What Did Miss Darrington See?: An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction

A woman bumps into her imaginary childhood companion at the airport; telepathy bridges the 5000 miles and a generation gap that separate a rural German housewife and a Chicago college student; an overweight black girl soars to freedom in her dreams; a conservative Edwardian woman is urged to marry by her future daughter, a flapper; the Virgin Mary invites the caresses of a black man; a hyena tries to pass as a debutante; a middle-aged professional meets, and learns to accept and cherish, the needy child within her. Salmonson, a seasoned writer and anthologist of fantasy and the supernatural, gathers 24 stories, written between 1850 and 1988, by U.S., English and Latin American women. While occasionally archaic or conventional in format, the selections are a superb introduction to the vast, often obscured supernatural genre in its varied permutations: Gothic romance, ghost story, allegory, etc. This searching documentation of female alienation and suppression persuasively demonstrates how supernatural fiction intentionally subverts patriarchal notions, and links the literature to the constancy of feminist social and political struggle. (Aug.)