The Darker Sex

We present today a book that will appeal to fans of Gothic Tales, Victorian literature or feminist writing. An anthology of supernatural tales written by an impressive list of authors: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary E. Braddon, Charlotte Riddell, Mary E. Penn, Louisa Baldwin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Violet Quirk, Edith Nesbit, George Elliot and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

The Darker Sex
Edited by Mike Ashley
Peter Owen Publishers
July 2009
# ISBN 978 0 7206 1335 3
# Fiction
# paperback
# £9.99

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 Brontë, 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.

MIKE ASHLEY is a British bibliographer, author and editor of science fiction, mystery and fantasy. He is well known for editing the Mammoth Bookseries of short-story anthologies. He won the Edgar Award for The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction. He lives
in Kent, England.

Emily Brontë's tale is one of her Belgian devoirs: Le Palais de la Mort (1842) in the translation by Sue Lonoff (The Palace of Death) published in The Belgian Essays.

Categories: Books, Emily Brontë