The overwhelming popularity of the female gothic has endured, virtually without change, for over 200 years. Women writers and women readers continue to identify with the female gothic, to lose themselves in the sometimes romantic, sometimes grotesque, sometimes fearful imagery of the genre. Why? Is it merely profitable escape fiction? Junk food for the mind? The Female Gothic takes a perceptive and entertaining look at what makes the female gothic work. The best of feminist scholarship gleefully addresses itself to the popular "Somebody's trying to kill me and I think it's my husband" and the "Had I but known" plots of the modern female gothic. Sexuality, terror, anger and madness are discovered in various guises in all female gothics from Monk Lewis in the tombs to Jane Eyre's madwoman in the attic to today's drugstore fare. Traces of the female gothic are found in writers as diverse as Margaret Atwood, Flannery O'Connor and Isak Dinesen. - Back cover.