LIT LISTS: Five top Gothic heroines

Hester Musson studied at Bristol University and The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She worked as an actress and autocue operator in London before writing full time and now lives in Scotland.

Musson’s debut novel The Beholders tells the story of Harriet, a young maid newly employed at a grand country house in the 1870s, who finds herself in thrall to her entrancing yet erratic mistress and the much-lauded yet strangely absent master of the household.

At the Waterstones blog Musson shared a list of her five favorite Gothic heroines. One entry on the list:

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beloved has haunted me since I first read it as a teenager, both for its depiction of slavery and the startling use of the supernatural. It was inspired by the true story of a mother who, desperate for her children to escape the horrors she endured when enslaved, does the unthinkable. Giving shape to such waking nightmares is perhaps Gothic’s greatest power, allowing us to cross a line imaginatively which we would ordinarily shrink from approaching.

Sethe is struggling with the furious and spiteful spirit of her baby, dead for eighteen years, which has turned her modest house in Ohio into a gothic setting to rival the most chilling castle. When friends finally exorcise the spirit, the daughter returns (possibly) as a mysterious and beautiful young woman who gradually takes over Sethe’s physical and psychological space. The intrusion of a terrible past into the present is a hallmark of Gothic fiction, and I can’t think of another story that does it so powerfully or eerily as Beloved.