Last July, my husband and I were comfortably ensconced in two Muskoka chairs watching a blazing sun drift across the sky above Georgian Bay. We tried hard not to look directly at what appeared to be a perfect sphere as it made a lingering drop to the horizon. If there had been a scientist on hand, no doubt he or she would have pointed out that it was the earth that was moving and not the sun. We, however, were drinking white wine and on the verge of taking a real holiday, not a working one—and the sun did drift and it did drop as far we were concerned.

There was only one thing that I had to finish up before the fun and games could begin. It was the final item on my author questionnaire for Simon & Schuster asking me to give a short account of my broader writing goals. I had proposed the “eco-gothic” as a term to describe my novel, Perdita, and I was still trying to sketch out its lineaments for the marketing department.

My husband, Stephen, had already come up with “Jane Eyre on Georgian Bay” to describe the book—and I had loved that. To this day Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 tale of a lonely governess and her romance with the byronic Mr. Rochester remains a much-loved gothic novel. I liked thinking of my work in terms of the larger gothic tradition, especially given that I’m a fan of Victorian ghost stories, particularly The Turn of the Screw variety. My novel, in fact, includes several of the usual suspects in a gothic line-up: in Perdita there’s a couple of treacherous portraits (maybe a subconscious tribute to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca?); a fin-de-siècle séance led by a hack spiritualist; a woman in the attic (though not an insane one); a black velvet dress; and, oh yes, an inconveniently extra wife.

I had also deliberately integrated several, more literary gothic motifs into Perdita. The novel’s central character is involved in a supernatural mystery: Marged Brice is the daughter of a lighthouse keeper on Georgia Bay and has been dumped off at a nursing home on the remote Bruce Peninsula. She claims to be 134 years old and solicits the help of a skeptical university professor, Garth Hellyer. Garth wants to figure out her real age but Marged wants him to help her understand who Perdita is—an elusive figure whose name means “the lost child.” Is Perdita an imaginary character, a ghost, or something else connected to Marged’s deep and unusual love for Nature—her biophilia?

Through the eco-gothic, then, I was taking the Gothic tradition in a slightly different direction. I wanted to blend my love of the genre with my love of nature. I had always associated the gothic with dark, rich colours, especially the deep, shadowy, black-purples of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven"—“with such a name as Nevermore.” In Perdita I was trying to bring a hunter green more into play amid the classic colours of the gothic palette.

Still, I knew that there was more I wanted to convey with the eco-gothic. What was it?

A cloud of mosquitoes suddenly descended upon us, and both of us fled precipitously into the Bay’s freezing waters (Stephen’s idea!), me remembering to set our glasses securely in the stones before plunging in. The marauders pursued us, and so we flipped onto our backs, letting only our faces surface in the glassy calm. Now stars were beginning to appear above us—millions and millions of them. I found the Big Dipper and then Stephen began to direct me toward Cassiopeia—how did the Greeks ever discern a woman reclining on a couch in such a chaos of lights?—when I felt it surging up inside of me. What I wanted was an “eco-gothic” that would convey—all of this.

But what exactly was all of this? Was it something about or in that very moment I was trying to capture? Was it a particular connection I felt with nature—floating around in the Bay, the darkness gathering around me?

We had experienced one of those gloriously beautiful days on Georgian Bay—warm and breezy all at the same time, the day full of a brisk, playful light and the evening cool and quiet. But did all of this also include a day the summer before when Stephen very nearly drowned, swimming blissfully one minute and in the next finding himself caught in an off-shore breeze and rapidly weakening as he fought to get back into shore? Or an afternoon the week before when I narrowly escaped being bitten by a Massasauga rattlesnake—just by the hair of a hair of a fraction of a second? Though we did not know it at the time, a terrific storm was heading toward us as we floated pleasantly in the Bay and that at 3 am we would leap out of bed to grab flashlights and anxiously assist a boat safely into the Basin.

And what about the Bruce Peninsula itself? Did all of this include its very troubled cultural and ecological history, from the clear-cutting of its forests to the swindling and displacement of the Saugeen and Chippewa First Nations?

Past and present—images and memories of people and places—the trees and water and a light wind—each one coming out as the stars did above me. . .all of this.

Suddenly I found Cassiopeia, low in the night sky. It was then I realized that the eco-gothic was going to be a term I couldn’t really define. I had set it aloft, sent it out into the vast swirl of words and fiction and literature, but I knew that I could only try, as a writer, to take my readers into a space I was calling the eco-gothic—all of this. Ultimately I would have to trust that others, too, might come to see and know and perhaps even love such a place.

Hilary Scharper spent her summers as a young girl on the shores of Georgian Bay where she developed a deep love of its natural beauty. Later on she studied anthropology at Yale University and eventually became interested in peoples’ stories about their relationships with the natural world. A professor at the University of Toronto, she now teaches on wilderness and cultural approaches to nature.

Throughout her life, she has been drawn to the literary classics and especially the gothic tradition. In recent years she has served as an assistant lighthouse keeper on the Bruce Peninsula in northern Ontario where she has explored an emerging literary form—something she terms the eco-gothic.

Hilary Scharper currently lives in Toronto with her son and her husband, Stephen Scharper, also a professor at the University of Toronto.