The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction

Published in 1917, when Victorian spiritualism still trembled in parlors and Gothic revivals gripped the literary imagination, Dorothy Scarborough undertook something daring: a scholarly map of the supernatural as it haunts through a century of English fiction. This isn't a simple catalog of ghost stories. It's an argument that the eerie never left literature, it merely changed costumes, moving from gloomy castles to the madhouse, from medieval demons to the strange new terrors of science. Scarborough traces the thread from Beowulf's primordial dread through the Gothic novel's decaying aristocrats, Victorian séance literature, and into the psychological horrors of her own moment. The chapters unfold like a dark tour: The Devil and His Allies examines how religious terror transformed into literary menace; The Supernatural in Folk-Tales reveals the ancient whispers beneath polished narratives; Supernatural Science interrogates what happens when progress itself becomes uncanny. Scarborough writes with genuine fascination, never merely academic, making this essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why we have always needed to be frightened on the page.