SOURCE: "Necromancy, or Closing the Crack on the Gravestone," in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Feminity, and the Aesthetic, Manchester University Press, 1992, pp. 291-323.

In the following excerpt, focusing on Wilkie Collins ' The Woman in White and Emily Brontë 's Wuthering Heights, Bronfen explores how the disrupting presence of the revenant—one who returns from death—poses questions concerning identity and the nature of death.

If we could be sure of the difference between the determinable and the undeterminable, the undeterminable would be comprehended within the determinable. What is undecidable is whether a thing is decidable or not. Barbara Johnson

Certainly one of the more perturbing Victorian examples of the interstice between feminine speech and death is Robert Browning's poetic rendition of the Roman trial and execution in 1698 of Guido Franchescini, The Ring and the Book (1869). The accused nobleman had stabbed his wife's adoptive mother and father...