Hi friends,

I have a special guest post from my friend Leigh Stein, author of last week’s pick, If You’re Seeing This, it’s Meant for You, about the gothic novels that inspired her book.

As she says, "I read a lot of gothic novels while I was writing my gothic TikTok hype house novel If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You. I have my personal faves (Rebecca, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and House of Leaves) but I know how well-read Elizabeth’s audience is, so I tried to choose some more unexpected recommendations that I still think fit under the Victorian eaves, if you will, of what counts as “gothic” lit.”

And, now, what to read if …

You plan to see Wuthering Heights on Valentine’s Day

The Glass Essay by Anne Carson

One of my favorite gothic novels is a thirty-nine-page poem called “The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson. It’s a narrative poem about a woman who goes to visit her difficult mother “who lives on a moor in the north,” in the aftermath of a devastating breakup. The speaker of the poem is obsessed with Emily Brontë and whenever she visits her mother, she fears that she is turning into Emily, “my lonely life around me like a moor.”

The atmosphere is chilly; the domestic space the women share is laden with emotional tripwires. The speaker disappears into her study of Emily’s poetry and the way critics have tried to understand the depth of feeling in the work of a woman who died at thirty without ever having “friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary / or a fear of death.”

I find myself tempted

to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge
for all that life withheld from Emily.
But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.

As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.
It is a chilly thought.

You can read the poem in its entirety at the Poetry Foundation website or in Carson’s book Glass, Irony & God. I think it would be the perfect piece to read on your phone when you’re hiding in the guest room at Thanksgiving, feeling alienated and misunderstood by your in-laws, fighting the temptation to google your ex-boyfriend.

You want the prequel to Jane