Margaret Oliphant's Curative Gothic Literature

Prolific Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), remembered chiefly for her realist fiction and biting literary criticism of contemporary authors, also wrote nineteen supernatural tales. This monograph offers a comprehensive exploration of Oliphant’s Gothic literature, in the light of her religious beliefs, cultural context and experiences of death and mourning, as she survived her husband and all six of her children.

Oliphant’s stories set in the afterlife depict the dead as inhabi...