SOURCE: "From Fiend to Friend, The Daemonic Feminine in Modern Gothic," in Our Ladies of Darkness, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, pp. 135-44.

In the following excerpt, Andriano examines the place of Ghost Story in twentieth-century Gothic fiction.

The male hysterical reaction to fiends in women's garments continues well into the twentieth century, during which the Gothic mode has flourished in the ghost story and the weird tale. Many of these texts display vivid anima signs. Oliver Onions's "Beckoning Fair One" (1911) is a famous example: a novelist's fictional heroine haunts him as a ghost and rivals the woman whom he should be loving; equally popular is Walter De La Mare's "Seaton's Aunt" (1923), a brilliant portrait of a possessed young man whose anima remains fixated on the Terrible Mother; less well known but almost as effective is Clark Ashton Smith's "Disinterment of Venus" (1934), which continues the Heine/Mérim...