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.
"No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements."
"Silly Novels by Silly Lady Novelists" appeared anonymously in the Westminster Review in 1856. The essay argued that contemporary popular novels for and by women played into tropes and assumptions that undercut the actual aptitudes of women in a frustrating and, ultimately, dangerous way. The author, Mary Ann Evans, deployed a wit and honesty that she would later use to examine the foibles of a wide range of characters in the realist novels she published under her now-famous pseudonym: George Eliot.
