The Lost Girls

The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter's loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers - Mary Webb and Mary Butts - who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especiall.