It’s Women in Horror Month, that time of year when we recognize the amazing women who celebrate and create the horror genre. When it comes to horror fiction, there don’t seem to be very many names that appear in the past. Of course, there’s always Mary Shelley, but, while she was exceptional in many ways, she certainly wasn’t the only woman of her time writing gothic and horror stories .

Anyone who is surprised by this hasn’t read Little Women. Here’s Jo March, the most unconventional of the four March sisters, burning up with her desire to write:

Every few weeks she would shut herself up into her room, put on her scribbling suit, and “fall into a vortex,” as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

Jo’s family is much more supportive of her than most families were: writing was not only considered unsuitable for women, but unhealthy (and that’s literal– if you want to read a seriously twisted horror story, try Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s semi-autobiographical story “The Yellow Wallpaper”). But at the same time, the reality of daily life meant that women somehow had to support their families, and many of them did it by writing (KC Redding-Gonzales has written about it here).  The writing that earned a steady paycheck, though, was pulp fiction for magazines and newspapers– “sensational stories” that gave their readers thrills, chills, romance, and murder. So that’s what Jo does. Her publisher “rejected any but thrilling tales” so that’s what she wrote, but with no name attached. Little Women‘s author, Louisa May Alcott, supported her family by writing sensational stories for ten years under a pen name, including a novel, A Long and Fatal Love Chase. But in the end, conventional Louisa won out, and, as in Little Women, where Jo finally gives up her writing, she stopped (this review from Stephen King has more on Louisa).

Alcott, Gilman, and the fictional Jo are just three examples from that time, though (even Frankenstein was first published under a pseudonym)– and we can’t know, really, how many women supplied horror, romance, suspense, ghost stories, and gothic fiction for pulp magazines, newspapers, and even three volume novels, since so many of them, like Jo, left their work unsigned, or like Alcott, wrote under a pen name. They did it because they loved writing, or needed money, or both, and whether they were proud of their work or ashamed of it, these scribbling women shaped popular culture. Many of them may be nameless, but they shouldn’t be forgotten.