About me

I’m Emily, a writer and a picture-maker. My thing is the long nineteenth century and Neo-Victorianism in literature, art, and the archives, whether it’s ‘asylums’ or activism, science or the supernatural – and particularly when these intersect with folklore or cabaret or horror.

I currently work for a hospice charity, writing comms for digital and print, and I am also a qualified senior journalist with many years experience .

I have a PhD in the medical humanities: my research looked at the creative work produced by mental health patients for ‘asylum’ magazines between 1844 and 1918. 

When not scribbling wildly, I’m drawing, painting, taking photos, and creating all sorts of images. You can see some of my artwork on my Instagram, or find stickers, prints, and design work at my Etsy here.

If you’d like to work together on a project, please get in touch!

Please see a selection of my articles below. I also ran a newsletter called The Apparition throughout the UK Covid lockdowns, issues of which can be read here.

My research

The hidden history of fake mermaids

Fine art essays

Darwin, Photography, and the ‘Screaming Victorians’ of Anthony Rhys’s Visual Biofiction

From Alice in Wonderland to Cadbury’s Cocoa: the Brothers Dalziel’s Victorian wood engraving

Novel essays

Review: The Way of All Flesh (2018) by Ambrose Parry

‘Lizzie Borden took an axe’: See What I Have Done (2017) by Sarah Schmidt

Mythic Monsters, Living Fossils, and Liminal Spaces: Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (2016)

Non-Fiction

Actress, suffragette, princess: the story of a forgotten Russian royal

Review: Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2018) by Alex Tankard

Hybrid faiths, occult religions, and esoteric beliefs: a review of Spirit Matters (2018) and The Occult Imagination in Britain (2018)

Review: Death in Ten Minutes – Kitty Marion, Activist, Arsonist, Suffragette (2018) by Fern Riddell

Review: Poison Panic (2016) by Helen Barrell

Exhibition reviews

100 Years of Queer British Art, from Fin de Siècle Aesthetics to Performative Dandyism – Tate Britain’s ‘Queer British Art 1861–1967’ (2017)

Art and Telegraphy at the Scrambled Messages project’s ‘Victorians Decoded’ (2016)

Music reviews

Medicine, mortality and music: Ensemble Moliere

Lodestar (2016) review: The time travelling first lady of folk revival music returns

Film reviews/essays

Peaches, pearls and pornography: The Handmaiden (2016) review

‘Shadows, and creaks, and groans’: Re-presenting the past in Crimson Peak (2015)

Television reviews/essays

Series on The Living and the Dead (2016)

1 – Psychographs, Celestial Telegraphers and Kodak Girls

2 – Victorian Psychology and Spirit Possession

3 – Folklore and Magic, Science and Technology

4 – A Victorian Language of Flowers, ‘invisible’ lesbians and the New Woman

5 – You Will Reap What You Sow

Sometimes I even venture cautiously into the eras following the long nineteenth century, and even as far as the present day. You can probably spot the running themes, however. Here are a few pieces I particularly like:

Video game essays

You had me at ‘body horror’: Anatomy (2016) and the female grotesque

Novel review/essays

Review: Social Creature (2018) by Tara Isabella Burton

Review: The Snow Witch (2017) by Matt Wingett

Review: Hallows Fell (2017), by Thom Burgess and Izzy Stanic

Review: The Eyrie (2017), by Thom Burgess and Barney Bodoano

Non Fiction

Review: Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful And Things Strange (2017) by Adam Scovell

Review: Cinematic lycanthropy and monstrous femininity: a review of James Gracey’s The Company of Wolves (2017)

Sometimes I make art. I like working in textiles – particularly knitting, crochet and cross-stitch – and all manner of traditional fine art, with some gentle forays into photography and digital art.

Art and photography

At the violet hour, the landscape tells its tales

Rattling skeletons and cursed daughters: a weekend in Prague

Paris, lilac and teal