ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes three fin-de-siècle ghost stories by Victorian women writers that employ a male narrative voice to enclose a woman's likeness and history. Each of these tales—Margaret Oliphant's "The Portrait", Vernon Lee's "Oke of Okehurst; or, A Phantom Lover", and Edith Nesbit's "The Ebony Frame"—focuses on haunted likeness of a woman who defies her objectification into art and inserts her own storytelling voice into the text. Margaret Oliphant's tale "The Portrait" employs a male narrator to enclose woman's story. Phil Canning and his elderly father inhabit a home that is curiously devoid of any feminine presence. Vernon Lee's "Oke of Okehurst; or, A Phantom Lover" begins with the type of outer frame that is characteristic of many ghost stories, one that establishes storyteller, audience, and setting. Edith Nesbit's "The Ebony Frame" relates a man's infatuation with the painting of a witch who comes alive and seduces him into making a Faustian bargain, offering herself in exchange for his soul.
