Overview

An exploration of the lesser-known but fascinating nineteenth-century author Amelia Edwards.

Amelia Edwards was a popular and unconventional British writer of ghost stories, murder mysteries and novels in the mid-Victorian period. She was also iconic for her celebrated work in Ancient Egypt, becoming one of the first female Egyptologists and founding the Egyptian Exploration Fund (Society). Both her stories and her travel writing are significant for their evocative descriptions of haunted places, particularly Italy and Egypt, and their uses of the tropes of dark tourism.

This talk compares representations of place, space, death and travel in ghost stories such as ‘The Four-Fifteen Express’, ‘The Engineer’ and ‘The Story of Salome’ and the murder mystery ‘The Tragedy in the Palazzo Bardello’, set in Rome. I’ll also talk about Victorian dark tourism and Edwards’ visiting of ancient tombs in her intrepid journey down the Nile. The late nineteenth century saw the popularity of Egyptian Gothic marketed to British audiences (Borwein, 2021; Sullivan, 2025). Debates within death studies about dark tourism’s connections with ritual, ambiguity and darkness (Toussaint and Decrop, 2013; Darvay, 2016;Stone, 2006; Seaton, 2002) can be linked to her attempt to reimagine lost cities of the dead. As in the place writing of Edwards’ contemporary Vernon Lee, which lingers on the half-erased memorials on Italian tombs and churches, forgotten stories of violent and/or oppressed women can be activated and excavated by the tourist gaze. The dark tourist may be both horrified and thrilled by their encounter with the past.

Dr Emma Liggins is Reader in English and Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include The British Short Story (with Andrew Maunder &Ruth Robbins) (Palgrave, 2011) and The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1850-1945: Gender, Space and Modernity (Palgrave, 2020). She has edited a special issue of VPR on the Strand Magazine (2021) and has chapters in The Edinburgh Companion to the Victorian Ghost Story (2025) and Ghosts and the Gothic (2025). She is currently working on a monograph Victorian and Edwardian Death Spaces: Gender and Memorialisation for Manchester University Press.