Medusa's Daughters
Medusa's Daughters
Edited by Theodora Goss
“A gothic landscape that is at once timeless and timely, filled with brilliant, angry, determined women who leap right off the page.”
—Fran Wilde, Nebula Award-winning
author of Updraft
After a period of decline, Gothic literature underwent a revival at the end of the 1800s. As the century turned, women writers such as Vernon Lee, Mary Coleridge, and Rosamund Mariott Watson left an indelible mark on fantasy and horror literature. Like Medusa herself, their poetry and short stories embody the very essence of magic and monstrosity.
Curated and annotated by award-winning fantasy author and Victorianist Theodora Goss, this collection of rare and strange gems serves as a tantalizing sampler of work by fin-de-siècle women writers, whose legacy still echoes in the speculative fiction we know and love today.
Recipient of the Foreword INDIES Gold Award for Anthology
Praise for Medusa’s Daughters
“With Medusa's Daughters, brilliant scholar, poet, and storyteller, Dr. Theodora Goss has gathered a collection of strengths: gothic tales of women, by women, some of which had been lost to time and forgetting. In doing so, she's brought us back to the short stories and poetry of Vernon Lee, Elinor Wylie, and (a personal favorite) Charlotte Mew. Dr. Goss has further interwoven these stories and poems with short stories by Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, and Kate Chopin, creating a gothic landscape that is at once timeless and timely, filled with brilliant, angry, determined women who leap right off the page.”
—Fran Wilde, Nebula-winning author of Updraft, World Fantasy, Hugo, and Locus finalist,
and Director of the Genre MFA for writers at Western Colorado University
“Medusa’s Daughters is a sinister Gothic delight, full of unrepentant witches, ghosts, dryads, and changelings. Goss is an expert guide to the strange codes of fin-de-siècle patriarchy and the bold, monstrous women who defied them.”
—Barbara Barrow, author of The Quelling
