ABSTRACT
From earliest days, the ghost story has been a genre dominated by women. Given the preponderance of anonymous authors, male pseudonyms, and the frequent use of male narrators, the actual number of women writers of the supernatural may never be fully measured. According to Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, though women’s ghost stories share some fundamental similarities with stories authored by men, stories written by women “explore different areas of concern, and express their responses differently”. The woman’s ghost story is a distinct and important subgenre within a subgenre, namely the Female Gothic that arose out of a wider Gothic tradition. Ever since Ellen Moers deployed the term “Female Gothic” in Literary Women, the idea of such a tradition has provided ample ground for discussion and debate among scholars of the Gothic and the supernatural. Ghost literature also showcases the most effective qualities of the short story form and women’s continuing involvement in the genre.
