Victorian Women, Ghost Stories & Grief

Join Dr Emily Vincent, tutor at Oxford University, for a livestream talk exploring how Victorian women writers used the Spiritualist ghost story to navigate maternal grief.

As Victorian women writers of the supernatural carved out space and time to both mourn and create, the Spiritualist ghost story offered a unique and even "scriptotherapeutic" way of writing and processing grief, particularly relating to the loss of a child.

This livestream talk will explore how Victorian women writers, including Florence Marryat, Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, used their Spiritualist ghost stories as a means of navigating maternal grief and bereavement.

What to expect

This is live, online lecture combines literary scholarship with a close reading of how grief was written, encoded and processed through the ghost story form. Expect discussion of specific texts and authors, historical context on Victorian spiritualism and mourning practices, as well as space for questions.

This livestream talk includes:

• An introduction to the Spiritualist ghost story as a form of "scriptotherapy"
• Close readings of works by Florence Marryat, Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Historical context on Victorian spiritualism, mourning and the loss of a child
• Exploration of how women writers used fiction to process grief and bereavement
• Insight from current academic research into 19th-century spiritualism and the Gothic

Who is this talk for?

• Anyone interested in Victorian literature, the Gothic, or ghost stories
• Those curious about the history of Spiritualism and its connection to grief
• Students of women's writing, literary history or the history of mourning
• Anyone drawn to the intersection of literature, loss and the supernatural

Discover how Victorian women turned grief into ghost stories, and ghost stories into a means of healing. Book your place now.

Meet your tutor, Dr Emily Vincent

Dr Emily Vincent is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield and a tutor in English at the University of Oxford, where she teaches on ghost stories and the Gothic for the Astrophoria Foundation Year. She holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, and her first book, on 19th-century spiritualism, women's ghost stories and maternal grief, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is also the editor of Summoned to the Séance: Spirit Tales from Beyond the Veil for British Library Publishing's Tales of the Weird series.