Bad Blood

Professor Diana Bronte (yes, really, how many more times?!) stared out of her rainy college window and sighed very deeply. In many ways it was a comfortable life: freedom to write and research almost anything that she decided; a flat inside the walls of Somerville and the comforting cliché of a bicycle with a large front basket to get further afield. By most standards she was living the academic dream.

Her chosen field, the female gothic, was popular, bordering on the fashionable, and yet this irked her in a way. Far better to inhabit a subject area tucked away in the long grass and establish yourself as the world authority on an intriguing though neglected field of study. Decades ago, when Diana had been an undergraduate, Old Norse had occupied this territory.

It became her little private joke to think of herself as ‘vampiric’, trading on the appetites of thousands of young women for feminist readings of obscure gothic stories. The titles of her numerous books were catnip to undergraduates across the English-speaking world: The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination’ (2008) was her first great hit, but The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (2020) had sold more and secured her Chair.

Since then though she had longed for something a bit more, well, practical, within her chosen field. Some actual gothic feminist action as it were. Some guerilla warfare with a lurid twist perhaps.

She got to her feet and discarded the bag, lapsang souchong today, and took her cup back to her desk along with a couple of digestive biscuits, their plainness a welcome antidote to the fevered workings of her specialist subject. Like a comfortable jumper, something she would never wear. It was nearly time to press send.

Just two months ago she had barely heard of Substack, let alone discovered how to manipulate its workings in order to create a fake account, traceable to an IP address belonging to her esteemed colleague. How lucky to have a computer scientist as a daughter. As culture wars ruined careers in public Geoffrey Philipsson CBE was smart enough to keep his head down, but in private was able to wage war on anybody he suspected of pro-trans activism. He was also not averse to damaging the careers of intersectional feminists that raised their heads above the parapet.

So far the attributed Substack posts had been mild enough – gentle diatribes about how inclusion policies in Universities had gone too far and so on. They had attracted mild criticism but had also smoked out some who had expressed support. The esteemed Geoffrey had simply blustered a little about fake news, seemingly unaware of the wider resonance of such a phrase.

Now though it was time to up the ante. A perfectly curated account, complete with lavish illustrations, of gothic inspired pornography, complete with pseudo-academic justification for the writer’s interest in such things. It even alleged that it was all in keeping with feminist reclaiming of things such as burlesque.

It wouldn’t destroy him, but the great human impulse to decide that there was never smoke without fire would be enough to jolt such a man’s imperial procession through a late Oxford career. Vampiric indeed.