Gothics and ghosts, vampires, witches, and l'écriture-femme

For more than six years I wrote regularly on listservs about the gothic genre: on Litalk-l, Trollope-l, Gaslight, WomenWritersThroughtheAges, and EighteenthCenturyWorlds I managed to get a group of people together who around Christmas as well as other times of the year were willing to read and to write about ghost and gothic stories with me. I also got people on these lists to discuss books about the gothic and books readily identified as female romance or woman's novels (écriture-femme). Sometimes all these genres and subgenres combined in one text, as for example, Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Grey Woman" and Edith Wharton's "Afterward." During this time I also taught a themed literature course regularly which I ended up calling "Gothics and Ghosts, Romance and the Supernatural." I covered gothic novels, vampire and ghost stories and the "female gothic." During this time I also wrote on these and other lists (e.g., C18-l) commentary on books about the gothic and about women's literature.

This section is made up of my and the postings other people produced during these years and notes from the lectures I did for my teaching. I also include appropriate pictures and make an effort to find pictures by women.

Literary History and Criticism: Commentaries

• Margaret Oliphant's (From) "Miss Austen and Miss Mitford" (1870)
• Richard Davenport-Hines's The Gothic: 400 Years (!) of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin 1999

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Cover Illustration to Chantal Thomas, Coping with Freedom

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