The Victorian age is known as one of scientific rationalism, but it was also a time when interest in mesmerism, clairvoyance and spiritualism flourished and séances and the reading of ghost stories were popular evening pastimes. Perhaps as a result of its society’s fascination for the paranormal and the occult, Victorian houses have become synonymous in the popular imagination with decay, death and horror.

In this talk, Gothic expert Emma Liggins considers the ways in which haunted space was represented in the ghost story, anticipating developments in horror film in the twentieth century. At a time of technological advance, urbanisation and the development of tourism, readers were eager for stories which offered a retreat to the old, remote haunted house with its ghosts of the past. Yet Gothic narratives also located the ghostly and the ghoulish in new town-houses to show that modernity could not escape darkness and evil.

Dr Liggins will look at late-Victorian ghost stories, such as ”The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, E. Nesbit’s “The Mystery of the Semi-Detached” and Lettice Galbraith’s “In the Séance Room” which offer a variety of disturbing haunted houses, whose unquiet female ghosts threaten domestic stability, male authority and Victorian certainties.