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The Late Victorian Gothic
Examining the automatic writing of the spiritualist s�ances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, various genres and late nineteenth-century mental science, this book shows the failure of writers' attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural at the fin de si�cle. Hilary Grimes shows that both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind made agency problematic. When notions of agency are suspended, Grimes argues, authorship itself becomes uncanny. Grimes's study is distinct in both recognizing and crossing strict boundaries to suggest that Gothic literature itself resists categorization, not only between literary periods, but also between genres. Treating a wide range of authors - Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Du Maurier, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Sarah Grand, and George Paston - Grimes shows how fin-de-si�cle works negotiate themes associated with the Victorian and Modernist periods such as psychical research, mass marketing, and new technologies. With particular attention to texts that are not placed within the Gothic genre, but which nevertheless conceal Gothic themes, The Late Victorian Gothic demonstrates that the end of the nineteenth century produced a Gothicism specific to the period.
196 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 5, 2013
Great ideas: didn't enjoy reading it.¹
OK, so the book is about how writing, particularly women's writing, around the supernatural aspects of the Gothic, at the end of the 19th century, might be considered uncanny. Grimes looks at a couple of different approaches to this, for example;
* Automatic writing, where the medium believes/says they are just a conduit for the words of a spirit. Grimes is particularly interested in the way new technologies were adding a layer to this e.g. where the automatic writing is being done by typewriter, not longhand. Not so much a doubling, then, as a tripling.
* Ghost stories, the large numbers of women writing ghost stories at the time, and how often they have become ghosts within the canon: invisible and overlooked. Grimes suggests women were "haunted by their own female identity" (p. 138) and "haunted by the destructive nature of the writing process and the driving ambition to write" (p. 139).
Basically she's saying that there's an uncanny doubling between the Victorian role of women as nurturer in the private home, and women as authors of public texts. Then, by writing in the Gothic, or the supernatural, women "damage [their] claims to serious realist and political literature" (p. 141). They have to face their lost half, their doppleganger, whichever genre they pick. ² And then when the texts are written they are almost immediately reduced to 'only women's work,' not real writing, and will become excluded from collections and libraries and serious critical considerations. At each stage of text production another doubling is present, an endless process of fading reflection and repetition, until we are left with only a trace. Cool, right?³
What killed the book for me was the writing. This is incredibly interesting material. Grimes has great ideas. But I find this kind of academic writing hard to justify.
It's like Grimes sets out to alienate the majority of readers by proving to a select few readers that she has mastered the code of academic language.
" . . . writing destabilizes boundaries of identity to such an extent that selfhood is negotiated by literary language." (p. 18)
" . . . scenes of writing are figures in the supernatural terms of telepathy or automatic writing, in which authorship and agency are contested sites of power."(p. 139)
"Lee's aestheticism wrestles with its own materialistic claims, only to come to the uneasy conclusion that art is as haunted with her failed empiricism as her ghost stories are." (p. 134)
No specific paragraph or sentence is too heinous, it's just that it never stops. Every idea is written in self-justifying academiaspeak, and it's worse than unnecessary: it camouflages Grimes's really good ideas, that would interest a lot of people, if only they could hack their way to them.
There is so much that is good in here:
"The uncanny nature of . . . writing, in which the words seem to be both familiar and alien simultaneously." (p.139)
I wish I could give it four stars, but it's a one for me, for deliberate obtuseness.
¹ YMMV
² sounds like romance writers :)
³ Coolest part? likening editing to the process of bodily amputation, or a "ritualistic slaughter. [A women writer] transforms into the symbolic figure of a priestess who, in a moment of controlled violence, effectively edits and improves (or redeems) her work." (p. 160). I wish she had mentioned then putting the parts together in new ways, a la Frankenstein's monster.
OK, so the book is about how writing, particularly women's writing, around the supernatural aspects of the Gothic, at the end of the 19th century, might be considered uncanny. Grimes looks at a couple of different approaches to this, for example;
* Automatic writing, where the medium believes/says they are just a conduit for the words of a spirit. Grimes is particularly interested in the way new technologies were adding a layer to this e.g. where the automatic writing is being done by typewriter, not longhand. Not so much a doubling, then, as a tripling.
* Ghost stories, the large numbers of women writing ghost stories at the time, and how often they have become ghosts within the canon: invisible and overlooked. Grimes suggests women were "haunted by their own female identity" (p. 138) and "haunted by the destructive nature of the writing process and the driving ambition to write" (p. 139).
Basically she's saying that there's an uncanny doubling between the Victorian role of women as nurturer in the private home, and women as authors of public texts. Then, by writing in the Gothic, or the supernatural, women "damage [their] claims to serious realist and political literature" (p. 141). They have to face their lost half, their doppleganger, whichever genre they pick. ² And then when the texts are written they are almost immediately reduced to 'only women's work,' not real writing, and will become excluded from collections and libraries and serious critical considerations. At each stage of text production another doubling is present, an endless process of fading reflection and repetition, until we are left with only a trace. Cool, right?³
What killed the book for me was the writing. This is incredibly interesting material. Grimes has great ideas. But I find this kind of academic writing hard to justify.
It's like Grimes sets out to alienate the majority of readers by proving to a select few readers that she has mastered the code of academic language.
" . . . writing destabilizes boundaries of identity to such an extent that selfhood is negotiated by literary language." (p. 18)
" . . . scenes of writing are figures in the supernatural terms of telepathy or automatic writing, in which authorship and agency are contested sites of power."(p. 139)
"Lee's aestheticism wrestles with its own materialistic claims, only to come to the uneasy conclusion that art is as haunted with her failed empiricism as her ghost stories are." (p. 134)
No specific paragraph or sentence is too heinous, it's just that it never stops. Every idea is written in self-justifying academiaspeak, and it's worse than unnecessary: it camouflages Grimes's really good ideas, that would interest a lot of people, if only they could hack their way to them.
There is so much that is good in here:
"The uncanny nature of . . . writing, in which the words seem to be both familiar and alien simultaneously." (p.139)
I wish I could give it four stars, but it's a one for me, for deliberate obtuseness.
¹ YMMV
² sounds like romance writers :)
³ Coolest part? likening editing to the process of bodily amputation, or a "ritualistic slaughter. [A women writer] transforms into the symbolic figure of a priestess who, in a moment of controlled violence, effectively edits and improves (or redeems) her work." (p. 160). I wish she had mentioned then putting the parts together in new ways, a la Frankenstein's monster.
February 22, 2026
I really liked this one, a thoughtful exploration of a wide-ranging and wide-reaching topic centred around fin-de-siecle fictions and what they reveal about Victorian trends and preoccupations. I've read a few similar books dealing with mesmerism and spiritualism and this is one of the best, I think, for its clear-headedness and insightful tone. Grimes examines, over the course of six chapters, the works of Henry James and writing; spirit photography and its relation to Francis Galton and Conan Doyle; du Maurier's TRILBY; female ghost story writers; Vernon Lee's aesthetics; finally, the figure of the New Woman. Grimes' arguments are well suggested and make sense, and her broad overview of a complex subject is well handled. The book is very occasionally a little dry, but for the most part it works very well.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews