Female Gothic is a critical term for Gothic fiction written by women that centers on specifically female experience, fear and constraint, coined by the literary critic Ellen Moers in her 1976 study Literary Women. Moers and the critics who followed her located the genre's concerns in childbirth, marriage and power within a patriarchal household, with heroines frequently imprisoned or threatened within domestic and marital settings rather than only by external supernatural menace. The term has since become a central category in feminist literary criticism of the Gothic, applied to writers from Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley through the Bronte sisters.
Facts
Notable ExampleZofloya; or, The Moor by Charlotte Dacre 1 Defining TraitCenters on a persecuted heroine fleeing a villainous father figure and searching for an absent mother 1 Sources
1. Gothic Fiction (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)The Female Gothic section, paragraph on Mary Robinson and Charlotte Dacre
Dacre's Zofloya; or, The Moor is a noted example of an early female Gothic novel which transgresses gender conventions of the female Gothic of the time
The Female Gothic section, opening paragraph
Female Gothic narratives focus on such topics as a persecuted heroine fleeing from a villainous father and searching for an absent mother.
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