When I was a girl, I had these two friends who were obsessed with ghost stories. We would have sleepovers and they would bring their books from the library, new finds checked out each week, of ghost stories, both real and fictional. We delighted in the spooky feelings they would elicit, but it was more the sense of possibility in each tale—of something more than this life, more than what is visible. The not-true not-untrue of it created a different space for imagining, and our young minds were alight with the possibility of the uncanny. The gauzy haze of a specter offered up such possibility. I loved it.
I still can’t bring myself to watch a horror film (although I guess I am partial to a good silent horror film). I get intrigued by some, but know they would follow me into the dark with their specificity. But a ghost story—it still fills me with just enough of a feeling of uncanniness that opens up a sense of mystery, despite my conditioning for logic and reason. I still love to hear them told.
There may also be a reason that as girls we were drawn to ghost stories—as we became teens, we knew that there were ways of being that we would no longer be allowed as women. Spaces that we should not be in alone, or situations we should avoid. Ghosts were stories where what was invisible could also be powerful.
My love of ghost stories as a girl led to a love of the Brontës, Ann Radcliffe, and gothic stories written by women. Despite all of the problems and frustrations, I knew what Jane Eyre felt like as a girl, when she was locked in a room with a ghost as punishment and fainted from fright.
But what I didn’t know until much later is how much the gothic novel was, as Margaret Anne Doody1 writes, a space of “feminine radical protest” for women writers in the nineteenth century. And how many women writers of the gothic there were—women who were some of the highest-paid writers of their day, publishing hundreds of books to high acclaim. And how at the same time, Spiritualism flourished—two sides of a coin that allowed women to gain agency in a world that was intent on forcing them out of the light, in so many cases literally confined to the home. As Gwen Margaret Neary2 writes:
it is not surprising that American women from 1870 to 1925 should identify with ghosts. They themselves occupied a “ghostly” position; they were, in some sense, the living dead.
Women were made into ghosts as they were relegated to the home as wives and mothers. That houses become haunted is, in so many ways, a reaction to oppression—those made invisible haunt the living in the spaces they were relegated to in life.
Harriet Prescott Spofford was a prolific writer of the gothic genre in the late nineteenth century, who became one of the most well-known and admired women writers of her time. She published hundreds of stories, poems, essays, and novels—her first story in the Atlantic was considered a “new and brilliant contribution” that impressed readers “with the splendors, the manner, the political intrigues, the sin-spiced witchery of Parisian life.”3 Emily Dickinson is known to have read Prescott, relaying in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor of The Atlantic,
I read Miss Prescott’s ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me, in the Dark—so I avoided her
Yet she also wrote to her sister-in-law Susan that the story had been “the only thing that I ever saw in my life that I did not think I could have written myself,” asking her to send her “everything that she writes.”
Hints of Dickinson’s admiration run through themes and turns of phrase in her poems that echo in Spofford’s works—to the extent that in some cases it almost seems that Dickinson may have been distilling scenes of Spofford’s stories into crystallized poems. One of Spofford’s more famous stories, “The Amber Gods” ends with the surprise revelation of the narrator stating:
I must have died at ten minutes past one.
Echoes of that narration-after-death reverberate in Dickinson’s poems—“I heard a fly buzz when I died,” “I felt a funeral in my brain,” among others.
Higginson was a champion of Spofford, helping to ensure she was published. Editor James Russell Lowell didn’t believe that the “demure little Yankee girl” could have written a story as detailed and sophisticated as Prescott’s “In the Cellar,” believing it to be a translation and rejecting it out of hand. Higginson wrote to assure him her work was original and urged him to publish her work. He also championed Spofford again when Henry James wrote scathing reviews of her novel-length work Azarian, writing an impassioned defense of the work in the Atlantic.
