Jane Goodwin Austin (1831–1894) published her short story ‘After Three Thousand Years’ in 1868. Austin’s tale is one of the first narratives to deal with a malevolent female mummy and what is known as the mummy’s curse. Her story has received limited critical attention unlike a similar story published by Louisa May Alcott in 1869, ‘Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse’. This lack of scholarly attention makes Austin’s short story more interesting to the researcher than that of Alcott. In my article, I will perform a close reading of ‘After Three Thousand Years’, examining how the imperialist theme is intertwined with the abject Gothic doubling of the mummy and the female protagonists, which I consider to be central to the plot of Austin’s story.
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