Ghost stories can look like a nostalgic game, a trivial make-believe, played when it was no longer widely held, by readers of books, that the spirits of the dead return to the land of the living – mopping, mowing, gibbering, giving their owl’s cries, causing the tapers to burn blue, sheeted, but never in any circumstances nude.
Hamlet and the Ghost both say that the weak imagine things.
Women imagine things. And they have been able to imagine and describe what it is that women imagine, what their weakness is, and to say how it could be defended. Enter the feminist ghost story. Edith Wharton and Vernon Lee belong to a ghostly sisterhood which, from the 1880s onwards, was to be responsible for much of the most interesting terror fiction. Among the women writers in question are E. Nesbit and the Americans Charlotte Gilman and Mary Wilkins. ‘The Little Ghost’ by Mary Wilkins, which invokes an abused child, another orphan-ghost, is arguably the most moving story in the Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories …
Karl Miller, Things, LRB, Vol. 9 No. 7 · 2 April 1987
