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Tag: feminist horror stories

flowers of wisteria vine
Stories 1

The Giant Wistaria by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s short story The Giant Wistaria from 1891 is less known than her iconic story The Yellow Wallpaper, a feminist classic. “Wistaria” like with “Wallpaper” deals with patriarchal values and the repression of women’s sexuality and motherhood. It starts off with a story about an unwed girl with a child and the family discussing what to do with her. The father wants to marry her to her cousin and leave the child behind when they leave the country. Years later, a young couple rents the house and starts to joke around with it being haunted. And perhaps they are right.

blooming rose bushes in summer garden
Stories 0

The Wind in the Rose-Bush by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

This short story was first published in 1913 in The Wind in the Rosebush and Other Stories of the Supernatural. Her books dealt with Puritanism, and she was one of the first women in America to be elected to the National Institute for Arts and Letters. She was distantly related to another American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Set during the late summer, this story involves a about a spinster Rebecca Flint who has come to Ford Village to take her elder sister’s daughter with her back to Michigan. But something about the village is strange and she encounters strange and ghostly things surrounding a rose-bush in the garden.