You Want a Gothic Novel with a Twist

A special post on Gothic novels from author Leigh Stein

Hi friends,

I have a special guest post from my friend Leigh Stein, author of last week’s pick, If You’re Seeing This, it’s Meant for You, about the gothic novels that inspired her book.

As she says, "I read a lot of gothic novels while I was writing my gothic TikTok hype house novel If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You. I have my personal faves (Rebecca, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and House of Leaves) but I know how well-read Elizabeth’s audience is, so I tried to choose some more unexpected recommendations that I still think fit under the Victorian eaves, if you will, of what counts as “gothic” lit.”

And, now, what to read if …

You plan to see Wuthering Heights on Valentine’s Day

The Glass Essay by Anne Carson

One of my favorite gothic novels is a thirty-nine-page poem called “The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson. It’s a narrative poem about a woman who goes to visit her difficult mother “who lives on a moor in the north,” in the aftermath of a devastating breakup. The speaker of the poem is obsessed with Emily Brontë and whenever she visits her mother, she fears that she is turning into Emily, “my lonely life around me like a moor.”

The atmosphere is chilly; the domestic space the women share is laden with emotional tripwires. The speaker disappears into her study of Emily’s poetry and the way critics have tried to understand the depth of feeling in the work of a woman who died at thirty without ever having “friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary / or a fear of death.”

I find myself tempted

to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge
for all that life withheld from Emily.
But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.

As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.
It is a chilly thought.

You can read the poem in its entirety at the Poetry Foundation website or in Carson’s book Glass, Irony & God. I think it would be the perfect piece to read on your phone when you’re hiding in the guest room at Thanksgiving, feeling alienated and misunderstood by your in-laws, fighting the temptation to google your ex-boyfriend.

You want the prequel to Jane Eyre

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

I’m obsessed with the story of the resurrection of Jean Rhys. The British novelist published Good Morning, Midnight, a depressing book about a broke alcoholic, in 1939. When she didn’t publish another novel, some assumed she had died.

She was very much alive—slowly working a novel set in the 1840s about the first Mrs. Rochester, the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre. Rhys was born on the Caribbean island of Dominica to a Welsh father and a “Creole” mother (at the time, the word designated white people born in the Caribbean), and she first read Jane Eyre as a teenage girl when she moved to England. She was “shocked” by Brontë’s depiction of the “poor Creole lunatic.”

In the late 1940s, when no one knew if Rhys was dead or alive, the British actress Selma Vaz Dias placed newspaper ads searching for Rhys because she wanted to adapt Good Morning, Midnight into a BBC radio production. Rhys, who was living in Cornwall, answered one of these ads and subsequently wrote to a friend, “I am very astonished that the BBC like my work… but it seems they thought I was dead—which of course would make a great difference. In fact they were going to follow it up with a broadcast ‘Quest for Jean Rhys’ and I feel rather tactless being still alive!”

In 1958, she was still working on her Bertha novel. She wrote to Vaz Dias:

[The Creole character in Jane Eyre] is necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry—off stage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage. She must be at least plausible with a past, the reason why Mr. Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds. (Personally, I think that one is simple. She is cold—and fire is the only warmth she knows in England.)

In 1966, twenty-one years after she started, Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea; today it’s considered her masterpiece. A short novel, it’s a bad dream in paradise, a gothic dissolution into madness. “I am not used to happiness,” Antoinette tells her husband on their honeymoon. “It makes me afraid.” She sounds like Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight.

You loved I’m Glad My Mom Died

The House of My Mother by Shari Franke

For a gothic memoir recommendation, I submit for your consideration The House of My Mother by Shari Franke. Every gothic novel is about a domestic space that turns into a site of horror and fear and in this case, it’s Shari’s own mother Ruby who creates the terror.

When Ruby Franke hits her first million followers for her YouTube channel 8 Passengers, her daughter Shari has mono and a fever of 102 degrees. Still, she tries to smile for the camera while in urgent care, to celebrate the big milestone.

“You can’t smile while you’re in the insta-care, Shari!” Ruby scolds. “You’re supposed to look like you’re on your death bed.”

“I complied instantly,” Shari tells us, “feigning death with a touch of theatricality that I knew would please her. Whatever she wanted.”

As the family’s fame and influence grows, Ruby gets involved with a cult leader named Jodi who exerts an excessive amount of control and influence over the family (including Ruby’s husband). After Shari leaves for college, things at home get much worse for her younger siblings.

Gothic fiction is filled with alluring yet dangerous male figures like Mr. Rochester, Heathcliff, and Max de Winter, but I’m also interested in stories where the mothers are the characters you should be afraid of. This is one of those stories.

---

Thanks to Leigh for these recommendations! In addition to her books, I highly recommend her newsletter, Attention Economy, for anyone trying to understand the creator economy or figure out how to make money from their art.

---

What to Read If is a free weekly book recommendation newsletter. Need a rec? Want to gush about a book? Reply to this email, leave a comment or find me on Instagram or Threads.

If you’re reading this on Substack or were forwarded this email, and you’d like to subscribe, click the button below.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.