The John Rylands Library – Darkness & Light: Exploring the Gothic

The exhibition brochure is out... I am delighted to have an essay featured in it, to accompany the Gothic Women case I curated for the exhibition.

Here's the text of the feature, for those who aren't able to get to Manchester before December 2015. It really is worth making a visit – the exhibition has some wonderful displays. Check out the website for more info, times etc.

Click to visit The John Rylands Library website page

Women & the Gothic
"The Gothic: abject, unreliable, dangerous and downright weird.
Which also sums up how I've felt about myself since realising I didn't fit the one-size-fits-all template of marriage, kids and sublimation to the wishes of others (age 5, if you're asking). I've always felt like an outsider, which has not always been easy.

The Gothic has an extensive history of being ridiculed. In the 1980s, NME dismissed us as an uncool fad (we're still here, the NME isn't); Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote off Gothic literature as 'the trash of the circulating library'; Renaissance scholars dismissed 1000 years of art, erudition and scientific endeavour as 'The Dark Ages'; the Romans laughed off Alaric and his Goths as barbarian nobodies (and look what happened to them).

The Gothic endures, despite never being quite in fashion, despite existing on the fringes. Perhaps that explains its allure and its terror. All of us have cobwebbed dungeons in the psyche. They are frightening places, and we are sold the lie that if we paint our world pastel shades and furnish it with white leather sofas everything will be all right. We ignore personal darkness at our psychological peril. Far wiser, in my humble opinion, is to explore the haunted castle and face those fearsome ghosts.

With that in mind and with lantern held aloft in trembling fingers, I undertook the challenge of making a personal selection reflecting Women and the Gothic. There was no way that my wish-list could be displayed. That would have filled The John Rylands Library in all its Gothic beauty.

Some choices are well-known, some are hidden from history. I was drawn to writers who were not content to follow, neither in their lives nor in their works. In the Gothic they discovered imaginative possibilities and seized those opportunities with verve and dynamism. They pushed the boundaries of the Gothic, using it to challenge and inform. Their writing transcends expectations. Here you will find no absent or marginalised gothic heroines, no quivering victims of Gothic male fantasy.

Here be dragons."

Darkness and Light: Exploring the Gothic

Thursday, 16 July to Sunday, 20 December 2015

I was honoured to receive and invitation from Liza Leonard to curate a case at this exhibition! I took as my theme Women and the Gothic. I could have chosen a hundred books, easily, but was limited to five.. The choice was very difficult, needless to say. It's been a great experience to work with the staff of The John Rylands Library. I am particularly grateful for the help and support I have received from Xavier Aldana Reyes and Linnie Blake of The University of Manchester.

The exhibition is running till the 20th December and is free to enter.

'Housed in the neo-Gothic grandeur of The John Rylands Library, Darkness and Light reveals how Gothic architecture and anatomy inspired and influenced a literary genre, and how the lasting legacy of Gothic can be found in art, films and subculture today.
From the fantastical to the macabre, this intriguing exhibition unearths Gothic treasures from the Library's Special Collections to investigate subjects as varied as the role of women in the Gothic movement, advances in medical science and classic literature.

Amongst the fascinating items on display is Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first Gothic novel. With a Gothic medieval castle, doomed love and restless spectres of the past, it sets the scene for the genre and sits alongside a whole host of Gothic bestsellers including The Monk, Udolpho and Jekyll and Hyde.'
Click to go to the John Rylands Library page

The John Rylands Library
150 Deansgate
Manchester
Gtr Manchester
2pm – 3pm
Free event

Take a closer look behind-the-scenes of the Darkness and Light exhibition with author and co-curator Rosie Garland.
We'll give you further insight into our Gothic collections and the dark histories behind them, providing you an exclusive look at items that aren't on public display in the exhibition.
This event will be followed by a short reading from, and book signing of Rosie's novel 'Vixen'.

http://events.manchester.ac.uk/event/event:io1-id9zd8x5-hs4m4p

Darkness and Light: Exploring the Gothic

Thursday, 16 July to Sunday, 20 December 2015

I was honoured to receive and invitation from Liza Leonard to curate a case at this exhibition! I took as my theme Women and the Gothic. I could have chosen a hundred books, easily, but was limited to five.. The choice was very difficult, needless to say. It's been a great experience to work with the staff of The John Rylands Library. I am particularly grateful for the help and support I have received from Xavier Aldana Reyes and Linnie Blake of The University of Manchester.

The exhibition is running till the 20th December and is free to enter.

'Housed in the neo-Gothic grandeur of The John Rylands Library, Darkness and Light reveals how Gothic architecture and anatomy inspired and influenced a literary genre, and how the lasting legacy of Gothic can be found in art, films and subculture today.
From the fantastical to the macabre, this intriguing exhibition unearths Gothic treasures from the Library's Special Collections to investigate subjects as varied as the role of women in the Gothic movement, advances in medical science and classic literature.

Amongst the fascinating items on display is Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first Gothic novel. With a Gothic medieval castle, doomed love and restless spectres of the past, it sets the scene for the genre and sits alongside a whole host of Gothic bestsellers including The Monk, Udolpho and Jekyll and Hyde.'
Click to visit The John Rylands Library page