Introduction: Lifting the Veil on Women’s Ghost Stories

Ghost stories are not just entertaining tales for dark firesides. They expose cultural constructions, constraints and lies, false promises and the violence people do to each other, which produces trauma in individuals, cultures, across generations. Creative and critical work in Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories establishes the variety, intentions and characteristics of women’s ghost stories in the twentieth and twenty-first century, revealing how ghosts in fiction problematise roles societies place on women, in different social and cultural contexts. These ghosts and ghostly presences expose damaging internalised narratives of romantic and domestic idylls. Texts considered here focus on ways in which haunting and the figures of ghosts expose, reveal, articulate and sometimes offer ways to overcome individual, psychological and cultural damage done to women, because of their bodies, vulnerability and disempowerment socially, legally and culturally. Women’s ghost stories burst out of silence, with ghostly force, to expose and indict broader society, locally, nationally and globally.