The Victorian Ghost Story - The Women

I’ll admit: I approached *The Victorian Ghost Story – The Women* expecting polite, period-appropriate shivers. Instead, I got a gut-punch of how deeply women writers weaponized the supernatural to dissect their own lives. Take ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’—Gaskell’s own contribution—where a child’s eerie encounter with a frozen, weeping ghost isn’t just a spooky set piece but a metaphor for inherited trauma. Fullerlove’s narration here is *perfect*: her voice drops to a conspiratorial hush during the ghost’s appearances, but she never overplays it. She trusts the material, and so should you. That said, the anthology isn’t without flaws. The pacing stumbles in ‘The Shadow in the Moonlight’ by Rosa Mulholland, where the prose grows overly florid and Fullerlove’s usually deft delivery struggles to keep the momentum. And while the production is crisp, a few stories (like Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Library Window’) could’ve benefited from subtler audio cues—a distant whisper, a faint echo—to heighten their dreamlike dread. But these are quibbles. The real triumph is how the collection reframes the ghost story as a tool of feminist defiance. When a character in Charlotte Riddell’s ‘The Open Door’ calmly informs her husband, *“I have seen what I have seen,”* it’s not just a chiller—it’s a manifesto. If you love audiobooks that haunt *and* make you think, this is your next listen.