
Stalks Carnage, arm in arm with Death,
A furnace blast in every breath,
On Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.

’Tis Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg:

Brave leaders fall on every hand!
Unheard, unheeded all command!
Battered in front and torn in flank;
A frenzied mob in broken rank!
They come like demons with a yell,
And fight like demons all pell-mell!
The wounded stop not till they fall;
The living never stop at all—
Their blood-bespattered faces say:
“’Tis death alone stops men in gray,
With Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg!”
 Stopped Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg
Where his last officer fell dead,
The dauntless, peerless, Armistead!
Where ebbed the tide and left the slain
Like wreckage from the hurricane—
That awful spot which soldiers call
“The bloody angle of the wall,”
There Pickett stopped, turned back again
Alone, with just a thousand men!
And not another shot was fired—
So much is bravery admired!
Pickett had charged at Gettysburg.

Brave Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg!

The charge of England’s Light Brigade
Was nothing to what Pickett made
To capture Cemetery Hill—
To-day a cemetery still,
With flowers in the rifle-pit,
But no one cares to capture it.
The field belongs to those who fell;
They hold it without shot or shell!
While cattle yonder in the vale
Are grazing on the very trail
Where Pickett charged at Gettysburg.

Where Pickett charged at Gettysburg,

In after-years survivors came
To tramp once more that field of fame;
And Mrs. Pickett led the Gray,
Just where her husband did that day.
The Blue were waiting at the wall,
The Gray leaped over, heart and all!
Where man had failed with sword and gun,
A woman’s tender smile had won:
The Gray had captured now the Blue,
What mortal valor could not do
 When Pickett charged at Gettysburg.

—Copyright by Forbes & Co., Chicago, and used by kind

permission of author and publisher.

“INASMUCH....”
By Edwin Markham

Wild tempest swirled on Moscow’s castled height;

Wild sleet shot slanting down the wind of night;
Quick snarling mouths from out of the darkness sprang
To strike you in the face with tooth and fang.
Javelins of ice hung on the roofs of all;
The very stones were aching in the wall,
Where Ivan stood a watchman on his hour,
Guarding the Kremlin by the northern tower,
When, lo! a half-bare beggar tottered past,
Shrunk up and stiffened in the bitter blast.
A heap of misery he drifted by,
And from the heap came out a broken cry.

At this the watchman straightened with a start;

A tender grief was tugging at his heart,
The thought of his dead father, bent and old
And lying lonesome in the ground so cold.
Then cried the watchman starting from his post:
“Little father, this is yours; you need it most!”
And tearing off his hairy coat, he ran
And wrapt it warm around the beggar man.

That night the piling snows began to fall,

And the good watchman died beside the wall.
But waking in the Better Land that lies
Beyond the reaches of these cooping skies,
Behold, the Lord came out to greet him home,
Wearing the hairy heavy coat he gave
By Moscow’s tower before he felt the grave!

And Ivan, by the old Earth-memory stirred,

Cried softly with a wonder in his word:
“And where, dear Lord, found you this coat of mine,
A thing unfit for glory such as Thine?”
Then the Lord answered with a look of light:
“This coat, My son, you gave to Me last night.”

—Copyright by Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, and used by

kind permission of author and publisher.

THE MAN UNDER THE STONE

By Edwin Markham

When I see a workingman with mouths to feed,

Up, day after day, in the dark before the dawn,
And coming home, night after night, through the dusk,
Swinging forward like some fierce silent animal,
I see a man doomed to roll a huge stone up an endless steep.
He strains it onward inch by stubborn inch,
Crouched always in the shadow of the rock....
See where he crouches, twisted, cramped, misshapen:
He lifts for their life;
The veins knot and darken—
Blood surges into his face....
Now he loses—now he wins—
Now he loses—loses—(God of my soul!)
He digs his feet into some earth—
There’s a moment of terrified effort....
Will the huge stone break his hold,
And crush him as it plunges to the gulf?
The silent struggle goes on and on,
Like two contending in a dream.
 —Copyright by Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, and used by
kind permission of author and publisher.

TO GERMANY
By George Sterling

Beat back thy forfeit plow-shares into swords:

It is not yet, the far, seraphic dream
Of peace made beautiful and love supreme.
Now let the strong, unweariable chords
Of battle shake to thunder, and the hordes
Advance, where now the famished vultures scream.
The standards gather and the trumpets gleam;
Down the long hill-side stare the mounted lords.

