Writing in 1979, Patricia Stubbs identified a problem encountered by feminist writers at the end of the nineteenth century as still having relevance for the current generation of women writers. ‘This’, she claims: is a difficulty peculiar to realist fiction — that of how to incorporate it into a form whose essential characteristic is the exploration of existing realities, experiences and aspirations which go well beyond the possibilities afforded by that reality…. This explains the increasing importance of non-realist linear narrative forms in contemporary women’s writing. She cites Monique Wittig, Beryl Bainbridge, Angela Carter and Patricia Highsmith as writers who write in fantasy modes in order to evade this constraint.1 Those feminist writers of fiction who remained within realist paradigms found themselves writing narratives of victimhood: Margaret Drabble’s heroines are an interesting example. ‘This, above all, to refuse to be a victim’, says Margaret Atwood’s nameless narrator at the end of her 1972 novel Surfacing.2 In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of women novelists did just that and found in the traditions of Gothic the potential for writing transgression that challenged patriarchal assumptions and expectations in the late twentieth-century context. In Gothic’s hybridity they discovered ways of opening up parodic spaces to comic and liberating effect.