Natasha Siegel’s historical fantasy debut AS MANY SOULS AS STARS is out this week from Bloomsbury and to celebrate, Natasha has penned a brilliantly informed guest post on fantasy and the female gothic!

Before we hand you over to Natasha, let’s find out more about her own Gothic novel:

1592. Cybil Harding, daughter of a secret alchemist, was born under cursed stars. Destined to bring disaster to those around her, Cybil is trapped in a grand house with a mother paralysed by grief and a father willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of magic.

Miriam Richter is a creature born of shadow. Forged by the dark arts, she is doomed to exist for eternity and destined to be alone – consuming the souls of mortals for sustenance.

Everything changes when Miriam meets Cybil, whose soul shines with a light so bright, she must claim it for herself. Miriam offers a bargain: she will grant Cybil reincarnation and the chance to change her stars in exchange for her soul.

Thus begins a dance across centuries as Miriam seeks Cybil in every lifetime to claim her prize. But Cybil isn’t inclined to play by the rules. As the two women circle each other, drawn together inescapably as light and dark, the bond forged between them grows stronger. In their battle for dominance, only one of them can win… but perhaps they can’t survive without each other.

Natasha Siegel’s fantasy debut is full of transporting historical detail, with thrilling twists and an abiding, thought-provoking romance that feels at once epic and deeply personal. Ambitious, gothic, and magical, As Many Souls as Stars is about the lengths we go to protect ourselves, our legacy, and those we love.

As Many Souls as Stars is out November 6th – you can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org

Fantasy and the legacy of the ‘female gothic’

by Natasha Siegel

When I was studying gothic literature as an undergraduate, my lecturer told me that above all, what defines a Gothic isn’t setting or supernatural elements or even tone; it’s a thematic interest in rupture—taking something real and twisting it, subverting it, slicing open the belly of something and showing its innards. It draws from real-world experiences of suffering, strangeness, and marginalisation. No surprise, then, that the Gothic has always been a genre that female writers have thrived in. There’s Mary Shelley and the Brontës, of course, but even more influential in her day might’ve been Ann Radcliffe, whose pioneering novels founded the ‘Radcliffe School’ of Gothic fiction. 

In 1976, literary critic Ellen Moers pioneered the use of the term “Female Gothic.” To Moers, women writers of Gothic used the genre to explore anxieties over domestic entrapment and female sexuality. There was a certain magic to this term, I think—it has really captured the imaginations of feminist scholars since, and it also captured me. Reading nineteenth-century Gothics, in particular, I was taken by the sheer indulgent fury of much of these women’s writing. At the end of Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 novel Zofloya, or The Moor, her protagonist Victoria discovers (spoiler alert) that the man she’s been having a passionate affair with is, in fact, Satan. He tells her, “I found thee, oh! Of most exquisite willingness, and yielding readily to all my temptations.” Then he drags her down to hell, with his ‘grasp of iron’ around her neck.

Monster romance has always been alive and well in the Female Gothic, and the monsters were just as often the protagonists as they were their paramours: lustful, insatiable, fallible. The ‘bedevilment’ of these women can definitely be read as a way of conforming to contemporary misogyny, but I think there’s often more at play. There’s a catharsis, a satisfaction, to reading these stories and seeing women having a good time being evil. That catharsis, that decadence—that rupture again, the idea of something beautiful destroying itself—is what always has drawn me to the Gothic as a genre. And, in some ways, I think we’re seeing a Renaissance of this form of Gothic today. Across contemporary fiction, fantasy and sci-fi, romance and horror, these themes are becoming more and more prominent. It’s easy to find people dismissing modern genres like ‘dark romantasy’ as entirely worthless. Sometimes, this is because these tropes and genres are intimately tied to women’s desire—and to many, women’s desire a corrupting force in art, not something that makes it inherently less worthy. This is absurd, of course, and even when you dig into the history of the fantasy genre, it’s clear that not only have these tropes always been present, but they’ve also always been fundamental to the evolution of speculative fiction. From Frankenstein to Beloved to One Dark Window, the intimate intertwining of women’s anger, desire, and desperation have formed a backbone to the Gothic as we know it today. 

I think it’s important to acknowledge that the historic roots of modern-day fantasy stretch far further than Tolkien or even Tennyson. Even authors like Radcliffe—who has long fallen out of fashion—still have their fingerprints impressed between the pages of my work, and surely the work of many others. It’s easy to see contemporary publishing trends as fickle, flash-in-the-pan moments before a new trope or subgenre sweeps in to take the pedestal. But it’s interesting to me that, when considered further, the themes and settings we see popping up have been around for much longer than one might think. My forthcoming Gothic, As Many Souls As Stars, was as inspired by 19th-century female gothic as it was by Marlowe’s 16th-century Doctor Faustus, or, indeed, by medieval conceptions of the devil and darkness. And when I pick up a romantic fantasy today, gothic or not, I can’t help but think about Matilda, the gorgeous and mysterious demonic love interest of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk—a 1796 novel widely considered to be an urtext to the entire Gothic fantasy genre and one of the first to introduce the early Gothic template of the ‘corrupted woman’. These books betray the anxieties of their eras, of course, but also a sense of fascination and excitement that I still find difficult to resist.

Near the end of Dacre’s Zofloya—which, I hasten to add, isn’t a particularly good book, for all it interests me—Zofloya, or Satan-in-disguise, explains his life view in a way I can only read as a meta-textual nod to the Gothic itself. Victoria says, “Thou takest, methinks, no part in the common occurrences of life.” “True!” Zofloya replies. “Common occurrences do not interest me. The dreadful, the terrific, the surprising alone have power to call me forth.” And isn’t that what we’re always seeking in the end—as both writers and readers? The dreadful, the terrific, the surprising. Across the centuries, that’s what Gothic has always been reaching for.

As Many Souls as Stars is out November 6th – you can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org

Natasha Siegel is a writer of historical fiction, fantasy, and romance. She was born and raised in London, where she grew up in a Danish-Jewish family surrounded by stories.

She studied English and History at the University of York, and she has an MA in Early Modern Studies from University College London, where her research specialised in Anglo-Jewish and colonial history in the 17th century. Her studies inspired a passion for historical narratives and folklore: her novels interweave magic and real-world settings to tell stories about queer, Jewish, and otherwise marginalised characters throughout history. She has a particular fondness for Early Modern tragedy and romance, which have informed much of her work, including her first fantasy novel, As Many Souls as Stars: a sapphic historical fantasy inspired by the Faustus legend. She lives in North-West London with her partner and spends her spare time chasing after the family dog, a rescue lurcher named Cleo.

Natasha’s poetry has won accolades from Foyle’s and the University of Oxford. She has published two acclaimed historical novels with Penguin Random House US. Her US debut, Solomon’s Crown, was a NYT editor’s choice. As Many Souls As Stars releases November 2025 with Bloomsbury UK / William Morrow US and is her UK and fantasy debut.