Haunted readings of female gothic short stories

Abstract This article deploys a cut-up technique borrowed from the haunted, fictocritical writing of Anna Gibbs. Taking descriptions from parts of different haunted houses found in short stories of the female gothic, it reconstitutes a new house, that is both an architectural assemblage and a reading of the figure of the haunted house as it relates to both gothic studies and feminism. The article has been divided according to passages describing different rooms as they appear in stories by thirteen women writers of the Gothic era: Charlotte Riddell, Mary Wilkins-Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Nesbit, Emma Frances Dawson, Madeline Wynne, Florence Marryat, Mrs Oliphant, Amelia Edwards, Elizabeth Bowen, Ellen Glasgow and Edith Wharton. The original paper, delivered at the 2015 Conference Haunting in Short Fiction and Its Adaptations at the University of Angers, was accompanied by a hypertext, choose-your-own-adventure-style Powerpoint presentation in which conference participants could select different doors and passageways, each leading to a different route, reading their way through the collaged house in an itinerant fashion. The rooms and architectural features, with their accompanying passages and readings, are here presented in a linear fashion.