Critical interest in the Gothic child has been vibrant since the new millennium. In 2004, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley edited Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, in which three of the fourteen essays associate queer children, in whole or part, with the Gothic. In one, Kathryn Bond Stockton identifies an innate ‘queerness’ in all children, simultaneously recognising that ‘We are in a world not ready to receive this historical formulation’ (Stockton 2004: 281). The collection as a whole understands ‘queer’ as ‘sexual alterity’ and also ‘deviation from the “normal”’ (Bruhm and Hurley 2004: x) and Stockton extends that terrain to include ‘the lurking child, the shadowy child, the indirect child … the obedient-child-as-fearful child, the not-stopping-what-otherboys- begin child’ (Stockton 2004: 284).

In my book, Twentieth-Century Gothic, I argue that questions of haunted childhood especially differentiate contemporary Gothic narratives from their antecedents. We create our Gothic monsters to give shape to what are otherwise vague but preoccupying social anxieties. Thus, in the face of the ever-increasing tabloid media fascination with child disappearances, child deaths and child abuse, children and death populate many recent Gothic literary and cinematic texts. Thus do we trace out ‘an obsession in society which cannot make up its mind whether it is appalled or enthralled by children and the dangers by which, in their name, we are haunted’ (Armitt 2011: 46–7). It is in this paradoxical manner that the Gothic girl child is best understood: as an enigma; a cipher for the appealing nature of things not always fully understood; one who is alluring, but potentially dangerous. In essence, one might argue that she, above all characters, best embodies the very attractiveness of Gothic literature itself.

In this chapter I examine ten fictional treatments of the Gothic girl child, published between 1845 and 2009. In researching the chapter I was surprised to discover that, though the narrative form develops in line with societal shift during that period, and though the sociocultural expectations of women have shifted dramatically since the midnineteenth century, the girl child of 1845 shares much common ground with her twenty-first-century sister, for Gothic literary depictions of girls remained surprisingly unchanged.