Our June programme was dedicated to 19th century writers of the Gothic, the ghostly an the weird. We were joined by a fantastic range of scholars (Helen Dallas, Emma Liggins, Brooke Morrison and Yanrong Tan) to talk some of the most well-known and some of the most overlooked 19th century women writers of the Gothic, the ghastly and the supernatural. We dived into the Gothic drama of Joanna Baillie, the Gothic poetry of Christina Rossetti, the short stories of Amelia Edwards, and the longer prose of Mary Shelley.
If you missed it, you didn’t miss out! Let me introduce you to the four women we studied this month. I’ll give you a run through of some of the talks and ideas that we explored this month alongside some of the things we read for book group. This month almost all our reads were tied to specific talks so I can definitely recommend a catching up combo of reading some of the selected short stories and watching some of the talks! You can find all of our reads and all the links to the relevant short stories mentioned here. Just look for the June reads!
Joanna Baillie
Joanna Baillie was massively famous in her day but is largely forgotten today outside of scholars who focus on the period or on the history of drama. Most of her plays are easily available to read online though so take this as a sign to go read some of her work.
She was most famous for her ‘Plays on the Passions’, each one of which focused on a particular ‘passion’ and offer a sort of in depth character study. As out speaker for this week explained, Baillie in her work explores the possibilities of psychological horror on the stage. For book group, we read possible her most famous play De Montfort. It’s a tale of obsessive jealousy and hatred leading to tragedy. We found a lot of queer resonances in the overwhelming obsession of De Montfort for his old schoolfellow Rezenvelt. Perhaps unintentional, but very hard to miss. If you like your plays (and your fictional men) incredibly dramatic, I can recommend this one. Misunderstandings, actions that you can’t take back, an inevitable speedrun towards blood, death and tears… delicious. I’ll leave the rest of the dissection of Joanna Baillie and her work to Helen Dallas. You can watch the talk below!
Amelia Edwards
Amelia Edwards was a prolific traveller and writer of short fiction. I didn’t know her well enough before this talk to draw together the threads of her tourist practice (including a bit of grave desecration in Egypt) and her writing practice so it was great to hear Emma Liggins bringing these two topics together for today’s talk. You might find that last month’s talk on the ‘Egpytianised’ Gothic by British and American women is an interesting companion talk for this one. If you’re interested in short fiction, Amelia Edwards is an interesting writer who skips across genres with ease. You’ll find more recommendations in the video (but, if I may give a sneak peak of this year’s October ‘Scare a Day’ challenge, we’ll be diving into some Edwards ourselves!). We didn’t actually read Amelia Edwards for book group (a shocking oversight, I apologise!), instead we travelled fictionally ourselves to Italy. We read the recent translation of The Blind Woman of Sorrento by Francesco Mastriani and translated by Idara Crespi. If you are looking for an incredibly awful depiction of blindness, this would be the book for you but it doesn’t come recommended from our book group. Find out more about Edwards below!
Christina Rossetti
We’re headed into far more famous territory with Rossetti…well at least when it comes to her long poem ‘The Goblin Market’ (how many of us much about her other work is the question). We were joined by Brooke Morrison for a really interesting angle on the poem: reading it through its use of flower language. It was a really intriguing way of approaching it and I recommend the talk. In book group, we decided to look at some of the rewritings and reimaginings of the tale that have sprung up in the last century or so. It’s one of those poems, particularly in relation to its depiction of sibling bonds, women, sexuality, and perhaps queerness, that has entered the popular imagination. There are more or less direct references to it in what amounts to probably hundreds of films, shows, books, articles and songs. We were interested in reading a range of versions from different places to see how different people took up the idea the goblin fruit, the goblin market and its depiction of sisterly devotion. I think our favourite was Nibedita Sen’s ‘Advice for your First Time at the Fairy Market‘. To be fair, Nibedita Sen’s work is always excellent, thought-provoking and devastatingly precise in its writing. Never a word wasted. This short story explores a mother/daughter bond, how you survive and thrive encounters with the fairies, and includes some mouth-watering references to food. We also read Laini Taylor’s YA version ‘Goblin Fruit’ which very much literalises the metaphor of the fruit. Our protagonist falls for a boy who is all wrong (in a supernatural way, not just a ‘not a great guy’ way), willingly choosing to bite of the forbidden fruit even though she knows what it is. It’s an interesting one but it is very early 2000s YA in its writing and approach – take that to mean whatever it means to you! The other we read was ‘Pico, Rico, Mandorico‘ which is set on a Caribbean island and becomes a critique of colonial power relations and worker’s rights. Basically, we learned that there is a LOT of mileage in ‘Goblin Market’ and you can take that potential in lots of different directions.
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley often (still) gets reduced to Frankenstein (and her relationship to Percy Shelley). While more people are perhaps aware now of The Last Man (in which the world ends in a pandemic) due to our own experiences of living through a pandemic. I saw it on a lot of lists. This week, though we both read and learnt about Mary Shelley’s most controversial novella Mathilda. It’s a tale of an absent father’s incestuous love for his daughter and his drastic action to combat his temptation. It’s a tragedy. It also wasn’t actually published until the 20th century. When Mary Shelley sent it to her father, he kept the manuscript and refused to give it back, finding the work too shocking. He didn’t destroy it though so the manuscript survived and was recovered. It’s not the Mary Shelley you know (or is it?) Yanrong Tan introduced the novella, its context and some of its ideas in a really great talk introducing the work and Mary Shelley’s wider ouevre.
There are so many excellent 19th century women writers of the ghostly and ghastly out there. What are your top recommendations?
Romancing the Gothic 