Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train was a runaway success. The 2015 novel, which follows an alcohol-dependent divorcée who becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a local woman, sold more than 23 million copies and spent 83 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. It inspired a film that grossed over $173 million worldwide and a hit stage adaptation by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel. And it helped define a genre of commercial literature that had surged to prominence with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl in 2012: the domestic psychological thriller.
You know the type. For a while, every bookstore from Barnes & Noble to Hudson News was flooded with them: Gone Girls and Good Girls and Pretty Girls and Final Girls, Women in Windows and Girls on Trains. In the last decade, a steady stream of film and television adaptations—from HBO’s Big Little Lies to the 2025 thriller The Housemaid—has only made the genre more ubiquitous. But what draws us to stories about the creeping rot behind tastefully neutral-toned suburban facades? What traditions does the “girl thriller” emerge from, and what has given it such staying power? While the domestic psychological thriller might seem like a contemporary phenomenon, its cultural lineage stretches back through the Victorian Gothic, detective fiction, and psychological Gothic traditions of the last two centuries. This deep well of literary inspiration helps explain the enduring draw of The Girl on the Train and its adaptations.
The Girl on the Train’s literary roots can be traced to the Victorian Gothic tradition, which first bridged the dark and uncanny with recognizably modern domestic and social life. Writers like the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins brought the eerie aesthetics and supernatural tropes of the earlier Gothic tradition into familiar nineteenth-century settings, repurposing wraiths and ruins to symbolize contemporary anxieties around empire, scientific progress, class divides, and women’s restricted roles in society. One useful Victorian Gothic predecessor to The Girl on the Train is Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre. In it, an orphaned governess falls in love with her brooding employer—only to discover that he is already married to a “madwoman” he keeps locked away in his isolated manor. The domestic is both home and site of horror; men are both lovers and jailers; the figure of the victimized woman is spectral and terrifying and oddly familiar. In their influential critical text The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar position the “madwoman” Bertha as Jane’s “truest and darkest double”: a manifestation of her stifled rebellion and sexuality and a symbol of Victorian women’s repressed rage against the patriarchy. This kind of doubling echoes through twentieth-century Gothic stories—and eventually into The Girl on the Train. Hawkins alternates between the perspectives of spiraling ex-wife Rachel, seemingly perfect replacement Anna, and the mysterious Megan, drawing subtle parallels between their thoughts and behavior. As in Jane Eyre, each woman sees her own latent fears and desires reflected in the other two.
The Victorian Gothic fascination with murder, madness, and mystery intersected with another nineteenth-century literary development: detective fiction. While early detective stories maintained the atmosphere of the Victorian Gothic, they dispensed with Romantic symbolism and terror of the supernatural in favor of a practical approach to mystery-solving. For example, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, detective Sherlock Holmes uses deductive reasoning to reveal that what seems like a ghost story about a blazing-eyed phantom beast prowling the moors is really a mercenary murder plot. Like Doyle’s mysteries, The Girl on the Train begins with a crime and centers on the reconstruction of truth. However, Hawkins’s novel is far more interior than the typical detective story. Rachel—emotionally entangled and socially isolated, her memory compromised by alcohol abuse—cannot stand coolly outside Megan’s case with a pipe and a magnifying glass. In a twist on the Sherlockian tradition, the investigator becomes as much a mystery as the investigated.
This double mystery points to another branch of The Girl on the Train’s lineage: the psychological Gothic. Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw presents a set of circumstances familiar from Jane Eyre: a governess arrives at an isolated stately home and is haunted by mysterious apparitions. However, James never reveals whether these specters—a pair of immoral former servants who seem to have possessed the children in her care—are real or mere figments of the governess’s fevered imagination. This emphasis on individual psychological experience over clarity of plot anticipates the “unreliable narrator” trope common to contemporary domestic thrillers. In The Girl on the Train, Rachel’s memory is established as porous and pliable. She regularly experiences alcohol-induced amnesia; one of the first things we learn about her is that her ex-husband accused her of having an “overactive imagination.” Psychological subjectivity is key to The Girl on the Train because it expands the novel’s atmosphere of mystery beyond the physical world. As observation cannot be relied upon after the fact, an entire second drama exists in the realm of Rachel’s perception and memory.
Perhaps the closest classic relative of the contemporary domestic thriller is Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca, which draws on Gothic romance, detective fiction, and the psychological novel. Rebecca follows the timid young bride of an enigmatic widower as she untangles the mystery of his first wife, a glamorous and cruel femme fatale named Rebecca. Du Maurier’s novel is not a ghost story in the traditional sense. What haunts its unnamed narrator is not Rebecca’s spirit but her own jealousy, insecurity, and projections: Rebecca as perfect wife, as glamorous socialite, as wicked adulteress, as impossible sexual rival. The true horror of the novel is the way this obsessive comparison ultimately leads the narrator to condone evil. In The Girl on the Train, Hawkins echoes the narrator/Rebecca dynamic in the relationships between Rachel, Megan, and Anna. Glimpsing Megan through the window of her commuter train, Rachel constructs an entire fantasy of domestic bliss around this woman she has never met—then feels her self-concept shaken when reality contradicts it. If Megan serves as Rachel’s Rebecca, Rachel might be Anna’s: the lingering shadow of the first wife haunting her former home. As in Rebecca, the women of The Girl on the Train are linked less by personal relationships than by psychological projection and complicated, often toxic, relationships with men. A central question Hawkins asks is whether, in a contemporary world still shaped by male violence and female competition, women will continue to misread one another as rivals or find strength in solidarity.
Wagstaff and Abel’s stage adaptation brings The Girl on the Train even closer to its literary roots. The playwrights lean into the detective tradition by expanding the role of D.I. Gaskill, giving Rachel a much-needed interlocutor and injecting the piece with moments of humor. Although the novel is split between three perspectives, they focus on Rachel’s point of view—echoing the claustrophobic subjectivity of the Female Gothic. In a 2018 interview with The Theatre Times, Abel explained that this was an artistic choice as much as a practical one: “[Rachel is] a flawed, complex character: sometimes weak, sometimes strong, sometimes frustrating… we really saw it as a character piece.” And, true to Rachel’s character, the play makes it impossible for the audience to distinguish between fact and fiction. Wagstaff and Abel make frequent use of flashbacks: to Rachel’s own memories, to moments she experienced but cannot remember, to recounted scenes she did not witness at all. By blurring Rachel’s memory and imagination, Wagstaff and Abel achieve a Jamesian ambiguity around her perception for much of the play. Their version of The Girl on the Train is not only a modern thriller; it is a theatrical return to a centuries-old Gothic question: when the home becomes threatening and memory cannot be trusted, how does a woman uncover the truth?
