Fact of Feeling: Memory in the Victorian Ghost Story.

This paper examines how the Victorian ghost-story genre troubles realist visions of memory as a store of immutable past experiences. Analyses of ghost stories by Ellen Wood, Amelia B. Edwards, Dinah Mulock, and George MacDonald reveal that they portray memory as constructed, biased, and fallible. Through first-person and frame narratives, these stories illustrate how the act of recollection falsifies memories by reshaping them to better fit affective narrative arcs, thus depicting a form of nostalgic memory that foregrounds feeling at the cost of accuracy. Yet, even as these ghost stories highlight the impossibility of truly accurate recollection, their focus on traumatic events emphasizes the felt imperative to accurately recall and communicate emotional experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]