While there were of course men writing gothic fiction, the approach and style of gothic ghost stories written by women like Prescott is distinctive. This was doubtless what made Henry James rile against her novel, Azarian, for its romantic, descriptive language—that he insisted “[l]ike the majority of female writers—Mrs. Browning, George Sand, Gail Hamilton, Mrs. Stowe—she possesses in excess the fatal gift of fluency.” James went on to suggest that she could only redeem herself if she “diligently study the canons of the so-called realist school.”
But another critic of the time was able to articulate more of what was distinctive about Prescott’s style. In an article in the June 1883 issue of The Century, James Herbert Morse wrote of her work, A Thief in the Night:
[n]o such weird and somber tale exists in American fiction—none in which the whole atmosphere is so penetrated with a terrible sense of blood. Poe’s tales, in comparison, were aggregations of horror; this was a vital presence. The writer had given her soul to it, and was absorbed out of sight—a thing which could never happen to Poe.
Not only were writers like Prescott, Rose Terry Cooke, Louisa May Alcott (using the pen name of A. M. Barnard), and other gothic writers expressing a distinctive feminist style of writing, they were doing it by becoming ghosts themselves—with a bold style and narration that diffuses a sense of the omniscient narrator, writing with an intimacy and vitality that thrilled and opened possibilities in the many readers who loved their work.
So often in Prescott’s short stories the hauntings of women ghosts are not the menace, but are there to serve justice—a delayed justice that, similar to Poe’s story of the Tell-tale Heart, demands to be met despite their death. Andrew Weinstock, in his book Scare Tactics, writes of this theme:
In each tale, women are subjected to varying forms of violence and have no recourse—at least to the living—to redress the situation. Only the dead possess the uncanny potency to confront and remedy these crimes.
In Prescott’s story Sir Rohan’s Ghost, a man is haunted by the woman he abandoned and left to die, whose ghost reveals that the young woman he has fallen for and nearly marries is the daughter he also abandoned. In the story “Amber Gods,” the narrator is a confident, vain, young woman who narrates a story that describes her unabashed delight in wooing a suitor away from her cousin to herself, gushing about how much love she and her new husband felt between them. It then swiftly turns to reveal her disillusion in her now husband, finding in marriage mutual disgust and regret. By the end of the story, she sees her cousin and now husband return to one another, acknowledging how wrong he was, while we later learn they are sitting on her deathbed as she looks on.
In one of the more chilling stories, Her Story, the narrator has been imprisoned by her husband—buried alive, by her account—in a lunatic asylum. The story begins with the ‘mad’ woman recounting to a visiting friend how she came to the asylum. It becomes clear early on that the narrator is unreliable, but it’s unclear how exactly or when exactly she becomes confused. As a nameless narrator, it is almost as if she has been ghosted from her own story, trying to find or reclaim a sense of self after the exhaustion, anxiety, and insomnia she experienced, trying to conform to ideals of domesticity in marriage and motherhood. She tells the story of falling in love with her husband, of their joint love of music. He is a minister and she takes up his work in the parish as well as having two children. But there are signs that all is very thinly held together when her husband’s ward, a stepchild of his uncle’s, comes to stay with them from Europe. The jealousy the narrator feels as she contrasts the young childless woman with her own worn-out frame, and the attention that her husband gives his ward when the wife had to be absent with the children or with the parish responsibilities, sets in motion a tale of gradually losing oneself entirely. The narrator, in despair, even downward spirals into considering suicide, stating “when I was gone perhaps he would love me again”—that perhaps if she was no longer living, the ideal—domestic angel or ghost—could finally be realized, deserving of love. As Weinstock writes,
In these ghost stories, the ghost or supernatural manifestation signals something amiss in the natural world—men and oppressive gender codes turn out to be scarier than the ghosts.
When I learned of Prescott’s work—and the thrills that it gave Dickinson and so many other readers of the time, I couldn’t wait to dive in. She does not disappoint. Her language is hypnotic at times in its use of over-description—a way of writing that becomes almost photographically real, in that false way that a photograph can never represent reality, but a crystallized moment, a flicker of a reality to dwell on in detail. Bendixen, again captures this, writing:
[Prescott] Spofford’s daring experiments with sound and image represented nothing less than an attempt to revitalize language itself, an attempt to transform the literary word into a force capable of challenging and enlarging the reader’s perception of reality.
