Description: This small collection of essays explores women's relationship with the gothic: a relationship which has, since its eighteenth-century beginnings, always been complex. These essays demonstrate some of the scope and diversity of that relationship, and much of its intensity: the ingenuity and genius employed, the anguish experienced and the risks taken, in its evolution.
Genuinely representative of gothic's flexibility and presence in everything from novels to architecture, from surrealist art to hypertext fiction, this volume brings new primary sources and topics to the reader's attention, and will be of interest to anyone who wants to expand and challenge their understanding of how and why women engage with the gothic.
Brief description: Maria Purves is a former Cambridge Fellow, and author of the book The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785-1829 (University of Wales Press, 2009). Before becoming a scholar Maria was an actress on the British stage.