8 Female Gothic Writers Who Inspired Modern Horror

A little over two centuries before Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 film adaptation of Frankenstein starring Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth came to the big screen, Mary Shelley set her mind to writing a ghost story.

What emerged was Frankenstein, an iconic contribution to horror literature that has inspired countless adaptations and spinoffs and has, safe to say, left a permanent mark on the horror genre. Shelley is far from the only woman whose work has shaped modern horror, though. Countless women across time have allowed their imaginations to spin dark and terrifying stories, and these are just a few of the most influential to do just that.

1. Ann Radcliffe
2. Mary Shelley
3. Shirley Jackson
4. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
5. Daphne du Maurier
6. Emily Brontë
7. Louisa May Alcott
8. Anne Rice

Ann Radcliffe

Radcliffe was an English novelist best known for being one of the pioneers of the Gothic genre, which is generally defined as literature suffused with a feeling of dread, mystique, and terror.

Radcliffe anonymously published her first two novels, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790). Her third novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), shot her to fame, but her novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) made her a literary icon in England. 

This novel follows a character named Emily St. Aubert as she undergoes a great number of cruelties. Most of the story takes place in the grim and macabre castle of Udolpho, and haunted, mysterious castles and crumbling, labyrinthine architecture would become hallmarks of the Gothic genre in the decades to come. 

Radcliffe was known for her Romantic sensibilities and her artistic, poetic approach to writing dark and disturbing stories. Her work influenced everyone from Lord Byron and Mary Shelley to Jane Austen, and helped shape Romanticism and horror on the whole. Today, her books are widely beloved for their strong female heroines and their pervasive, atmospheric sense of decay and misery, expressed through images like ruined castles that clearly reflect characters’ distress. 

In her essay entitled “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” Radcliffe explained her approach to writing by defining the differences between horror and terror. “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them,” she wrote. Her books certainly fall into the realm of terror, and helped to inspire countless psychological, artful Gothic fiction and film projects.

Mary Shelley

In 1816, an 18-year-old Mary Shelley accompanied her future husband, Percy Shelley, to Lake Geneva to visit Lord Byron. In order to entertain themselves amid an unusually dreary, cold, and stormy summer, Byron challenged his guests to write ghost stories.

Soon after, Shelley began to write Frankenstein, which was meant to be a short story. Fortunately, it blossomed into a novel that still stands as a centerpiece of horror literature and is also often called the world’s first science fiction novel. The book tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who assembles a monster, only to greatly regret his creation later. Frankenstein has generated countless adaptations and also helped shape future genres like sci-fi horror and body horror, and it has even had an impact on actual medical science.

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson’s unsettling Gothic masterpieces include the macabreThe Haunting of Hill House, the stunningly violent short story “The Lottery,” and the chilling We Have Always Lived in the Castle. While Jackson didn’t receive extensive critical acclaim in her lifetime, her work has gone on to leave an indelible impact on horror and popular culture. 

“The Lottery,” a short story published in The New Yorker in 1948 about a group of townspeople who participate in a sacrificial rite, went on to influence similar narratives from The Hunger Games to The Wicker Man. Jackson's novels also added scope and depth to the haunted house archetype, a particularly common staple in modern horror, as she utilized ruined, crumbling manors as metaphors for the declining psyches and oppressive lives of her typically female protagonists. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist and leading contributor to the women’s rights movement in the United States in the late 1800s. She was also a writer best known for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which depicted a wealthy housewife’s mental unraveling. 

The story became a Gothic classic upon its publication, and is filled with classic Gothic themes, from a gigantic and isolating home to a sense of claustrophobia and impending doom. It has also retroactively been read as an indictment of Victorian patriarchy and a society that shut women away to “rest” when they were displaying signs of unhappiness. The story helped pioneer psychological horror and the use of unreliable narrators, and also served as a powerful early example of a horror story embedded with social critiques.

Daphne du Maurier

Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 classic Rebecca tells the story of a woman haunted by the specter of her new husband’s first wife, Rebecca. It takes place in a typical Gothic setting—the sprawling and atmospheric manor Manderley—and tells a story of jealousy, lies, and mental decline. Rebecca was an early and seminal entry in the “domestic horror” pantheon perfected by Shirley Jackson, and it embodied a modern, non-supernatural kind of horror where ghosts only exist in memory but still manage to wreak havoc on the living. It helped shape the modern suspense genre as well, showing how the simplest domestic moments can be filled with ominousness in the hands of the right writer.

Other celebrated works by Du Maurier include the novels Jamaica Inn and Frenchman's Creek and the short story "The Birds," which inspired Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same name. She was also a playwright who detested being called a "romantic" writer, instead preferring her work to be looped firmly into the realm of Gothic and psychological literature.

Emily Brontë

While Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights might typically be branded as a romance novel, the story is actually quite filled with elements of Gothic horror. From the windswept moors and dreary manor that gives the novel its name to the tortured, haunted character of Heathcliff, the novel is every bit as much of a horror story as it is a romance.

Brontë is believed to have drawn inspiration from the crumbling, ghost story-shrouded manor homes she explored while growing up on the English moors, and the atmosphere of dreariness and dread that pervades Wuthering Heights helped shape modern tales of disturbed romance and obsession. The novel also helped earn stories with elements of Gothic horror their place in the literary canon.

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott may be best known for her decidedly un-horrific Little Women, but she also wrote a number of Gothic short stories and novels under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, some of which include Lost in a Pyramid, Behind a Mask, and the short story “The Abbott’s Ghost.” 

Alcott mostly wrote these stories to support her family early in her career, and like many female writers of the time, she used a male pen name. Her stories depict unruly, often unlikable women, and helped provide an early blueprint for future morally gray, complex, rebellious, and even villainous women in horror, such as those featured by Gillian Flynn and in films like Robert Eggers's The Witch. “Lost in a Pyramid” is also one of the first known Gothic takes on the classic mummy’s curse story in American literature. 

Anne Rice

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire changed horror forever, adding a sophisticated twist to vampire stories by giving monstrous characters scope and psychological depth. The novel is considered a cornerstone of modern Gothic fiction, and it has influenced the entire pantheon of modern vampire stories, from Twilight to True Blood and beyond, by creating the archetype of the glamorous, philosophical vampire. 

Rice’s 37 books also explored everything from witchcraft to werewolves, and she put her signature spin on all of them and ultimately helped cement the modern horror trend of telling monster stories through a nuanced and distinctly human lens.