But even more than the work itself, was how much of a network of women writers there were in the late nineteenth century, who championed and advocated and wrote about one another. Weinstock writes of this, stating:
in attending to these ghost stories, we are eavesdropping on a conversation of sorts—…These are women who knew each other’s writing and in some instances corresponded with or knew each other personally. Both Rose Terry Cooke and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, for example, wrote appreciatively of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s work…and she reciprocated their praise. Ward sought advice on writing from Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom Mary Austin also cited as an influence….the recurrence of particular feminist themes within their work is not simply coincidental. Beyond reflecting the zeitgeist of the era…[it is] a discrete body of literature produced by a talented pool of women authors who participated tougher in using supernatural fiction as a strategic means to articulate anxieties related to the positions, roles, and expectations for women in American culture.
I love to think of these women writing and reading and in conversation with one another’s work. Because genius doesn’t enter and leave the living without context. Works like Prescott’s or Dickinson’s are made better, even more intriguing, to know their influences—to know how the ghosts of other writers haunt the corridors of their work.
Harriet Prescott Spofford, like so many other women writing at the same time, initially took up the pen to support her family, who had fallen into poverty with the paralysis of her father. Her first stories—hundreds—are lost, sold to whoever would pay her as she sometimes wrote 15 hours a day to make ends meet. Of course, so many women writers like Prescott, induced to write both by their imagination as much as for the need for monetary survival, are so quickly written off in the esteem of the canon. The number of their works and the possibility that their work’s quality might be inconsistent across their lifetime becomes an easy threshold to cross, rendering them into footnotes, ghosts on the margins of the page. As Bendixen writes in the introduction to Amber Gods
Today Harriet Prescott Spofford is almost completely forgotten.
And yet like so many past women, they haunt so that we can find their stories. Elizabeth Stuart Ward Phelps, another forgotten writer in the orbit of Prescott and Dickinson, singled out “Amber Gods” in a 1910 essay ironically titled “Stories that Stay,” and wrote that the story “took a grip upon something deeper than taste or imagination in me,” that she could never forget the “alien chill” that came across her as she read the last sentence fifty years earlier.
So for Halloween, that foggy gray area of the year when the veil between the worlds grows thin, I’m haunted by these gothic women writer ghosts—and whose voices still call for justice. We still desperately need those haunted spaces of feminist radical protest. Because, again, as Weinstock writes
…the ghost or supernatural manifestation signals something amiss in the natural world—men and oppressive gender codes turn out to be scarier than the ghosts.
Margaret Anne Doody. “Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel.” Genre 10 (winter 1977): 529-72
Gwen Margaret Neary. Disorderly Ghosts: Literary Spirits and the Social Agenda of American Women, 1870-1930. Diss. University of California Berkeley, 1994.
Alfred Bendixen. “Introduction.” The Amber Gods and Other Stories by Harriet Prescott Spofford, edited by Alfred Bendixen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
I am riveted by these readings and your thoughts on them. I read and enjoyed Ann Radcliffe's books after learning that they inspired Jane Austen to write Northanger Abbey as a satire of the gothic while also an affectionate love letter to it, but I haven't read these other authors, nor did I know how interconnected they have been.
It's funny, I've been hoping that you would write something about that recent interview on Mad Moms with Rebecca Woolf because it upended me in so many different ways, yet I'm not sure I can write about those ways myself. In a way this is also a response to that -- for me -- because of the way it speaks to women's erasure and how women writers have had to cut off parts of themselves to fit male-dictated acceptable narrative frameworks.
Oh how I love this issue Freya! I have always been mesmerised by horror written by women and delegated to bring to fruition by female characters. Even I fell in love with gothic while exploring the works of Bronte sisters as a teenager. This post is extremely well written and with such deep research, I love this. 💜🌼