Edith Nesbit's short supernatural fiction

What is it about?

Edith Nesbit is best known as a children's author, but she also wrote compelling and disturbing ghost and horror stories for adults. This paper argues that Nesbit used the horror genre to explore the situation of women in her society, in particular through her deployment of male Frankenstein and female Cassandra figures, and through her imagery of female death and female corpses.

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Why is it important?

It is too often assumed that the ghost story is a marginal or trivial form, and that authors interested in asking difficult questions about their societies turned exclusively to realist literary forms. This paper contributes to a growing body of work that recognises how the apparently 'escapist' mode of fantasy allowed writers - and perhaps especially women writers - a vehicle for social critique.

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