Maternal Impulses in ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’

Abstract

In this article, I examine Arthur Conan Doyle’s treatment of motherhood in ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’ (1924) and, in so doing, argue for the insights that it imparts on the mature writer’s creative vision. The story advocates better communication amongst the Fergusons, between husband and wife, and between parents and children, for the family’s regeneration. In its exploration of the maternal experience, parent-child relationships, and sibling relations, Conan Doyle’s story is at home in the Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics network, a project on which I am proud to have worked as an intern while completing my Ph.D. in English Language and Literature at University College London. Victorian literature, the area of my expertise, is replete with examples of troubled maternal figures, and they tell us much about nineteenth-century social and cultural life. Over the past decade, Studies in the Maternal, the network’s peer-reviewed journal, has championed pioneering scholarship on motherhood, operating as an important forum for academics, writers, and creative artists internationally, and expanding the critical and theoretical vocabulary with which we approach characters such as Mrs Ferguson.