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This book explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. It focuses on folkloric records of the island of Saaremaa, Estonia, a territory in which, unusually, there are more folktales of female werewolves than male. The book also explores tropes and strategies of feminisation evident in Werewolf: The Apocalypse to reveal an almost unique disavowal of the masculine werewolf in favour of traditions of presenting the female werewolf. The examination of Honoré Beaugrand's 'The Werewolves' offers fruitful discussion of the female werewolf's integration into colonial discourse and narrative. In the nineteenth century, at the fin de siècle, female authors began to produce fiction about the female werewolf. Two of the most interesting examples of this, which have been curiously neglected by critics, are Clemence Housman's novella The Werewolf and Rosamund Marriott Watson's poem 'A Ballad of the Were-wolf', written under the pseudonym Graham R. Tomson and published in 1891. Then, the book examines twenty-first-century young adult paranormal romance texts, considering the ways in which such texts associate lycanthropy with contemporary idealisations and constructions of the post-adolescent female. It explores presentations of body-centred violence in film, drawing parallels between female werewolves and other violent females in horror cinema. Finally, the book also examines cinematic representations of the femme animale with an exploration of how this conceptualisation of the feminine might inform a reading of Ginger Snaps.
siècle , female authors at last began to produce fiction about the female werewolf. Two of the most interesting examples of this, which have been curiously neglected by critics, are Clemence Housman’s novella The Werewolf (1896) and Rosamund Marriott Watson’s poem ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’, which was written under the pseudonym Graham R. Tomson and published in 1891. Both these works are of
their own specialist skills. Of particularly significance was Clemence Housman herself. She unassumingly combined both design talent and networks (Suffrage Atelier meetings at Pembroke Cottage) with patient taxation expertise, honed by years of sorting out her father’s dubious muddles. It was an impressive, if untypical, gathering: whether through professional achievement or marriage, they were largely wealthier than the average middle-Âclass Edwardian woman. Like the Census Committee, momentum had to be maintained. The following Friday, the League discussed various
Violet Tillard. In Buckinghamshire they successfully ran meetings in Great Missenden, Wendover and nearby towns, WTRL congratulating their ‘very excellent work for The Cause’.20 Two tax resistance cases stand out particularly, both springing from census boycotters: Clemence Housman and Constance Andrews. In Ipswich, Constance had purposely bought a dog, refused to pay the licence and was charged on 20 April at the local county court with keeping it without a licence. Her defence was, of course, no taxation without representation. Constance refused to pay her fine, and
talents generously. Amid this buzz of colourful propaganda culture, however, it is siblings Laurence and Clemence Housman who emerge pre-Âeminent in designing the protest against the coming census. Clemence and Laurence grew up in a family of seven children near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. It was not an untroubled childhood; their mother died early, and their father, prone to embroiling family finances in disasters, remarried. Their eldest brother Alfred escaped to Oxford University, where he formed a passionate attachment to another male student. He later became a
relation to the way that werewolves are conceptualised in the West, showing how fashion directly shapes cultural fantasy: if men have a beast within, hairy on the inside, women can be associated with animals more directly and particularly with their soft and seductive surfaces. In nineteenth-century werewolf fiction, white fur is suggestively equivalent to white skin, neither fully distinguished from the other. In Clemence Housman's ‘The Were-wolf’ (1890), the werewolf in human form ‘blanch[es] white as her furs’ in the moment immediately before her
five hundred names of women willing to refuse paying their taxes (or at least sympathetic to League aims) was clearly over-Âambitious. Neither Mrs Fawcett’s NUWSS nor Pippa Strachey’s LSWS was encouraging about receiving a League deputation.4 More positively, local meetings to win potential resisters held in seaside resorts like Eastbourne and Hastings were productive, while persistent Margaret Kineton Parkes visited residential towns like Bath. The League’s banner that Clemence Housman had organized was greatly admired 88 Narrative: October 1909 to April 1911
coal-Âmining areas.25 Across London itself, in working-Âclass boroughs to the east like Shoreditch or Bethnal Green, it is also hard to identify boycotters. And distance from London remained a strong determining factor, with the WTRL, for instance, never making great inroads much further out. Indeed, unsurprisingly, the more remote from London was a community, the more sporadic was the scattering of boycotters. Rural counties revealed a similar pattern, even in southern England. In Dorset, Clemence Housman and her handful of like-Âminded women in Swanage had every
14 Annie Kenney’s Bristol and Mary Blathwayt’s Bath To help peer into boycotters’ domestic spaces behind their formal census schedules, Henry Nevinson’s diary, Clemence Housman’s letters and Laurence’s own autobiography provide revealing personal testimony. For the large west of England region, the autobiography of chief WSPU organizer Annie Kenney, Memories of a Militant (1924), can be consulted. However, Annie, while the central actor-Âobserver of Bristol’s census boycott, wrote her faux naïf recollections selectively, telling us more about travelling to
Englands’? To find out, I set out on journeys. During 2010–11 my research trips, usually by train, sometimes by road, criss-Âcrossed England, visiting key boycotting communities, then re-Âvisiting them, until I almost met myself coming back. Luckily, I was already familiar with ‘suffrage city’ Manchester, site of One Hand Tied Behind Us (1978);13 and with residential Kensington, west London home of suffrage writers and artists, notably the ‘census siblings’ Laurence and Clemence Housman. Other newer adventures beckoned: the Black Country towns of the West Midlands; East