Blogs & News

Events : 2026 Online Reading Workshops – The Gothic

Take a walk on the wild side with our new reading course looking at horror, mystery and the darker side of the human condition. We’re taking on some giants of the Gothic to explore literature’s supernatural forces, from the terrible monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the wild and windy moors of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Many of your favourite women writers wrote Gothic novels so now is the time to dig a little deeper into the underbelly of nineteenth-century literature.

other : Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein: The Father, the Son and the Spirit of Hope

As the long winter evenings continue, here is a ghost story to get you through these cold and bleak January nights. Mary Shelley’s genre-defining Frankenstein is a fitting tale for this time of year. Shelley strands her protagonist, the scientist Victor Frankenstein, in a bleak, icy landscape, and sets his creation - a man built from the body parts of dead bodies - on his trail. But alongside this ‘monster’, Victor is haunted by memories. He remembers his

blog : The Old Nurse’s Story- Superstition and Story

Superstition The Old Nurse’s Story can be found in collections of Gothic stories, ghost stories and tales of the macabre, and is one of only two of Elizabeth Gaskell’s stories to include an actual ghost. It might seem odd that Elizabeth Gaskell, the wife of a Unitarian minister, should write about supernatural events and hauntings; yet despite Unitarianism’s foundation in rationality, Elizabeth appears to have been somewhat superstitious.  In October 1859 she writes to George Smith, her publisher: