BOOK REVIEW: WOMEN’S WEIRD. STRANGE STORIES BY WOMEN, 1890-1940 BY MELISSA EDMUNDSON (ED.)

HANDHELD PRESS - PUBLISHED ON 31.10.19
www.handheldpress.co.uk

A spotlight is currently shining not only on genre fiction written by women during the Victorian/Edwardian era, but also the cultural and sociological reasons they were written in the first place. Melissa Edmundson, the author of the keynote guide Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (UWP, 2013) is at the forefront of this forensic examination and with Women’s Weird, Edmundson focuses her attention on early weird fiction by women. 

Weird fiction as a sub-genre was popularised by H.P. Lovecraft in his 1927 text Supernatural Horror in Literature - and in Edmundson’s thoughtful, informative and easily accessible introduction she goes on to describe the gulf between male and female appreciation of supernatural fiction and how women’s fiction is rarely the focus of critical appreciation (although Edmundson does note that this is slowly changing).

This book should be seen and recognized as a landmark anthology in helping to bridge this gap and the thirteen tales offered contain some stunning writing, with on tale in particular, ‘Hodge’, by Elinor Mordaunt, absolutely blowing me away. It’s a genuine masterpiece of the genre and one would think that by including a tale of this calibre the rest of the book would seem weak by comparison, but Edmundson has curated a solid journey through weird landscapes, using a mixture of obscurer tales by, shall we say, ‘household names’ such as Edith Nesbit (‘The Shadow’) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (‘The Giant Wisteria’) and names new to me such as D.K. Broster (‘Crouching at the Door’) and Mary Butts (‘With and Without Buttons’). Indeed, seven of these stories are ‘new’ to me and it’s refreshing to have an anthology where such a degree of unknown tales exist. It should be the duty of every anthologist who approaches to work in this field to present ‘lost’ tales until there are none left and not fall into the lazy trap of reaching for the readily available popular stories by the big names.

The anthology has been put lovingly together by Handheld Press, an imprint that was new to me until fairly recently and I can say without hesitation that they are now my favourite publishers. The notes/annotations at the back of the book by publisher Kate Macdonald should become an industry standard and I for one certainly welcome them and the help they give with understanding texts from a time where language was different and many words and meanings are no longer used in a modern setting/context. 

This is an unmissable, urgent and era-defining work. We truly are in a new ‘golden age’ of uncovering and understanding the much maligned area of early women writers and their genre output.


Johnny Mains
Editor of An Obscurity of Ghosts: Further Tales of the Supernatural by Women (1859-1903)