So recalls Mary Cholmondeley in her memoir Under One Roof: A Family Record (1918). Apparently, sisters Victoria and Hester had a habit of pressing Mary for stories each time she returned from visits outside the Hodnet Rectory during her youth. The above invention may not seem special at first glance – after all, it was composed spontaneously and never expanded at a later time – but upon closer inspection, one can see that it contains important information. It reveals Cholmondeley's love of melodrama, but it also points to the influence of a mode of writing which the Hodnet-born authoress could not have failed to encounter through her father's readings of ‘Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Edgeworth, Jane Austen and Stevenson’ and through her connections to supernatural writers such as Rhoda Broughton and Edith Wharton: the Gothic. Imagining herself as a heroine who gets buried alive and then escapes in an improbable manner, Cholmondeley was clearly familiar with the traditional conventions of the Gothic literary tradition. But this familiarity has never been recognized by scholars. Perhaps assuming that this relationship to the Gothic is superficial, critics have focused on more ‘important’ topics, such as her autobiographical efforts, her status as a New Woman writer or the content in, and reception of, her novel Red Pottage (1899).

In this essay, I seek to establish the Gothic as a major feature in Cholmondeley's short stories, as well as a key component of her feminist literary aesthetic.