Suspense/Gothic

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  Behind a Mask is one of the thrillers, mysteries, and sensational works Louisa May Alcott published under the pen name A.M. Bernard. It was first published in 1866, and then re-published in 1975 by scholar, rare book dealer, and biographer Madeleine B. Stern. Further readership and analysis of the novella has helped expand understanding of Alcott's work and interests. The story subverts expectations around gender performance, class, and heroism as it follows Jean Muir, a down-on-her-luck actress who disguises herself as a young governess and infiltrates a wealthy family.

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  Mary Shelley wrote Mathilda from 1819-1820, shortly after her novel Frankenstein was an immediate popular hit--but it wasn't published until more than a century later. Narrated by a young woman on her deathbed, the novella explores grief, despair, and redemption. Despite its deployment of familiar Gothic themes like suicide, incest, and a woman withering away, its framing is frequently read as a feminist reclamation of the genre.

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  Ten Days in a Mad-House compiles Nellie Bly's reporting from her first undercover assignment for the New York World in 1887. She disguised herself as "a crazy person" in order to get herself admitted to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt's Island). She spent ten days there as a patient before the World secured her release. Her articles led to a grand jury investigation and a major budget expansion for New York State asylums.

  While Bly's projects were often framed as stunts— by her paper and others—Ten Days is a serious examination of what happens to women that society finds inconvenient (whether or not they have an illness). Bly describes her experience with frank horror while also deploying her trademark observational humor, trained on the absurdity of the institution and the people who uphold its abuses. Cita's edition positions this landmark text within the tradition of feminist literature about women's experiences with mental illness, mental health treatment, and in mental institutions.

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  “'The Yellow Wall-Paper' (1892) holds an important place among rediscovered works by turn-of-the-century American women writers for its bold critique of gender politics in a patriarchal society. The nameless narrator, undergoing the infamous rest cure for what doctors now diagnose as postpartum depression, experiences debilitating psychological effects. At first repulsed by the wallpaper in the room where she is sequestered in a country estate, the narrator comes to like it as she vows to decode its pattern—she imagines many women creeping behind bars and identifies with one trapped woman, arguably a reflection of her painful position as a woman in Victorian America. Many of the story’s first readers considered it a psychological horror tale in the fashion of Poe." - Catherine J. Golden

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  "The first time I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl I was in an undergraduate women writers course at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 2004. My coming into consciousness as a Black feminist had not yet revealed itself; however I knew that Jacobs’ story of strength, perseverance, and courage would beckon me to pick it up again and again throughout my life. Jacobs’ writerly voice, deeply multilayered, was doing many things: championing the cause of the enslaved, actualizing her own plight as a survivor, and redeeming herself as woman." -Dr. Christy Hyman

  Harriet Jacobs' 1861 autobiography is a landmark text for the U.S. abolitionist movement that continues to inspire and influence art, scholarship, and literature nearly two centuries after it was first published under the pseudonym Linda Brent.

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  Family curses, demonic doppelgangers, lingering loss, and redemption--Gaskell's 1856 gothic ghost story presents a suspenseful tale with a feminist frame. The anchor to the story is Irish servant Bridget FitzGerald, whose power and fierce pain drives the story's conflict and, ultimately, its resolution, influencing the fates of entire families and towns.