Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic

Female Gothic Histories is an important new study of the ways in which women writers have used the gothic novel to symbolize and counter their exclusion from traditional historical narratives. Beginning with a detailed reading of Sophia Lee’s critically neglected The Recess, one of the earliest historical gothic fictions, Diana Wallace traces the development of this form from works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier, and the modern gothics of Victoria Holt, to the phenomenally popular novels of Sarah Waters.