He listens for the knock of the Coblynau, certain they will come for him… soon, just like they did to warn of the Aberfan disaster.Īuthor Catherine McCarthy’s second collection invites the reader on a regional journey, evoking a sense of quiet horror from the cosmic to the Gothic. Lure: A fisherman who nets the tail fin of a lure becomes obsessed with finding the rest, but what else lies hidden in the ancient lake?Ĭarreg Samson: A Neolithic burial chamber stares out to sea, remembering times long since past, but when it loses its heart of stone to a young girl the repercussions are hard to bear.Ĭoblynau: An old man watches the mountain which was once a slag heap of coal. This collection of 10 supernatural stories offers a flurry of folklore, a gathering of ghosts, and even a cosmic cave creature. Synopsis: Welcome to Wales, land of mists and megaliths, where mythical creatures and ancient spirits lurk in the strangest of places. The list is in no particular order except mainly by the year of publication – oldest to latest. So, having set the background, here’s my personal selection of women-authored ghost stories of the last 150 years and where you can read them – often online, for free ( always a bonus). This caused the same, relatively small selection of mostly male-authored works to be republished and republished yet again.” The brackets are my addition for clarification and fit in with Edmundson’s view.Įdmundson goes on to say :- “Women focus on women’s experience in these stories, so their writing was conveniently labelled too ‘domestic’ to be included alongside the men … the home can be the scariest place of all, because it’s supposed to be the place where we feel safest or where we have the most control.” Then (often male) editors relied on the work of other (often male) editors, not doing the research themselves. “So while these women were well known in their day, their work wasn’t included in many anthologies of supernatural and weird fiction. Here’s the view of Dr Melissa Edmundson, a specialist in 19th- and early 20th-century British women writers, from an article in The Guardian newspaper. There was a huge market and public appetite for these supernatural tales in the literary magazines and they were both a fun outlet for writers and a steady way of earning income.Īny of these names ring a ghostly bell? Mary E Wilkins Freeman? Evelyn Henty? Olive Harper? Elinor Mordaunt? Lettice Galbraith? BM Croker? Probably not.īut Edith Wharton, and Edith Nesbit? Ah, maybe now the bell is tingling faintly? I will include these two Ediths, as I think of them, in my personal selection below as well as a few more recognisable or even downright famous femme writers of this genre.īut briefly, as an interesting sidebar – why have these ladies been ghosted from history? Here’s a little known fact to ponder:- between the 1830s and the onset of World War I (1914) – the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of the ghost story – 70% of the ghost stories were written by women. Ten Great Ghost or Spooky Stories written by Women
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |