GOTHIC ANGELS OF DEATH
Mourning, Memory and the Feminine Gothic in the Cemetery
With Emma Liggins on Thursday the 16th October 2025 at 7 pm

How were women remembered in Victorian cemeteries? Were they always cast as ‘beloved wives’ or ‘devoted daughters’ beneath grand, angel-topped headstones — or do we find more nuanced tributes etched in stone?

This talk explores the language of epitaphs and the symbolism of angel monuments and grave design in Highgate Cemetery (London) and Southern Cemetery (Manchester). It considers how the commemoration of women both echoed and complicated the Victorian ‘celebration of death’.

By comparing family headstones with memorial cards shared before and after funerals, the talk uncovers how the image of the grieving woman — draped in sorrow over a tomb — became an enduring motif of 19th-century mourning culture.

The session concludes with a discussion of Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2001), a neo-Edwardian cemetery novel set in Highgate from 1901 to 1910, exploring how cremation is framed as a compelling choice for women within the Gothic imagination.Tickets £12.50 including a delightful gin cocktail and a 20% donation to Brompton Cemetery. Please click here to purchase.

Emma Liggins
Emma Liggins is a Reader in English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. An expert on women’s writing, ghost stories, and Victorian mourning culture, she has published extensively on the New Woman, sensation fiction, and Gothic literature, including The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories and