ABSTRACT

This chapter examines some of Edith Nesbit's Gothic stories from a vantage point that precisely challenges the claims of scholarship informed by feminism. It focuses on three stories, namely "Uncle Abraham's Romance", "From the Dead", and "Man-Size in Marble", all of which can be read as demonstrating a distinctly anti-feminist agenda. The chapter focuses on Anne Williams work for two purposes: first, to help determine the limited extent of the feminist contours in Nesbit's Gothic tales and then to note one of their signature less-progressive "male" features. The second purpose is to clarify that the female protagonists' apparent complicity in their own destruction is not ultimately an interpretation amounting to victim-blaming but a plot feature typifying the male Gothic. Nesbit's story "Man-Size in Marble" features a pair of young newlyweds, Jack and Laura, an artist and professional writer respectively, who decide to move to the country for financial reasons.