Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Series editor’s preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the most Gothic of acts – suicide in generic context
- 1 Scottish revenants: Caledonian fatality in Thomas Percy’s Reliques
- 2 Male and female Werthers: Romanticism and Gothic suicide
- 3 ‘The supposed incipiency of mental disease’: guilt, regret and suicide in three ghost stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
- 4 ‘The body of a self-destroyer’: suicide and the self in the fin-de-siècle Gothic
- 5 ‘To be mistress of her own fate’: suicide as control and contagion in the works of Richard Marsh
- 6 Suicide as justice? The self-destroying Gothic villain in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood
- 7 Gothic influences: darkness and suicide in the work of Patricia Highsmith
- 8 Better not to have been: Thomas Ligotti and the ‘suicide’ of the human race
- 9 Vampire suicide
- 10 Under the dying sun: suicide and the Gothic in modern Japanese literature and culture
- 11 ‘I will abandon this body and take to the air’: the suicide at the heart of Dear Esther
- Index
5 - ‘To be mistress of her own fate’: suicide as control and contagion in the works of Richard Marsh
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2025
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Series editor’s preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the most Gothic of acts – suicide in generic context
- 1 Scottish revenants: Caledonian fatality in Thomas Percy’s Reliques
- 2 Male and female Werthers: Romanticism and Gothic suicide
- 3 ‘The supposed incipiency of mental disease’: guilt, regret and suicide in three ghost stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
- 4 ‘The body of a self-destroyer’: suicide and the self in the fin-de-siècle Gothic
- 5 ‘To be mistress of her own fate’: suicide as control and contagion in the works of Richard Marsh
- 6 Suicide as justice? The self-destroying Gothic villain in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood
- 7 Gothic influences: darkness and suicide in the work of Patricia Highsmith
- 8 Better not to have been: Thomas Ligotti and the ‘suicide’ of the human race
- 9 Vampire suicide
- 10 Under the dying sun: suicide and the Gothic in modern Japanese literature and culture
- 11 ‘I will abandon this body and take to the air’: the suicide at the heart of Dear Esther
- Index
Summary
Suicide clearly held a particular fascination for Richard Marsh (1857–1914), one of the most prolific and popular fiction writers of the period, with representations of suicide and reflections on it featuring widely throughout his Gothic oeuvre. But this interest goes further than the astute incorporation of cultural anxieties, which Marsh often used as a key technique for heightening the disturbing effects of his work, to considerations of its social, philosophical and scientific import. This is evidenced not only through his fiction but also by a seemingly unpublished essay (in the University of Reading archives), from 1891–1910, simply entitled ‘Suicide’ (which includes the characteristically provocative suggestion that ‘there may be something to be said even in favour of suicide’). This chapter draws on examples from a range of Marsh's multitudinous Gothic (or Gothic-inflected) texts, including Mrs Musgrave (1895), A Master of Deception (1913) and A Spoiler of Men (1905), which Johan Höglund identifies as containing arguably ‘the first instance of the zombie character in British fiction’.
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- Suicide and the Gothic , pp. 81 - 95Publisher: Manchester University PressFirst published in: 2025
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