Ghosts may or may not be real, but behind all good ghost stories there is a grain of truth. We spoke with Melissa Edmundson, editor of Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women 1890-1940, about the real fears underlying the stories that scare us.
“‘It makes me creep to think of it even now,’ she said. ‘I woke up, all at once, with that dreadful feeling as if something were going to happen, you know! I was wide awake, and hearing every little strange sound for miles around, it seemed to me. There are so many strange little noises in the country for all it is so still.’”
The Giant Wistaria by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
On dark nights we’ve all watched the shadows and wondered whether something in the darkness was watching us, something unknown. Weird fiction happens when we dwell on these stranger parts of reality. The editor of Women’s Weird, Melissa Edmundson tells us ‘…for me, Weird is often “quieter” than horror. There’s something ominous waiting just below the surface. Unlike horror, there is also more left to the imagination.’
Weird Fiction appeared in the late Victorian period, coinciding with the occult revival and the rise in paranormal investigation societies like The Ghost Club and the Society for Psychical Research. Typically we associate the genre with writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville and William Burroughs, but many women have written weird fiction too; Women’s Weird recognises this. This chilling collection of short stories brings together Weird fiction from women writers including Edith Wharton, Mary Butts, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Nesbit. Edmundson reminds us that women have long been associated with magic, and the intuition necessary to communicate with whatever hides behind the veil. In the stories found in this collection, a strange presence is felt in a new build, weird things happen when a man destroys a bed that’s been in his family for generations, an architect explores the crypt and no good can come of that.
To introduce Women’s Weird, Edmundson cites Mary Butts’ essay ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’: ‘A writer must, if only half-consciously, believe in what he is writing about. Details he can invent, and setting; terror and wonder he must have known and may have reflected on.’ Writing can be an opportunity to ask others—’is it just me who feels this way about reality?’—and to realise many others feel the same.
The stories in this collection unsettled me (and therefore worked for me) because they felt weirdly real; I too have felt that strange, dreamlike terror in the small hours of the morning when everyone else is sleeping. It’s a feeling, more than anything; we seldom pin down its source or perpetrator(s). True to life then, Women’s Weird prioritises subtlety and psychological terror over the explicit. What little is shown remains largely unknown, unfinished, uncertain. Edith Nesbit writes this to introduce her short story “The Shadow”: ‘You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are alike in these respects — no explanation, no logical coherence.’ Humans are hard-wired to hate uncertainty. We don’t like unanswerable questions, nor things we can’t control, like nature. We worry about what lingers in the darkness. We like our monsters to be predictable, and therefore beatable. Even modernity hasn’t killed uncertainty; there may no longer be bears and wolves that lurk in the woods in Britain and Ireland, but there may well be other things we don’t yet understand.
Many of our fears can be contextualised in a time and place. Some contend with personal experiences, trauma and mental health. Others are near-universal but taboo. In Women’s Weird, some of the stories deal with personal beliefs commonly held at the time, often beliefs in the occult or spirit realm. Edmundson tells us the author Margery Lawrence, for instance, ‘was a lifelong believer in Spiritualism and frequently connected to those who had passed to the “other side”. She wrote Ferry Over Jordan in 1944, her treatise on Spiritualism which included many of her own personal experiences making contact with loved ones—humans and pets!’
The aforementioned author Mary Butts was an occultist and studied under the infamous Aleister Crowley. ‘In her supernatural writing, she was also influenced by M.R. James, so perhaps she represents a good balance of “story” and “belief.” May Sinclair was a member of the Society for Psychical Research and used her supernatural fiction to work through her own ideas of the unexplained.’
Fears related to personal experience and trauma also feature prominently in this collection. Only as hauntings or monsters can some sorrow be expressed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, after the birth of her first child, was made to undergo a “rest-cure” for severe postpartum depression. ‘She wrote her most famous story “The Yellow Wall-paper,” as a response to that treatment and sent her doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell, a copy. In her 1913 essay “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’,” she ends by saying the story “was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” Her ghost stories definitely reflect her feminist views.’
Edmundson says: ‘…Much like dystopian fiction today, Weird fiction may outwardly be about unexplained supernatural or supernormal forces, but underneath it tells us something about our own “real” world that we must come to terms with. I don’t think our fears have changed too much.’
Awareness of what scares us—and the ability to reflect on these fears—is integral to writing Weird fiction and Horror in general. The fear of death, inevitable as it is, is a common concern for horror writers. Anne Rice, author of Interview with a Vampire, wrote that: ‘Vampires are the best metaphor for the human condition. Here you have a monster with a soul that's immortal, yet in a biological body. It's a metaphor for us, as it's very difficult to realise that we are going to die, and day to day we have to think and move as though we are immortal.’ Fear of loss, or our self-destructive tendencies, are other common fears we struggle to articulate in waking life. The bestselling author of horror Stephen King was abandoned by his father and suffered from alcoholism and addiction. His fears of abandonment and his own vices continue to haunt his fiction.
Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House, knows how to write a psychologically terrifying story. In her lecture “How I write,” she wrote: ‘Now no one can get into writing a novel about a haunted house without hitting the subject of reality head-on; either I have to believe in ghosts, which I do, or I have to write another kind of novel altogether.’ She described finding a note written to herself with the words ‘oh no oh no Shirley not dead Theodora Theodora’, which she couldn’t remember writing, and this frightened her. ‘I began to think that maybe I had better get to work writing this book awake, because otherwise I was going to find myself writing in my sleep, and I got out the typewriter and went to work as though something was chasing me, which I kind of think something was.’
These stories are scary because, to paraphrase Robert Bresson, they ‘render the real more precise.’ Try as we may try to ignore the darkness, it’s still there. We may or may not have had strange visitations from ghosts and spirits, but we all know how weird and wonderful the world is, how terrifying it can feel to be alive, to feel powerless in difficult circumstances, to be alone in a dark room, to wake up from nightmares, to know our lives are finite, to face the void and uncertainty, to wonder who we are, to find ourselves changing from one day to the next, to have a consciousness and to feel at the mercy of our minds and bodies. And these fears are very real and persistent—writers of fiction dare not look away.
Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women 1890-1940 edited by Melissa Edmundson, published by Handheld Press on 31 October 2019. Catch the book launch at the beautiful Soho bookshop The Second Shelf on 30 October.