Gothic fiction & The Female Writer: Women who shaped gothic horror

When people hear the word ‘horror’, they might often think of violence, fear, and of women in peril. But the relationship between horror and women is far richer – and far more surprising – than many realise. 

From the rise of the Gothic in the eighteenth century, women have been at the heart of the horror genre – not just as characters, but as creators. These chilling tales were often written by women, for women, and became a powerful space to explore their deepest fears, desires, and frustrations. Horror offered something radical: a genre that could challenge social norms, question power structures, and give voice to the unspoken.

In this fast-paced, four-century journey through literary history, we’ll uncover how women have shaped the horror genre – transforming haunted houses, ghosts, vampires, and monsters into metaphors for real-life struggles. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, from the forgotten women of Romantic poetry to the simmering rage in Jane Eyre, this talk examines how horror has become a vessel for feminist expression.

Doors open at 7pm, talk starts at 7.30pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Speaker Bio:

Dr Joan Passey is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol where she specialises in the gothic, horror, and folklore in literature and culture. She has a Masters from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Exeter, both focusing on the gothic and the supernatural. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and regularly contributes to and presents for BBC Radio 3, and has spoken at Hay Festival and from the BBC Proms. She edits anthologies for the British Library Tales of the Weird series, with titles including Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land's End, Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles, and Phantoms of Kernow: Tales from Haunted Cornwall. Her monograph, Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913 (University of Wales Press, 2023) was the first to define a Cornish Gothic tradition in the nineteenth century, and she co-edited Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Robert Lloyd.

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