Edging toward the Gothic

I'm continuing focus on books that provide useful background for a podcast on lesbian themes in Gothic literature. While I found this work not as on-topic as I'd hoped it would be, it does includes some really useful discussions of the ways in which Gothic novels created a context for depicting the realities of 18-19th c women's social hazards -- hazards that it wasn't polite to talk about directly. I think that will be a useful angle, because it touches on how the Gothic was an overt depiction of covert realities, and how it deconstructed the premises of the "marriage plot" even when the stories themselves still resolved in marriage at the end. If one takes the premises and mood of a Gothic novel and rejects the notion that marriage to a man provides the only eventual safety and happiness (even if that is a conditional and tenuous safety), then there's more scope for the transient and often unreliable female alliances within the stories to emerge as a viable alternative.