The Darker Sex

Edited by Mike Ashley

Ghosts, precognition, suicide and the afterlife are all themes to be found in these
thrilling stories by some of the greatest Victorian women writers from both Britain
and the USA. Horace Walpole may have started the Gothic-fiction movement, but
it was three women who popularized it –Clara Reeve, Mary Shelley and Anne
Radcliffe. Victorian women proved they had a talent for creating dark, sensational and
horrifying tales of the supernatural, and this anthology showcases some of the best and
most representative work by female writers of the time, including Emily Brontë, Mary
Braddon, George Eliot and Edith Nesbit, as well as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte
Riddell, Louisa Baldwin, Mary Penn, Violet Quirk and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.
Editor Mike Ashley provides valuable insight into the authors’ lives and contextualizes
each story –every one of which still has the ability to shock and frighten –and shows
how Victorian women perfected and developed the Gothic genre.

MIKE ASHLEY is a British bibliographer, author
and editor of science fiction, mystery and fantasy. He is
well known for editing the Mammoth Bookseries of
short-story anthologies. He won the Edgar Award for The
Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction. He lives
in Kent, England.