Intertexts

Ghost stories, haunted houses, and the supernatural hold a hypnotizing power over our minds and dare us to look at our everyday spaces as both familiar and uncanny, leading us to re-evaluate our relationships not just with specters but with each other, with the spaces we occupy, and with our past, present, and future. Placing ghost stories within their historical, societal, and cultural contexts allows for further exploration [End Page 139] of what these narrations tell us about the author and the author's world. Emma Liggins, a senior lecturer in English at the Manchester Metropolitan University in England, sees the ghost stories of women writers from the mid-nineteenth to twentieth centuries as metaphors for women's reactions to the modernization of the home.

Liggins examines the ghost stories of six canonical female authors—Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, May Sinclair, and Elizabeth Bowen—as well as the current understanding of how women reacted to the modernization of the home by analyzing how women's fears, anxieties, and desires manifested through the pages of these spectral short stories. Liggins engages with and challenges such scholars as the spatial theorists Henri Lefebvre and Gaston Bachelard and the feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz; she also brings into the conversation such non-fiction works as Edith Wharton's The Decoration of Houses. Placing the stories within the context of the Female Gothic—a subversive genre which challenges female confinement and presents their fears amidst patriarchal structures—Liggins focuses specifically throughout the book on what she terms "the architectural uncanny" of haunted houses, that is, "the experience of disorientation, or the feeling of being lost in an unfamiliar environment" (3) within domestic spaces (such as master bedrooms, libraries, and gardens).

Through the dissection of this uncanny as it presents itself in female ghost stories, Liggins traces a history of women from the 1850s to the 1940s in terms of changing household relationships and domestic spatial boundaries for women as technology and war modernize their world. The book is, in Liggins's words, "a feminist history of the ghost story" (2), expanding our view of women's reactions to modernization in such areas as the mistress-servant relationship and female inheritance.

The organization of this book as well as the presentation of the information makes it accessible to readers ranging from veteran scholars to amateur enthusiasts. Liggins begins each chapter "anew," as she (re-)ex-plains the historical, societal, and cultural context of each author, assesses current scholarship, theories, and interpretations, and as she outlines her approach and forthcoming analysis in the introductory paragraph. Although the continuous re-stating may suggest that Liggins is not engaging [End Page 140] with pre-established interpretations and analyses from earlier chapters, it does allow the reader to pick up at any point in the volume. Each chapter focuses on one writer and includes brief biographical surveys, concise summaries of each of their short stories to be discussed and analyzed, and the important themes that will be addressed.

Chapter 1, "Introduction: Women in the Haunted House" is where Liggins presents the writers to be analyzed, the overarching themes and motifs—such as servant-mistress relationships or the effect of technology—, and the scholarly and theoretical context within which this book lies. In chapter 2, "The Old Ancestral Mansion and Forbidden Spaces in Elizabeth Gaskell's ghost stories" Liggins argues that the violation of spatial boundaries or "privacy" by spectral figures, servants, and outsiders alike represents a challenge to both gendered and class-based "spatial divisions" during the Victorian era. In such stories as "The Old Nurse's Story," "The Poor Clare," and "The Crooked Branch," Liggins shows that servants (particularly female ones), specters, and even tourists are liminal characters, able to enter such forbidden spaces as the male study of ancestral homes. Because of this ability, they can be viewed as metaphors for the declining aristocracy of the...