(07-09-2018, 02:05 PM)Edgar Theodore Machen Wrote:

(08-28-2013, 02:20 AM)Penfeather Wrote: I never thought much about this before, but I suddenly noticed that there seems to have been a trend in publishing during the '60s and '70s that amounted to a sub-genre in the pulp gothics industry, and that is nurse gothics (see attachments below for cover image examples). 

Have any of you read any of these? I think I might have read one or two but didn't take especial notice that the heroine was a nurse. Of course it would be inevitable to have nurse protagonists (especially in contemporary-setting gothics) since there are only so many professions a young woman could be in that would logically put her into the locale of a strange house or mansion.  In the old gothics the heroines were frequently governesses; in the modern ones they're almost always secretaries, or in this case nurses.

Any comments on this sub-genre?

Correction - the heroines of early and mature Gothic novels were either orphans, or runaways ... If the action took place in the Middle Ages, it was a noble lady. The heroines of the romances where the actions took place at the time of the writing of the text (late 18 - early 19) could also be from the petty nobility. They are united not by origin but by character traits. But after the Jane Eyre the governesses were in vogue.