The Reigning Queens of Horror: 30 Must-Read Macabre Classics by Women Authors
Gothic Ghost Stories, Occult Mysteries, and Feminist NightmaresBy Francis Marion Crawford, Mary Shelley, Ann Ward Radcliffe, Louisa May Alcott, George Sand, Emily Brontë, Marie Corelli, Carolyn Wells, S. Baring-Gould, Mrs. Loudon, Baroness Orczy, Marie Conway Oemler, Eliza Parsons, Eleanor Sleath, Jane Austen, Clara Reeve, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth, Duchess, Mrs. Oliphant, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Amelia B. Edwards, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Jane Chandler Webster, E. Nesbit
Length256h 37m
About this audiobook
The Reigning Queens of Horror gathers thirty macabre classics that demonstrate women's central, though too often obscured, role in shaping Gothic, supernatural, and psychological terror. Ranging from ruined castles, hauntings, and inherited curses to domestic unease, social confinement, and uncanny intimacies, the volume traverses Romantic Gothic, sensation fiction, ghost story, detective-inflected mystery, and early psychological horror. Its standout materials include both canonical Gothic visions and rarer works whose rediscovery broadens the genre's history. The contributors form an unusually expansive transnational and transhistorical chorus, encompassing writers associated with the Gothic revival, Victorian and Edwardian supernatural fiction, American regionalism, New Woman writing, and modern psychological realism. Alongside major literary figures are popular storytellers and neglected innovators whose work reveals how horror furnished women with a language for confronting gendered authority, class anxiety, colonial fantasy, grief, desire, and the instability of domestic safety. Their varied cultural positions make the collection a valuable corrective to accounts of horror dominated by male practitioners. This anthology is recommended for students of Gothic literature, devotees of the uncanny, and readers seeking an intelligently curated encounter with women's macabre traditions. Within one volume, readers can trace formal experiment and recurring motifs across generations while appreciating the productive dialogue between celebrated classics and forgotten gems. It offers both engrossing reading and a rich foundation for reconsidering the history, breadth, and continuing power of horror.
Audiobook details
GenreHorror, Literary Classics
Length256 hrs 37 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJul 31, 2024
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Frankenstein
26CHAPTER IX
2PREFACE
27CHAPTER XI
3VOLUME ONE (pt. 1)
28CHAPTER XIII
4VOLUME ONE (pt. 2)
29CHAPTER XV[*]
5VOLUME TWO
30CHAPTER XVII
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6VOLUME THREE (pt. 1)
31CHAPTER XIX
7VOLUME THREE (pt. 2)
32CHAPTER XXI
8The Mummy!
33CHAPTER XXIII
9INTRODUCTION.
34CHAPTER XXV
10CHAPTER IV.
35CHAPTER XXVII
11CHAPTER VII.
36Wandering Ghosts
12CHAPTER IX.
37The Dead Smile
13CHAPTER X.
38The Screaming Skull
14CHAPTER XI. (pt. 1)
39Man Overboard!
15CHAPTER XI. (pt. 2)
40For the Blood is the Life
16CHAPTER XI. (pt. 3)
41The Upper Berth
17CHAPTER XI. (pt. 4)
42By the Water of Paradise
18CHAPTER XI. (pt. 5)
43The Doll's Ghost
19CHAPTER XI. (pt. 6)
44A Book of Ghosts
20The Yellow Wallpaper (The Original 1892 New England Magazine Edition) - a feminist fiction classic
45PREFACE
21The Witch of Prague
46JEAN BOUCHON
22CHAPTER I
47McALISTER
23CHAPTER III
48THE MOTHER OF PANSIES
24CHAPTER V
49A PROFESSIONAL SECRET
25CHAPTER VII
50H. P.
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