From the late eighteenth century, women writers, aware of their exclusion from traditional historical narratives, have used Gothic historical fiction as a mode of historiography which can simultaneously reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusion. If the Gothic with its blatant flouting of realism is always already, as I will suggest here, a kind of metafictionavant la lettre, then Gothic historical fiction, the subject of my study, can be seen as a kind of metahistory, a way of theorising or producing a philosophy of history.³ In the hands of women writers, Gothic historical fiction has offered a way...

‘What would history be if seen through the eyes of women?’ asks Gerda Lerner.² The answer given in Sophia Lee’s extraordinary novel,The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times(1783–5), is that it would be a nightmare cycle of violence, madness and death, culminating in the erasure of the maternal line.The Recessretells the history of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods from the point of view of the imagined twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots, Matilda and Ellinor, two marginalised and illegitimate figures who are ultimately, as one of them puts it, ‘all an illusion’.³...

Fiction –‘telling stories’, that childhood euphemism for ‘lies’ – is, as Elizabeth Gaskell understood, one way of telling the truths that cannot be expressed in other ways. From early in her writing career Gaskell understood the potential of the Gothic, as developed by Sophia Lee and Ann Radcliffe, as both a mode of history and a symbolic language of the psychological which could convey the female experience repressed in other modes of writing. However, as the novel became increasingly associated with realism in the nineteenth century, it was to the short story that Gaskell turned as a mode which offered greater...

‘What are the relations of the Past and Present?’ asked Vernon Lee in 1904. ‘Where does the past begin? And, to go further still, what is the Past?’² These were questions to which she returned repeatedly in a body of work which uses the Gothic to figure the past, and its relation to the present, in a particularly sustained and sophisticated way. In ‘Puzzles of the Past’ she concludes that what we usually think of as ‘the Past’ is a ‘fiction’, ‘a mere creation of our own’ or a ‘special human product’, constructed out of our own emotional needs, desires...

The Female Gothic is always ‘going back’: texts are haunted by their predecessors and, in turn, haunt their descendants. This uncanny echoing is particularly intense in the relationship between the work of Daphne du Maurier, particularlyRebecca(1938), and the socalled ‘modern Gothic’ or ‘drugstore Gothic’ developed by Victoria Holt and others in the 1960s. Just as critics have repeatedly drawn attention to the ways in whichRebeccais ‘a Cornish Gothic resetting ofJane Eyre’, the modern Gothic has been characterised as a ‘crossbreed ofJane Eyreand Daphne du Maurier’sRebecca’.² A huge and calculated publishing success story,...

As a writer, Sarah Waters is interested in the ‘queerness’ of history: history, that is, not as ‘neat and gleaming and complete’ as a box of type, but as ‘strange’, ‘odd’, ‘eccentric’, ‘of questionable character’, ‘shady’, ‘suspect’, and, of course, ‘homosexual’.² Her historical novels use the Gothic to play knowing games with the shifting meanings of the word ‘queer’, nudging the modern reader into an acknowledgement of the complexities of historical process. The word functions as a touchstone, signalling her re-creation of a repressed lesbian past and the way in which this project alters, or indeed, ‘queers’ (‘puts out of...

The Gothic historical mode, as I have argued, has allowed women writers to offer a symbolic critique of the ways in which women have been left out of recorded history and the psychological effects of this exclusion. Legally constructed as ‘civilly dead’ for much of the period I have been discussing, women writers have developed the language and imagery of the Gothic – spectrality, live burial, the haunted house, the womb-tomb ‘recess’, the murdered mother – to symbolise the fact that that they, and their mothers and daughters, have been denied a matrilineal genealogy and full subjectivity.

History (both recorded...