{"id":20051,"date":"2022-06-17T16:02:56","date_gmt":"2022-06-17T20:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/reading\/?p=20051"},"modified":"2022-06-17T16:02:56","modified_gmt":"2022-06-17T20:02:56","slug":"monster-she-wrote-the-women-who-pioneered-horror-and-speculative-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/reading\/archives\/20051","title":{"rendered":"Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction<\/a><\/em> (2019) Lisa Kr\u00f6ger and Melanie R. Anderson<\/p>\n

\"Monster,<\/a>It’s (somewhat) common knowledge that Mary Shelly wrote the first SFF book: Frankenstein<\/em>. <\/p>\n

But there were so many other women at the start of the horror, science fiction, and speculative fiction genres, and this book tells you a little about each of them.<\/p>\n

Since I can’t find it anywhere, here is the Table of Contents:<\/p>\n

Part One: The Founding Mothers <\/strong>
\nMargaret Cavendish: Mad Madge
\nAnn Radcliffe: Terror over Horror
\nMary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The Original Goth Girl
\nRegina Maria Roche: Scandalizing Jane Austen
\nMary Anne Radcliffe: Purveyor of Guts and Gore
\nCharlotte Dacre: Exhibitor of Murder and Harlotry <\/p>\n

Part Two: Haunting Tales<\/strong>
\nElizabeth Gaskell: Ghosts Are Real
\nCharlotte Riddell: Born Storyteller
\nAmelia Edwards: The Most Learned Woman
\nPaula E. Hopkins: The Most Productive Writer
\nVernon Lee: Ghostwriter \u00e0 la Gar\u00e7onne
\nMargaret Oliphant: Voice for the Dead
\nEdith Wharton: The Spine-Tingler <\/p>\n

Part Three: Cult Of The Occult<\/strong>
\nMarjorie Bowen: Scribe of the Supernatural
\nL. T. Meade: Maker of Female Masterminds
\nAlice Askew: Casualty of War
\nMargery Lawrence: Speaker to the Spirits
\nDion Fortune: Britian\u2019s Psychic Defender <\/p>\n

Part Four: The Women Who Wrote The Pulps<\/strong>
\nMargaret St. Clair: Exploring Our Depths
\nCatherine Lucille Moore: Space Vamp Queen
\nMary Elizabeth Counselman: Deep South Storyteller
\nGertrude Barrows Bennett: Seer of the Unseen
\nEveril Worrell: Night Writer
\nEli Colter: Keeping the Wild West Weird <\/p>\n

Part Five: Haunting The Home<\/strong>
\nDorothy Macardle: Chronicler of Pain and Loss
\nShirley Jackson: The Queen of Horror
\nDaphne du Maurier: The Dame of Dread
\nToni Morrison: Haunted by History
\nElizabeth Engstrom: Monstrosity in the Mundane <\/p>\n

Part Six: Paperback Horror <\/strong>
\nJoanne Fischmann: Recipes for Fear
\nRuby Jean Jensen: Where Evil Meets Innocence
\nV. C. Andrews: Nightmares in the Attic
\nKathe Koja: Kafka of the Weird
\nLisa Tuttle: Adversary for the Devil
\nTanith Lee: Rewriting Snow White <\/p>\n

Part Seven: The New Goths <\/strong>
\nAnne Rice: Queen of the Damned
\nHelen Oyeyemi: Teller of Feminist Fairy Tales
\nSusan Hill: Modern Gothic Ghost Maker
\nSarah Waters: Welcome to the Dark S\u00e9ance
\nAngela Carter: Teller of Bloody Fables
\nJewelle Gomez: Afrofuturist Horrorist <\/p>\n

Part Eight: The Future Of Horror And Speculative Fiction<\/strong>
\nThe New Weird: Lovecraft Revisited and Revised
\nThe New Vampire: Polishing the Fangs
\nThe New Haunted House: Home, Deadly Home
\nThe New Apocalypse: This Is the End (Again)
\nThe New Serial Killer: Sharper Weapons, Sharper Victims<\/p>\n

First off, I loved learning about these women who have in some cases been all-but forgotten.<\/p>\n

And I loved all the random details.<\/p>\n

Cavendish scandalized polite society more than once; on one occasion, she showed up to a theater event wearing a dress that exposed her breasts, including her nipples, which she had thoughtfully painted red.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

the Spiritualist Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for president, with the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass as her running mate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The pulps, along with dime-store paperbacks also made from cheap paper, got fiction into the hands of a wider audience because they were so affordable. But the transitory nature of that low-cost material meant that unknown numbers of those stories were lost forever as the paper they were printed on decomposed to nothing.
\n…
\nAll of which helps explain the accepted wisdom that few women wrote speculative fiction in the early 1900s and that, instead, the lineage starts in the 1960s and 1970s with writers like Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although horror is not my thing, I very much appreciated learning about these women who were writing SFF and horror–and possibly found a couple stories that were less on the horror side that might interest me (assuming one can find them).<\/p>\n

I was also pleased to discover that I knew the majority of the “modern” writers–even if I hadn’t necessarily read their books. <\/p>\n

I can think of some friends for whom this might be a perfect book–because they love SFF and horror. And others because of the biographical and horror bits.<\/p>\n

Publisher: Quirk Books<\/p>\n

Rating: 8\/10<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction (2019) Lisa Kr\u00f6ger and Melanie R. Anderson It’s (somewhat) common knowledge that Mary Shelly wrote the first SFF book: Frankenstein. But there were so many other women at the start of the horror, science fiction, and speculative fiction genres, and this book tells you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,18,32,292,2,48,204,4,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-8-10","category-anthology","category-biography","category-ebook","category-fantasy","category-female","category-good","category-non-fiction","category-sexual-content"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piQkW-5dp","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":270,"url":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/reading\/archives\/270","url_meta":{"origin":20051,"position":0},"title":"Twisted Tails","author":"Michelle","date":"June 11, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Twisted Tails (2006) edited by J. 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