My treatment of gender and sex as unified and binary, for the purposes of this project, is a considered historical choice, and not a default assumption. Although Gothic fictions can provide an unprecedented space for gender play and ambiguity, the same flexibility was not accorded to Gothic writers. As Robert Miles has shown in his book on Ann Radcliffe's role as the "great enchantress" of the Gothic, the social role of the authoress-- as the existence of such a term suggests-- was fraught, and involved reputation-management distinct from that required of male authors of the Gothic.

Methodologically, then, the categorization of authors by gender was largely quite straightforward. I relied on my own gendered perception of each name, finding it very easy to declare "James" and "George" as male, and "Charlotte" and "Elizabeth" as female. When authors were listed only by initials, or when I was unsure of the "Francis"/"Frances" gendered distinction, I looked for gendered pronoun use in the Garside bibliography of the novel or in articles on the texts and authors in question.

I was only unable to resolve genders for eleven of the 208 novels. Eight of these eleven novels were unsigned, meaning I had no author information at all. The remaining three were by C.A. Bolen, F. Legge, and H.J. Sarrett, about whom I could find no further information. All eleven texts were indexed, but excluded from the final charts.

Translated works have been indexed under the gender of their translators.