Medusa's Daughters
Medusa's Daughters
Recipient of the Foreword INDIES
Gold Award for Anthology
“A gothic landscape that is at once timeless and timely, filled with brilliant, angry, determined women who leap right off the page.”
—Fran Wilde, Nebula Award-winning
author of Updraft
After a period of decline, Gothic literature underwent a revival at the end of the 1800s. As the century turned, women writers such as Vernon Lee, Mary Coleridge, and Rosamund Mariott Watson left an indelible mark on fantasy and horror literature. Like Medusa herself, their poetry and short stories embody the very essence of magic and monstrosity.
Curated and annotated by award-winning fantasy author and Victorianist Theodora Goss, this collection of rare and strange gems serves as a tantalizing sampler of work by fin-de-siècle women writers, whose legacy still echoes in the speculative fiction we know and love today.
Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy and Locus Award-winning author of the short story and poetry collections In the Forest of Forgetting (2006), Songs for Ophelia (2014), and Snow White Learns Witchcraft (2019), as well as novella The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), and sequels European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018) and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (2019). She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her work has been translated into twelve languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Visit her at theodoragoss.com.
Praise for Medusa’s Daughters
“With Medusa's Daughters, brilliant scholar, poet, and storyteller, Dr. Theodora Goss has gathered a collection of strengths: gothic tales of women, by women, some of which had been lost to time and forgetting. In doing so, she's brought us back to the short stories and poetry of Vernon Lee, Elinor Wylie, and (a personal favorite) Charlotte Mew. Dr. Goss has further interwoven these stories and poems with short stories by Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, and Kate Chopin, creating a gothic landscape that is at once timeless and timely, filled with brilliant, angry, determined women who leap right off the page.”
—Fran Wilde, Nebula-winning author of Updraft, World Fantasy, Hugo, and Locus finalist,
and Director of the Genre MFA for writers at Western Colorado University
“Medusa’s Daughters is a sinister Gothic delight, full of unrepentant witches, ghosts, dryads, and changelings. Goss is an expert guide to the strange codes of fin-de-siècle patriarchy and the bold, monstrous women who defied them.”
—Barbara Barrow, author of The Quelling
