University of Kent Special Collections
Catherine Crowe was a wildly acclaimed Victorian novelist, playwright, social critic and …ghost hunter? Her novels were as popular as Charles Dickens,’ and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Martineau, and George Eliot were her ardent fans. And her pioneering catalog of ghosts and the supernatural, The Night Side of Nature, was one of the first and most influential works to be adopted by the up-and-coming Spiritualist movement.
So how did this incredibly talented, incredibly famous woman disappear from our collective memory? The answer involves a few misbehaving spirits, a little bit of nudity, and a whole lot of mean-spirited gossip by one very famous frenemy.
For this year’s Halloween Special, Professor Ruth Heholt helps Olivia resurrect the wildly famous, wildly fascinating, wildly under-appreciated Catherine Crowe.
Selections from Catherine Crowe’s works read for us by Matthew Meikle and Emma Porter. You can find many of Catherine Crowe’s works on Project Gutenberg.
Ruth Heholt is professor of literature and culture at Falmouth University. She is the author of Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics (Routledge, 2021), editor of the journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, and co-author of books including Ghosts and the Gothic (University of Manchester Press, 2025), Folk Horror: New Global Pathways (University of Wales Press, 2023), and Gothic Kernow: Cornwall as Strange Fiction (Anthem, 2022). She is lead of the Dark Economies Scholarly Association (DESA).
Music featured in this episode provided by:
Kevin MacLeod, Doug Maxwell, Myuu, Brian Bolger, Jesse Gallagher, and the Weber State University Choirs and Orchestra.
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