This panel contributes to ongoing and shifting conversations about the category of literature written by and about women known as the “female gothic” in the British long eighteenth century. Our goal is to bring to the forefront of female gothic scholarship the nascent trends focused on recovering the lost legacies of those literary works and writers that have been left behind in critical conceptualizations of the genre. This panel will coincide with the publication of Lost Legacies: Women Authors and the Early Gothic (forthcoming from University of Wales Press), a collection of critical essays centered on such recovery work, edited by one of the panel’s co-organizer, Kathleen Hudson. The project of the collection and this panel is to give voice to women writers who have been marginalized but whom are increasingly recognized as important contributors to the development of literature in the long eighteenth century, to the gothic broadly conceived, and to women’s literary history.

In Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic (1995), Anne Williams made the influential argument that “‘Gothic’ is not one but two; like the human race, it has a ‘male’ and a ‘female’ genre” (1). Following Williams’s lead, critics of the gothic such as Maggie Kilgour, E.J. Clery, and Robert Miles have distinguished between male and female gothic literature not only in terms of writers’ gender, but also in style, form, and content. The male gothic is known as the “school of horror,” which takes as its subject matter overt depictions of violence and unexplained supernatural phenomena while the female gothic’s “school of terror” has come to be defined through its use of the “supernatural explained,” or the (eventual) rational explanation of seemingly supernatural events. This taxonomy has preoccupied critics of the female gothic, who have focused almost solely on the work of Ann Radcliffe, known especially for her work The Mysteries of Udolpho, and to a lesser extent Clara Reeve and Charlotte Dacre.

Recent work by Diane Long Hoeveler, Diana Wallace, and Angela Wright, however, has opened up possibilities for moving beyond Radcliffe and away from traditional formulations of the female gothic, particularly as it is figured in diametric opposition to the male gothic. Wallace, for example, has suggestively proposed that current scholarship can and should “listen carefully” to what female gothic writers “are saying about the relationship between women and history” (Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic). This panel takes up Wallace’s suggestion by shifting critical focus to female gothic writers and texts previously at the periphery of literary history in the attempt to center the women who have been marginalized, undiscovered, and underappreciated in history and in the tradition of female gothic scholarship. In so doing, the panel takes an active interest in MLA 2020’s theme of “Being Human.” The work of recovering the lost legacies of women writers within the gothic tradition is undergirded by the conviction that women’s literature is an essential component not only to the equitable operation of a diverse community of writers and readers, but also to defining and redefining what it means to be human today and what it meant to be a human in the long eighteenth century. We reconstitute the study of the female gothic, and indeed the meaning of the term itself, to explore the role of gender in constituting the human of the past and the present and use the overlap between the two to forge alternative communities and dismantle gendered violence.

In “Female Gothic versus Women’s Gothic: New Definitions,” Kathleen Hudson challenges previous definitions of the female gothic as overly reductive, overly complicated, or just incorrect. She examines some of the developments and pitfalls which define critical negotiations of the “female gothic” and proposes a new examination of “women’s gothic” as a more broadminded and comprehensive means of studying those aspects which shaped gendered authorship and identity in the early gothic.

Franz Potter’s “The Selling of Sarah Wilkinson” explores the forgotten gothic writer’s identity as a novelist and as a chapbook writer. In Wilkinson’s early novels and chapbooks, she assumes a dual identity as educator and as entertainer. While these works are sensationally terrifying, they always instruct the reader in morality, particularly in filial duty. In her later novels and chapbooks, however, the lines become blurred as she increasingly focuses on writing to survive rather than to educate or moralize. Potter argues that the battle Wilkinson wages between these identities tells an intriguing – and terrifying – story about the perils of surviving by the pen as a woman in the long eighteenth century.

Anna Shajirat uses the forgotten female gothic novels Clermont (1798) and The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey (1797) to argue in “Female Gothic Horror: Maturation, Trauma, and Sexual Violence” for the insufficiency of the critical distinction between male horror and female terror in accounting for gendered violence. She locates female gothic horror not in supernatural monsters and spectacularized violence, as in the male gothic, but in the mundane realities that women must learn about their subjugation in worlds dominated by men. The gendered horror of the female gothic exposes the realities for eighteenth-century women who were subject to literal and figurative forms of violence from both public and private spheres, from intimate relationships and the law.

Each of these three papers will be delivered in fifteen minutes with the remaining time devoted to discussion. Co-organizers Kathleen Hudson and Anna Shajirat will facilitate discussion between panelists and the audience and will pose questions to both to groups to sustain the conversation. Our aim is to provide a productive space for scholars from the panel and audience to collaborate in an exchange of ideas that illuminates – and perhaps even raises – the stakes of recovering the lost legacies of the female gothic tradition.