The Return of the Stars & The Women Who Haunted the Gothic
Something wickedly wonderful has risen from the retrograde — BitchScopes is officially back.
Our cosmic comeback is bigger, bitchier, and more goddess-driven than ever. Think astrology rewritten through feminine eyes — part oracle, part rebellion, all empowerment. Each week we’re mapping the skies with asteroids, archetypes, and attitude.
If you haven’t yet, come find us at Patreon.com/BitchScopes — because the stars have stories, and we’re finally telling them our way.
And speaking of stories… let’s talk Gothic women. Because this week on Bitchstory, we descended into the candlelit catacombs of literary history with Violet Paget — better known by her pen name, Vernon Lee — a queer, cerebral, and hauntingly brilliant writer who turned the Gothic into something richer, stranger, and more psychologically alive.
The Women Who Haunted the Gothic
Before vampires sparkled or haunted houses had hashtags, women were already writing the dark stuff — and doing it better. The Gothic was their secret door into forbidden rooms: madness, grief, lust, rage, and power.
It wasn’t just about ghosts — it was about being the ghost in a world that refused to see you.
Mary Shelley — The Mother of Monsters
At just nineteen, Mary Shelley dreamed up Frankenstein, a tale stitched together from lightning, loss, and longing. While men of science played God, she asked the real question: What happens when creation rejects its creator?
Her words still haunt us:
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
Shelley’s horror was never just about monsters — it was about motherhood, ambition, and alienation. Her grief and genius shaped not just Gothic horror, but the entire genre of science fiction.
Ann Radcliffe — The Mistress of Mystery
Long before cinematic jump scares, Radcliffe was making readers tremble with The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). She
mastered the art of “explained supernatural” — terror that hinted at the uncanny, then revealed the human hand behind it.
Radcliffe’s heroines were curious, independent, and emotionally rich — women who defied the silence of their age. She once wrote:
“There is something in the enormity of the ruins that elevates the mind to noble ideas.”
She made fear beautiful — and intelligence feminine.
Charlotte Dacre — The Scandalous One
Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) was a scandal in skirts. Critics called it
“immoral” — translation: she wrote about female desire, ambition, and the devil himself. Dacre turned the Gothic into a fever dream of lust and vengeance, daring women to imagine themselves as both sinner and survivor.
She was the bad girl of Romanticism — the one the poets whispered about, and the one who made sure we never forgot that women, too, could write wicked.
Violet Paget (Vernon Lee) — The Intellectual Ghost
Vernon Lee didn’t just write Gothic fiction — she philosophized it. Her ghost stories, like “Amour Dure” and “A Phantom Lover,” blurred the line between art, beauty, and the supernatural. She explored desire through the lens of obsession and reincarnation — what we’d now call psychological horror.
A queer woman in Victorian England, Lee lived unapologetically outside the script. She once said:
“To be a woman, and to be an artist, are both crimes.”
And yet, she committed both with style. Her work prefigured modern feminism, aesthetic theory, and even psychoanalysis — all cloaked in moonlight and mystery.
Shirley Jackson — The Domestic Witch
By the mid-20th century, Shirley Jackson brought the Gothic home — literally. In The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, she turned repression, paranoia, and gender roles into poltergeists.
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,” she warned.
Jackson’s heroines were gaslit before the term existed. Her horror wasn’t about monsters — it was about marriage, motherhood, and the quiet violence of small-town normalcy.
The Power Beneath the Veil
What unites these women — and honestly, what makes them the patron saints of Bitchstory — is that they used the Gothic as disguise and declaration.
They wrote about confinement, about the body, about rebellion in whispers that still echo centuries later. Their “madwomen” weren’t crazy — they were caged.
To write horror, for them, was to survive it.
And maybe that’s why it still resonates — because every generation of women has to claw her way through the fog of what’s expected to reclaim what’s real.
The Revival
So as BitchScopes rises from the underworld of creative pause and Bitchstory wanders through the shadowed halls of women’s history, it feels only right that both come together under this week’s theme: resurrection.
From stars to stories, we’re reclaiming what’s been buried — and lighting the candles again.
Stay witchy, stay wordy, and never forget:
You are not too much. You are just the right kind of haunted.
✨
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