This Introduction begins to detail an aesthetic pattern in Arab women’s writing which is characterised by making community with the dead, and un-obscuring peripheral subjects from view. The pattern comprises of: (1) The mother or mother-figure is absent (emotionally or literally) which requires a daughter to perform an investigation. (2) Ghosts, jinn, qarina, and other supernatural elements. (3) There are episodes of inherited or witnessed madness, which underscore economic, patriarchal systems of dispossession. (4) Time is stuck in loops, with repeated or mirrored events, or another sense of encroachment of the past upon the present. (5) Gothic spaces, what I call “dis-located spaces,” which are sites that bring the periphery out of the edges and into the centre, or do not function under the modern patriarchal logics of capital accumulation; (6) Finally, storytelling itself becomes imbued with the project of producing and disseminating knowledge about women’s lives. Here I detail the peripheral conditions that some Arab women face, which is then registered in a critically irreal, Gothic forms, and how spectrality speaks to a particular gendered encounter with global capitalist patriarchy. I then explain how “living with ghosts”, of being in community with the dead and those who are rendered spectral due to peripheralisation, is a theoretical project at the very heart of the Arab women’s writings that I engage with in this book. This Introduction then offers a brief history of the Gothic tradition’s encounter with the Arab world, and the jahiliyyah period as a time of magic and barbarism that offers a rich palette of references to Arab women writers. Finally, I discuss the tensions between modernity and tradition in the Mediterranean mashreq, as well as my approach to analysing texts in translation alongside texts originally written in English.