with Dr Emma Liggins, Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies: join us for a fascinating talk about C19th women writers and the haunted house!

This talk considers women writers’ fascination with the haunted house in the nineteenth century. From Mary Shelley to Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Braddon to Rosa Mulholland, women used the ghost story format to call out patriarchal abuse and reframe their own domestic experiences. Ghosts not only signalled the return of the past and the dangers of modernity, they also commented on servants, maternity, illegitimacy, colonialism and conflicted feelings about death and disease. Come along to find out about the ways in which women writers of the uncanny used hauntings to explore family trauma and the costs of inhabiting spaces governed by male rules.

Dr Emma Liggins is a Reader in English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. She is the author of several books, including The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1850-1945.

This is a Haworth: Home of Gothic Literature event for the Haworth Festival