Search results for ""Author Melissa Edmundson""

This book explores women writers’ involvement with the Gothic. The author sheds new light on women’s experience, a viewpoint that remains largely absent from male-authored Colonial Gothic works. The book investigates how women writers appropriated the Gothic genre—and its emphasis on fear, isolation, troubled identity, racial otherness, and sexual deviancy—in order to take these anxieties into the farthest realms of the British Empire. The chapters show how Gothic themes told from a woman’s perspective emerge in unique ways when set in the different colonial regions that comprise the scope of this book: Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Edmundson argues that women’s Colonial Gothic writing tends to be more critical of imperialism, and thereby more subversive, than that of their male counterparts. This book will be of interest to students and academics interested in women’s writing, the Gothic, and colonial studies.

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D K Broster was one of the great British historical novelists of the twentieth century, but her Weird fiction has long been forgotten. She wrote some of the most impressive supernatural short stories to be published between the wars. Melissa Edmundson, editor of Women's Weird, Women's Weird 2, Elinor Mordaunt's The Villa and The Vortex and Helen Simpson's The Outcast and The Rite, all published by Handheld, has curated a selection of Broster's best and most terrifying work. From the Abyss contains eleven stories, including: 'The Window', in which a deserted chateau takes revenge on anyone who opens one particular window. 'The Pavement', in which the protectress of a Roman mosaic cannot bear to let it go. 'Clairvoyance', in which the spirit of a vengeful Japanese swordmaster enters an adolescent girl. 'From the Abyss', in which the survivor of a car crash is followed out of the gorge by her doppelganger.

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Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste concerns the coming-of-age of its title character, the mixed-race Zillah Le Poer, daughter of an English merchant and an Indian princess. Sent back to England as a young girl, Zillah has no knowledge that she is an heiress. She lives with her uncle Le Poer, his wife, and two daughters, and is treated as little more than a servant in the household. Zillah’s situation is gradually improved when Cassandra Pryor is employed as a governess to the Le Poer daughters and takes an interest in the mysterious “cousin.” Craik explores issues of gender, race, and empire in the Victorian period in this compact and gripping novella.Along with a newly-annotated text, this Broadview edition includes a critical introduction that discusses Craik’s involvement with contemporary racial and imperialist attitudes, her place within the broader genre of Anglo-Indian fiction, and the importance of Zillah Le Poer as a positive symbol of empire. The edition is also enriched with relevant contemporary contextual material, including Dinah Mulock Craik’s writing on gender and female employment, British views on the biracial Eurasian community in India, and writings on the Victorian governess.

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Charlotte Riddell’s The Uninhabited House (1875) tells the story of River Hall and the secrets that are hidden behind its doors. Within this haunted house, Riddell combines the supernatural with Victorian anxieties over stolen inheritance, crime, greed, and class mobility. This new Broadview Edition includes a detailed biography of Charlotte Riddell and illustrations from the original appearance of the novella in Routledge’s Magazine; it also includes Riddell’s ghost story “The Open Door” (1882), which serves as a useful companion text for The Uninhabited House. The contextual material in the edition highlights Victorian cultural, historical, and literary influences on Riddell’s text, including women’s contributions to the ghost story, print culture, and the development of supernatural fiction; the link between ghost stories and the holidays; and the haunted house, ghost hunting, and popular beliefs about ghosts in the Victorian era.

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