Now far beyond the tumult and the hate,

The white-clad nurses and the surgeons wait
The backward currents of tormented life,
When on the waiting silences shall come
The screams of men, and, ere those lips are dumb,
The searching probe, the ligature and knife.

II

Was it for such, the brutehood and the pain,

Civilization gave her holy fire
Unto thy wardship, and the snowy spire
Of her august and most exalted fane?
Are these the harvests of her ancient rain
Men reap at evening in the scarlet mire,
Or where the mountain smokes, a dreadful pyre,
Or where the warship drags a bloody stain?

Are these thy votive lilies and their dews,

That now the outraged stars look down to see?
 Behold them, where the cold prophetic damps
Congeal on youthful brows so soon to lose
Their dream of sacrifice to thee—to thee,
Harlot to Murder in a thousand camps!

III

Was it for this that loving men and true

Have labored in the darkness and the light
To rear the solemn temple of the Right,
On Reason’s deep foundations, bared anew
Long after the Cæsarian eagles flew
And Rome’s last thunder died upon the Night?
Cuirassed, the cannon menace from the height;
Armored, the new-born eagles take the blue.

Wait not thy lords the avenging, certain knell—

One with the captains and abhorrent fames
The echoes of whose conquests died in Hell?—
They that have loosened the ensanguined flood,
And whose malign and execrable names
The Seraph of the Record writes in blood.

IV

From gravid trench and sullen parapet,

Profane the wounded lands with mine or shell!
Turn thou upon the world thy cannons’ Hell,
Till many million women’s eyes are wet!
Ravage and slay! Pile up the eternal debt!
But when the fanes of France and Belgium fell
Another ruin was on earth as well,
And ashes that the race shall not forget.

Not by the devastation of the guns,

Nor tempest-shock, nor steel’s subverting edge,
Nor yet the slow erasure of the suns
Thy downfall came, betrayer of thy trust!
 But at the dissolution of a pledge
The temple of thine honor sank to dust.

Make not thy prayer to Heaven, lest perchance,

O troubler of the world, the heavens hear!
But trust in Uhlan and in cannoneer,
And, ere the Russian hough thee, set thy lance
Against the dear and blameless breast of France!
Put on thy mail tremendous and austere,
And let the squadrons of thy wrath appear,
And bid the standards and the guns advance!

Those as an evil mist shall pass away,

As once the Assyrian before the Lord:
Thou standest between mortals and the day,
Ere God, grown weary of thine armored reign,
Lift from the world the shadow of thy sword
And bid the stars of morning sing again.

—Copyright by A. M. Robertson, publisher, San Francisco, and

used by kind permission of author and publisher.

TO THE WAR-LORDS
By George Sterling

Be yours the doom Isaiah’s voice foretold,

Lifted on Babylon, O ye whose hands
Cast the sword’s shadow upon weaker lands,
And for whose pride a million hearths grow cold!
Ye reap but with the cannon, and do hold
Your plowing to the murder-god’s commands;
And at your altars Desolation stands,
And in your hearts is conquest, as of old.
The legions perish and the warships drown;
The fish and vulture batten on the slain;
And it is ye whose word hath shaken down
The dykes that hold the chartless sea of pain.
Your prayers deceive not men, nor shall a crown
Hide on the brow the murder-mark of Cain.

II

Now glut yourselves with conflict, nor refrain,

But let your famished provinces be fed
From bursting granaries of steel and lead!
Decree the sowing of that deadly grain
Where the great war-horse, maddened with his pain,
Stamps on the mangled living and the dead,
And from the entreated heavens overhead
Falls from a brother’s hand a fiery rain.

Lift not your voices to the gentle Christ:

Your god is of the shambles! Let the moan
Of nations be your psalter, and their youth
To Moloch and to Bel be sacrificed!
A world to which ye proffered lies alone
Learns now from Death the horror of your truth.

III

How have you fed your people upon lies,

And cried “Peace! peace!” and knew it would not be!
For now the iron dragons take the sea,
And in the new-found fortress of the skies,
Alert and fierce a deadly eagle flies.
Ten thousand cannon echo your decree,
To whose profound refrain ye bend the knee.
And lift into the Lord of Love your eyes.

This is Hell’s work: why raise your hands to Him,

And those hands mailed, and holding up the sword?
 There stands another altar, stained with red,
At whose basalt the infernal seraphim
Uplift to Satan, your conspirant lord,
The blood of nations, at your mandate shed.

—Copyright by A. M. Robertson, publisher, San Francisco, and

used by kind permission of author and publisher.

PAULINE PAVLOVNA
By T. B. Aldrich
(Scene: Petrograd. Period: The present time. A ballroom in the
winter palace of the prince. The ladies in character costumes and
masks. The gentlemen in official dress and unmasked, with the
exception of six tall figures in scarlet kaftans, who are treated with
marked distinction as they move here and there among the
promenaders.
Quadrille music throughout the dialogue. Count Sergius Pavlovich
Panshine, who has just arrived, is standing anxiously in the doorway
of an antechamber with his eyes fixed upon a lady in the costume of
a maid of honor in the time of Catherine II. The lady presently
disengages herself from the crowd, and passes near Count
Panshine, who impulsively takes her by the hand and leads her
across the threshold of the inner apartment, which is unoccupied.)
He. Pauline!
She. You knew me?
He. How could I have failed? A mask may hide your features, not
your soul. There’s an air about you like the air that folds a star. A
blind man knows the night, and feels the constellations. No coarse
sense of eye or ear had made you plain to me. Through these I had
not found you; for your eyes, as blue as violets of our Novgorod, look
black behind your mask there, and your voice—I had not known that
either. My heart said, “Pauline Pavlovna.”
 She. Ah, your heart said that? You trust your heart then! ’Tis a
serious risk! How is it you and others wear no mask?
He. The Emperor’s orders.
She. Is the Emperor here? I have not seen him.

He. He is one of the six in scarlet kaftans and all masked alike.
Watch—you will note how every one bows down
Before those figures; thinking each by chance
May be the Tsar; yet none know which is he.
Even his counterparts are left in doubt.
Unhappy Russia! No serf ever wore such chains
As gall our Emperor these sad days.
He dare trust no man.

She. All men are so false.

He. Spare one, Pauline Pavlovna.

She. No! all, all!

I think there is no truth left in the world,
In man or woman.
Once were noble souls.—
Count Sergius, is Nastasia here to-night?

He. Ah! then you know! I thought to tell you first.

Not here, beneath these hundred curious eyes,
In all this glare of light; but in some place
Where I could throw me at your feet and weep.
In what shape came the story to your ears?
Decked in the teller’s colors, I’ll be sworn;
The truth, but in the livery of a lie,
And so must wrong me. Only this is true:—
The Tsar, because I risked my wretched life
To shield a life as wretched as my own,
Bestows upon me, as supreme reward—
O irony!—the hand of this poor girl.
Says, “Here I have the pearl of pearls for you,
Such as was never plucked from out the deep
By Indian diver, for a Sultan’s crown.
Your joy’s decreed,” and stabs me with a smile.

She. And she—she loves you.

He. I know not, indeed. Likes me perhaps.

What matters it?—her love?
Sidor Yurievich, the guardian, consents, and she consents.
No love in it at all, a mere caprice,
A young girl’s spring-tide dream.
Sick of her ear-rings, weary of her mare,
She’ll have a lover—something ready made,
Or improvised between two cups of tea—
A lover by imperial ukase!
Fate said the word—I chanced to be the man!
If that grenade the crazy student threw
Had not spared me, as well as spared the Tsar,
All this would not have happened. I’d have been a hero,
But quite safe from her romance.
She takes me for a hero—think of that!
Now by our holy Lady of Kazan,
When I have finished pitying myself, I’ll pity her.

She. Oh, no;—begin with her; she needs it most.

He. At her door lies the blame, whatever falls.

She, with a single word, with half a tear,
Had stopt it at the first,
This cruel juggling with poor human hearts.

She. The Tsar commanded it—you said the Tsar.

He. The Tsar does what she wills—God fathoms why.

Were she his mistress, now! but there’s no snow
Whiter within the bosom of a cloud,
No colder either. She is very haughty,
For all her fragile air of gentleness;