Some of the best horror books written by women began with a teenage girl. Mary Shelley was only 18 when she started Frankenstein.
Female horror authors shaped the genre long before anyone gave them credit. Ann Radcliffe wrote the gothic novels others copied for decades, while Elizabeth Gaskell and Edith Wharton mastered the ghost story.
Here you'll find classic novels and short stories by the women who helped invent modern horror. Every book is complete and free to download in PDF.
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Novels
Gothic Horror Novels by Women
Crumbling abbeys, cursed bloodlines and villains who refuse to stay buried fill these gothic novels by women. Radcliffe, Shelley, Reeve and Corelli laid the foundations the whole genre still stands on.
Mary Shelley started it at 18: a student builds a living creature from dead matter and then abandons it. The novel that founded science fiction is also one of the darkest gothic tragedies ever written.
Orphaned Emily St. Aubert is locked inside a remote Apennine castle by her scheming guardian, where veiled pictures and midnight sounds hide a terrible secret. The 1794 bestseller that defined the gothic novel.
A young peasant spends three nights in the sealed wing of Lovel Castle, where groans and an armored ghost point to a buried crime. One of the first gothic novels, written in 1778 as a reply to The Castle of Otranto.
Fleeing Paris, a family takes shelter in a ruined abbey deep in the forest, where a hidden manuscript reveals a murder. Radcliffe's breakthrough novel mixes terror, suspense and a heroine who refuses to give up.
Victoria, a proud Venetian noblewoman, sinks into murder with the help of a mysterious Moorish servant who is not what he seems. A wild and shocking 1806 gothic novel with one of the genre's most daring villainesses.
Harriet Brandt charms everyone she meets at a Belgian resort, yet the people closest to her grow weak and die. Published the same year as Dracula, it is a psychological vampire novel about heredity and guilt.
A starving writer suddenly inherits a fortune and gains a charming new friend, Prince Lucio, who is the Devil himself. Corelli's dark Faustian novel was the biggest bestseller of 1895.
In fashionable Cairo, a mysterious dancer bewitches a French painter and draws him toward the tomb of an ancient Egyptian warrior. A tale of reincarnation and revenge across thousands of years.
No tenant can stay in River Hall, so a young law clerk is sent to find out why. Charlotte Riddell, the queen of the Victorian ghost story, wrote this classic haunted house novel with a sharp eye for money and class.
The dead return to a small French town and drive the living out of its walls. Told by several witnesses, Margaret Oliphant's ghost novel is eerie, moving and unlike anything else in the genre.
Two medieval students turn to sorcery, and one of them rises to the papal throne through witchcraft and murder. Marjorie Bowen wrote this dark tale of the Antichrist in 1909, when she was barely 23.
In the late 21st century a plague spreads across the world until one survivor is left to tell the story. Mary Shelley's apocalyptic novel is a haunting vision of loss, written after the deaths of Byron and Percy Shelley.
The Victorian ghost story was largely a women's craft, and these short stories and novellas prove it. Start with The Yellow Wallpaper if you have 20 minutes, or with Gaskell's The Old Nurse's Story for a classic winter chill.
A woman confined to a nursery room for a rest cure begins to see someone creeping behind the wallpaper. A short, unsettling masterpiece of psychological horror you can read in 20 minutes.
Written for Dickens's Christmas issue of 1852, it follows a little girl lured out into the snow by a phantom child. A short, sad and genuinely eerie winter ghost story.
Four tales of the past refusing to stay dead, including Amour Dure and Oke of Okehurst. Vernon Lee's ghosts are seductive and strange, and these stories are among the finest supernatural fiction of the 1890s.
Ten stories by Edith Wharton where guilt, secrets and the supernatural blur together, including The Bolted Door and Afterward. Elegant, cold and quietly chilling.
Eight short horror stories from 1893, including Man-Size in Marble, where two stone knights leave their tomb on All Hallows' Eve. Proof that the author of The Railway Children could also be truly frightening.
Six supernatural stories set in quiet New England villages, including Luella Miller, about a woman who drains the life of everyone who cares for her. Simple, homely settings make the horror hit harder.
Seven ghost stories about love, desire and what follows us after death, with the original eerie illustrations by Jean de Bosschère. Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched is one of the most disturbing visions of the afterlife ever written.
Latimer can hear other people's thoughts and foresee the hour of his own death, a gift that turns his life into a nightmare. George Eliot's only venture into the supernatural ends with a chilling experiment.
An English orphan arrives in Salem in 1691 just as the witch hysteria begins, and suspicion slowly closes in on her. A tense and tragic novella about fear turning a community against an innocent girl.
A young German artist abandons the cousin he promised to marry, and after her death he feels her cold arms around him wherever he goes. A short and haunting Victorian revenge tale.
A Welsh family has lived for centuries under a curse that says a father will die by his own son's hand. Gaskell turns an old legend into a gripping tale of fate that no one can escape.
A boy falls ill after hearing a voice crying night after night in a ruined doorway near his family's Scottish home. Two of Margaret Oliphant's Stories of the Seen and the Unseen, gentle and deeply unsettling.
Five Victorian tales to read by the fire, including The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth, a ghost story told entirely in letters. Rhoda Broughton's stories are short, witty and properly creepy.
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