About

When people hear the word horror, they often think of violence, fear, and women in peril. Yet the relationship between horror and women is far richer – and far more surprising – than many realise.

From the rise of the Gothic in the eighteenth century, women have been at the heart of the horror genre – not only as characters, but also as creators. These chilling tales were frequently written by women, for women, becoming powerful spaces to explore their deepest fears, desires, and frustrations. Horror offered something radical: a genre that could challenge social norms, question power structures, and give voice to the unspoken.

In this fast-paced, four-century journey through literary history, Dr Passey reveals how women have shaped the horror genre – transforming haunted houses, ghosts, vampires, and monsters into metaphors for real-life struggles. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, from the overlooked women of Romantic poetry to the simmering rage in Jane Eyre, the talk examines how horror has become a vessel for feminist expression.

Dr Joan Passey is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, specialising in the gothic, horror, and folklore in literature and culture. She holds a Master’s from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Exeter, both focused on the gothic and the supernatural. A BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, she regularly contributes to and presents for BBC Radio 3, and has appeared at Hay Festival and the BBC Proms. She edits anthologies for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, with titles including Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land's End, Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles, and Phantoms of Kernow: Tales from Haunted Cornwall. Her monograph Cornish Gothic, 1830–1913 (University of Wales Press, 2023) was the first to define a Cornish Gothic tradition in the nineteenth century, and she co-edited Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Robert Lloyd.

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