Gothic Auntie

Literature, folklore, and history

recent posts

Category: Genre and Society

  • Christmas is Gothic

    I was inspired to write this post at the beginning of November, watching the post Halloween despair sweep it’s way across my social media feeds. Christmas creep has come for us, and now everything is covered in twinkly lights, unsettling nutcracker statues, and exhortations to shop your way to happiness the moment the ghosts and…

  • Gothic Heroines as College Roommates

    Gothic Heroines as College Roommates

    Most gothic heroines would have a much better time of it in the present, but whether they’d have a similarly positive effect on the people around them is another matter entirely. Catherine Earnshaw You can’t tell if that boy’s her brother or her lover, troublingly you’re starting to suspect that the answer might be both,…

  • Return to “A Mirror of the Graces” as I Count Backward from Ten

    Return to “A Mirror of the Graces” as I Count Backward from Ten

    Part two! Are you excited? I’m excited. I’m starting to find it funny now that I’m sharing it with you. We’re heading into the chapter entitled “On the Female Form” and just like Hildegard of Bingen I’m wondering if our dear Lady has some repressed feelings going with the way she’s cataloguing types of female…

  • Extracts from “The Mirror of the Graces” Very Much With Commentary

    Extracts from “The Mirror of the Graces” Very Much With Commentary

    I’ve been doing research into what the daily lives of historic gothic heroines might have looked like in those rare periods of stability when they weren’t running from castles or finding extra wives hidden in the attic. Part of this has involved reading “The Mirror of the Graces”, a 19th century guidebook on how to…

  • A Gothic Literature Playlist

    I was listening to Can’t Catch Me Now from the newest Hunger Games movie and was struck by how gothic it is. Not in the musical sense, though it’s resemblance to traditional murder ballads does place it in the same family tree, but because of how well it conforms to gothic narratives and archetypes in storytelling. Like the brutally…

  • The Grim Origins of The Girl With the Green Ribbon

    You’ve likely come across the story of the girl whose head is held on with a ribbon at some point in your journey as a horror fan, but what if I told you it has surprisingly dark origins? The roots of this tale go back to the French Revolution, and the urban legends and folklore…

  • Gothic History: What was the “London Cat’s Meat”?

    Gothic History: What was the “London Cat’s Meat”?

    If you’re following along with Dracula Daily then you may have ended today’s instalment wondering about the “London Cat’s Meat” that Jonathan wrote about in his diary. Surely it must just be a pejorative name given to a cheap street food? Right? “Robber steak”- bits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and…

  • Men from Gothic Literature Ranked by Husband Potential

    Despite the inherent romance of the genre it’s slim pickings when trying to find a husband who won’t murder you or lock you in an attic in the world of gothic literature. Here’s a selection of gothic menfolk, should you find yourself trapped in some Jasper Fford-ian literary nightmare, ranked by husband potential. 8. Heathcliff…

  • Is Jane Eyre a Dark Romance?

    I can feel the lit snobs bristling from here, but it’s true; Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and a lot of gothic classics all fit the brief for dark romance. What’s more, the moral panic that dark romance has inspired is the exact same one that played out over gothic literature in the 18th and 19th centuries. The…