“Women were integral to the formation of the modern ghost story, a tradition that really came into its own in the 19th century. It’s a genre dominated by women, but we will never truly know how many women published ghost stories because so many wrote under pseudonyms or wrote anonymously. Women also tended to use male narrators, so many stories that were written anonymously and thought to be by men were actually written by women," explains Dr. Melissa Edmundson, author of Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
“There is a tendency to focus more on male writers of ghost stories, and I think this has to do with a few factors,” says Dr Melissa Edmundson. “Women writers typically confined their supernatural fiction to the short story, and this genre has historically been overlooked by critics. With the recent interest in short stories, combined with the mainstreaming of gothic studies, more attention is being paid to the role women played within the ghost story tradition.”