The Darker Sex: Tales of the Supernatural and Macabre by Victorian Women Writers (2009)

Ghosts, precognition, suicide and the afterlife are all themes to be found in these thrilling stories by some of the greatest Victorian women writers from both Britain and the USA. Horace Walpole may have started the Gothic-fiction movement, but it was three women who popularized it Clara Reeve, Mary Shelley and Anne Radcliffe. Victorian women proved they had a talent for creating dark, sensational and horrifying tales of the supernatural, and this anthology showcases some of the best and most representative work by female writers of the time, including Emily Bront, Mary Braddon, George Eliot and Edith Nesbit, as well as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Riddell, Louisa Baldwin, Mary Penn, Violet Quirk and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Editor Mike Ashley provides valuable insight into the authors' lives and contextualizes each story every one of which still has the ability to shock and frighten and shows how Victorian women perfected and developed the Gothic genre.