Centred on women and speaking to women’s social, sexual, and intellectual lives, stories by Riddell, E. Yet, I argue, their commonalities and continuities reward investigation, indicating the shared roots of men’s and women’s weird tales in the nineteenth century as well as their mutual interdependence.
On the surface, these narratives bear little resemblance to Lovecraft’s ’The Call of Cthulhu’, Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan, or Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Horla’.
In 1882, several of the late Charlotte Riddell’s short stories were collected under the title Weird Stories. This paper explores the weird tradition in Victorian women’s writing. Male experience of the fin-de-siecle period is written into what are called its weird tales. This is not just because of the historical bias towards literary men in Western canons and not because women did not choose to write supernatural horror stories, but because, as I’ll argue, what we have come to understand as the form of the weird tale is an implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) masculine mode. While there are numerous women among recent ‘New Weird’ writers, female authorship of early weird tales barely shows up next to the success of H. She died of cancer.In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, weird fiction looks like a masculine tradition. She was the first person to become a pensioner of the Society of Authors. James Magazine in 1867 and was also the editor of a magazine called Home.Īfter her husband died, leaving much debt, Riddell lived in seclusion but paid off the debt with her writing. Riddell became the co-owner and editor of St. In modern times, she is better known for her Victorian ghost stories. Between 18, she published 30 novels and was known as “the novelist of the City” for her books about the financial and business worlds. In 1858, she published her first novel, The Moors and the Fens, and married civil engineer Joseph Hadley Riddell.
When she was in her late teens, her father died, and four years later, she and her mother decided to move to London so that Charlotte could make a living as a writer (fictionalized in her 1883 novel, A Struggle for Fame). Riddell was born in Carrickfergus, Ireland, the youngest daughter of the High Sheriff for County Antrim, James Cowan. James Magazine, a prominent London journal of the time. She was also part owner and editor of St. During her lifetime, she was very popular and was the author of more than 50 novels and short stories. Charlotte Riddell was an Irish/English writer who is best known now for stories of the supernatural.
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